Who: Lavender Brown and Blaise Zabini
When: Wednesday, October 6, 1997; after Potions class.
Where: The Great Hall
Rating: PG
Status: COMPLETE
What: Blaise tells Lavender about the letter he received from her mother.



"It's a duck," Lavender said quietly to herself. It was the free block of time after her Potions class and instead of going back to the Gryffindor Common Room, Lavender somehow ended up in the Great Hall. There were a few people around, but she didn't pay attention to who they were. She just needed some time to sit and think. Of course, about five minutes into the thinking and the sitting, Lavender became distracted by the bright sun that was shining down on her from the enchanted ceiling. Now, she was laying on her back on one of the long benches at the Gryffindor House table with one arm under her head and the other resting on her abdomen. "Or maybe a swan," she said a bit louder. The duck had too big of a body to be a duck. Lavender cocked her head to the side for a moment to see who walked past her, but she didn't recognize the person so she returned her attention to the fluffy, white clouds drifting slowly across the sky.

It was a hobby of hers to stop by the Great Hall once in awhile and watch the sky. Night time was good, too, because you could see the stars without getting in trouble for breaking curfew and it wasn't odd for students to do their homework there, so usually no one asked questions. The tension from the last few weeks was finally leaving Lavender slowly and she was able to enjoy just being at Hogwarts again. At least for the time being. She was still a bit nervous about the Carrows and other Death Eaters trudging around the castle looking for students to put a toe out of line, but Lavender decided to take the optimistic route for once. It was nice to be carefree for an hour or so, anyhow.

Blaise hadn't exactly been stalking Lavender Brown, per se, but he had certainly been keeping an eye on the Gryffindor. Ever since the letter he'd received from her so-called mother, he'd been watching both of the girls - Parvati and Lavender. He'd even been keeping an eye on Padma, for good measure (and because both of the Patil sisters were rather eye-catching to begin with). After Potions, he'd followed Lavender to the Great Hall, surreptitiously, leaving a good fifteen feet between them, if not more. He'd also watched her eat out of the corner of his eye during lunch. And when she'd finished doing anything productive and had instead taken to cloud-watching, he'd eyed her still. When it seemed that she wasn't going to be doing anything else anytime soon, he approached her. Carefully. Silently. Not wanting to block her light or distract her from her activity.

Never having been much of a cloud-watcher as a child, himself, Blaise had no commentary that he could offer on what type of animals were currently floating across the magically fabricated sky.

It didn't take Lavender long to realize that there was a person standing very close to her. Before she even decided to find out who it was, she knew it was Blaise . There was something about his presence that made her skin break out into goose flesh. Not in the good way, either. Ever since their last encounter, Lavender had been keeping him in her mind. Unfortunately, not because she wanted to, but because he was permanently in her life and she couldn't not pay attention to him. She didn't know that he had been so stalkerish , though. If she had, then she probably would have confronted him about it. Lavender didn't need that sort of drama in her life.

"Hello," she said, finally acknowledging him, but not taking her eyes off the ceiling. "Is there something I can help you with?" Her voice was rough and cold, but she couldn't help it. Even if she wanted to be calm and sound genuinely interested in Blaise standing there beside her, she couldn't.

"Perhaps," Blaise answered, smoothly. If he were at all bothered by her tone of voice or her determination not to look at him while she spoke, he didn't show it. Instead, he sat down on the bench she was lying on - roughly four and a half inches from her shoes. "I received an interesting letter, not terribly long ago, and it's been bothering me. I was hoping that you might have some insight."

Lavender was doing her best to not be intrigued by Blaise's answer, but unfortunately she was never good at pretending. She and Parvati were a little too interested in gossip to ever not be interested in what was going on with the other students. A letter to Blaise that he thought was bothersome was definitely high on the list of things to gossip about. "Oh? And what makes you think that I would have any insight about a letter someone wrote to you?" She may have accidentally glanced at Blaise , but her eyes drifted back to the ceiling as soon as she realized she had done it. It was hard not to look at him when he was sitting so close to her feet. Lavender was wishing she had decided on the pants for her uniform rather than the skirt. She felt quite uncomfortable with him down there.

Very deliberately, Blaise shifted slightly toward Lavender, regarding her with a mild expression and a slightly raised eyebrow. When he spoke, his tone of voice was almost pleasant. "Because it was written by your mother. Supposedly."

"What?" Lavender sat up slightly, using her elbow for support, "That's ridiculous." There was no way her mother would write to Blaise. He was just trying to get a rise out of her.

"I thought so, myself," Blaise assured her. "At first, I believed it to be some kind of forgery sent to me by you or one of your friends... but as I've been ignoring its directive and there hasn't been any follow-up, I can only assume that it was sent from someone outside of the school. Now, why would your mother - or someone pretending to be your mother - want to write to me?"

Lavender started to laugh, but it was very nervous. He was lying. He had to be. "My mother wouldn't write to you," she said, trying to sound positive about her answer. "Maybe it's one of your friends playing a trick on you. Did you ever think of that?" Now she was starting to grow frustrated and lying on the bench didn't seem like the best thing to be doing, so Lavender pulled herself up and swung her legs to the side so her feet touched the floor. At least it put a few feet between them.

Blaise lifted both eyebrows, then. "Of course I did. But they would have followed up, as well, after I ignored it. A trick or a prank that has no noticeable effect isn't a successful. A Slytherin would have been more likely to push their point than a Gryffindor, even, I would think. We hate to see our plans fail."

It took all of two seconds for it to finally hit Lavender that Blaise wasn't lying to her. But she still refused to believe her mother would write to him. Unless it was to warn him to be nice to her or threaten his life. "Okay," Lavender sighed, giving in just a bit to find out more about the letter, "What did it say?"

The Slytherin looked at her suspiciously for a moment, but he had chosen to approach her about the letter, himself. "It encourages me to pursue you, and it asked me not to do exactly what I'm doing now - that is, telling you about it. That last made me wonder if it might be Ministry-sent, but I really doubt that we're that important to them."

Even if the Ministry was involving itself in their love lives, it still had better things to do than issue individual threats.

There was no way that her mother would write to Blaise and ask him to pursue her only daughter. It made no sense to Lavender. She sat there, unable to say much, just shaking her head back and forth. "I don't understand," she finally said, though her voice was very low and disbelieving. "My mother is against this. She told me that. There is no reason for her to want this to happen." Lavender bit the inside of her cheek and tried to think out the situation. It suddenly struck her that if she saw the letter then she would be able to tell if it was her mother's handwriting. "Do you have the letter with you?"

"I do." Blaise slung his bookbag over onto his lap and started to open it, but paused and looked at Lavender. "Whether or not your mother wrote this - it bespeaks a conspiracy that's somewhat over our heads. It might not be wise to confront them, just yet."

He wasn't entirely sure Lavender's mother - if the letter had actually been penned by the woman - had enough power to really make his life difficult. The Browns weren't exactly the Malfoys in that sense. Still, it was best to preach caution. After delivering his warning, Blaise dug out his notebook, opened it to a marked page, and handed the letter over. It was in much the same condition as when he'd received it, although it had been folded somewhat in transit.

A conspiracy? Perhaps Blaise was just as paranoid as Lavender. Somewhat hesitantly, Lavender accepted the letter from Blaise and opened it slowly. As soon as she saw the first word, Lavender gasped. "No," she shook her head in disbelief, "Someone has taken my mother hostage and is making her write letters!" Lavender knew she was spewing craziness, but there was no rational explanation as to why her mother would write to Blaise.

After the initial moment of shock, Lavender read the entire letter. "This is unbelievable!" she said a little too loudly and handed the letter back to Blaise. She pressed a hand to her forehead and continued to shake her head.

"I guess that it's her handwriting," Blaise commented, needlessly. He tucked the letter back away. Then, as if in consolation, he offered, "I didn't respond to it."

Lavender's forehead creased slightly, "Why didn't you?" She was glad he didn't, but she wanted to know why. There were a lot of questions she wanted to know the answers to, but now she was remembering Blaise's idea to not confront them yet. How could she not confront her mother about this? Since when did the woman become such a spokesman for Pureblood families? It was difficult for Lavender to fully grasp the reasoning behind the letter. She thought she knew her mother. Apparently not.

"Because it seemed suspicious. I don't like the idea that people are attempting to puppet me in some way. I also don't know who's involved in it. If your mother is somehow part of a conspiracy, then what's there to say that my mother isn't, as well?" Blaise shrugged, setting his bag aside. "I don't want to do anything until I've found out more. I thought my inaction would prod some other ... instigation. But it hasn't, so... I'm approaching you about it. Mostly because the letter said not to."

Lavender watched Blaise as he spoke and for once she actually understood how he felt. It creeped her out a bit. "When did she send this letter?" There was no date on the actual letter, or at least none that she had noticed. If it was recently, Lavender would be very upset. She had just written to her mother no less than a week ago telling her about the awful bet that Blaise and Draco had going. Suddenly, a terrible thought entered her mind: what if her mother's letter prompted the bet in some way? Blaise said it was Draco who started it, but how could she trust him?

"Weeks ago," Blaise admitted. He didn't seem terribly embarrassed or apologetic about not going to Lavender with it straight away. There was no reason he should have, after all. The letter had specifically wanted him not to, and for all he knew she could have been the one who'd sent it. "I was giving whoever wrote it time to follow up."

Lavender rolled her eyes dramatically, "My mother is persistent, but not that persistent. If you didn't write back to her, she probably assumed you were taking it in. Or that you would write back eventually when you realized it was good to listen to her." Lavender really wanted to talk to her mother about this now. "All this time she's been writing to me saying that she felt bad that I have been put in this position and all this other nonsense. And now I find out that she's actually happy about it. Just because I have relatives who were in the same house as you and because we happen to be Pureblood ." Lavender bent forward and placed her face in her hands and started shaking her head again. "What do we do?" she asked, though her hands muffled her voice.

It was a good question. One that Blaise had been trying to answer for the past month or more, since he'd received the letter from the Ministry. Regrettably, he hadn't come up with any viable solutions in that time. He frowned at an empty table across from where they were sitting, trying to think. "Our options are limited. If we assume that this is a conspiracy against us, arranged either by our parents or the shift in political power, then we have to find out how far that conspiracy actually goes, and what their real goals are. I have a hard time believing that it can really be just about ensuring pure bloodlines. Why would they pair us off so specifically, if that were the only goal?" He realized he was essentially brainstorming out loud, and turned to face Lavender again. "We should also decide whether or not we're working in unison, towards the same end. We don't trust each other, but I believe we can safely say that neither of us is comfortable with the situation as it stands. It looks as though the same forces that are obviously working against me are equally focused against your will, as well, and without your knowledge. I'm not sure if that's true, of course, but you'd have to be a very clever actress if it weren't."

Lavender was taken aback by Blaise's last statement, "You think I knew about this?" The idea that he trusted her as little as she trusted him was both comforting and annoying. Lavender wasn't the untrustworthy one of the pair. Well, at least in her eyes. She'd never done anything wrong to deserve this. It was all too much for her to comprehend. Blaise was obviously thinking on a large-scale conspiracy level while she was just worried about the ridiculous bet that he had with Draco and how Parvati seemed to like the idea of being arranged to Draco and how her mother was obviously someone she didn't know very well. But to say that the Ministry had anything to do with the letter seemed a bit odd to Lavender. That was a bit too much. Of all the pairs of arranged students, surely she and Blaise were not the most important.

"I'm saying that it seems as though you didn't," Blaise clarified. "I thought it was a possibility. Your friend is obviously behaving very suspiciously, so there was no reason to think that you weren't in on it all, somehow, as well."

"Trust me," Lavender scoffed, "I have nothing to do with Parvati swooning all over Draco." Her discussion with Padma was still lingering in her thoughts. At least they were paranoid about Parvati together. "It is surprising to me. All of this is." Lavender probably wasn't expressing it very well because she was still slightly shocked about the letter. "Surprising and disturbing." She was doing her best to avoid making a decision about whether or not she wanted to 'work in unison' with Blaise.

"To say the least," Blaise agreed. He was used to not trusting his own friends. He'd certainly always taken Draco Malfoy with a grain of salt. However, he hadn't expected this year to be quite so paranoia-inducing. Usually, his natural suspicions amounted to not quite believing Draco when the other Slytherin was bragging about something. Nowadays, he had to worry about how many people were trying to force him into a marital contract, and why they would want to in the first place. It was getting to be tiring.

Lavender suddenly felt like people were looking at them, even though they weren't. So she stood up and sat across from Blaise rather than right beside him. It put some space between them and didn't make it look like they were dating or...something equally weird and wrong.

The unfortunate thing was that Lavender had gotten used to the fact that she was in a marital contract. It took a month of positive self-talk, but by now she was sure that there were more horrible things in the world. It didn't mean that she wanted to be forced into marrying and then reproducing with Blaise , but what other choice did she have? Running away? That didn't seem likely to happen. She didn't do well on her own and obviously she couldn't count on her parents (or at least her mother) for help. No, she would have to just stick it out and hope that the war was over with by the time a year was up and that the Ministry would regain some sense.

"You have no idea how badly I want to confront my mother about this," Lavender frowned as she spoke, "It makes no sense! I mean, it isn't so bad that she wrote to you and she wants you to be nice to me, but the fact that she thinks it benefits us to be shoved together in this type of...situation just really shocks me."

"At least she has an opinion, one way or another," Blaise muttered, and there was some bitterness to his voice. His own mother, after all, was still silent on the whole affair. Of course, he hadn't told her about it... but surely she knew. She had connections! Contacts! One of her boyfriends probably had a child under marriage contract, as well. She had to have heard! Blaise realized that he was thinking down a tangent and brought himself back to the situation at hand, looking over at Lavender piercingly when she moved. "She may not trust you to make an appropriate choice, yourself."

"Yes, well...," Lavender let the thought trail off until it fell and she didn't feel like reviving it. "I'm old enough to make the appropriate choices for myself, even if she can't trust me to do it." She brushed a piece of hair out of her eyes and tucked it back into the band holding it up in a pony tail. "She even said in that letter that she would rather I had my own choice of who to marry." Not that it mattered because the rest of the letter negated that little sentence. "What about your parents?" Lavender asked, looking hopefully at Blaise . She would rather focus on something rather than her mother at the moment. His parents were the natural selection. Why hadn't Lavender received a letter from Blaise's mother asking her to...do whatever.

Blaise visibly stiffened in his seat, and his eyes sort of glazed over. He was looking at a fixed spot, just slightly to the left of Lavender's face, rather than meeting her eyes. "My father's deceased. My mother is currently ..." What word would be most appropriate? Absent? Uninvolved? "... busy."

"Oh," Lavender felt bad for bringing up his parents now. "I'm sorry about your father." What else could she say? It must be horrible to not have one of your parents around, especially if the other one was busy. "Does your mother not have an opinion on all of this, though?"

"None that I'm aware of," Blaise said, coolly. He was trying to appear as though that fact didn't bother him. As if he couldn't care less what his mother might think, either way. "And I never really met my father, so you don't have to feel sympathetic."

"Oh," Lavender said again, but in a more surprised tone. It's one thing to have a father you never met, but to have one that was also dead was quite sad. "I still feel sympathetic," she informed Blaise , "It must be hard not knowing your father in the first place." The conversation was making her miss her father. Mainly because he seemed to be the only person in her family that agreed with her about the marriage law.

"I never found it to be that difficult," Blaise said easily enough. It might have been a lie, but he didn't give away any sign that it was, necessarily. He shifted a bit, and his eyes finally met hers again, from across the table. "To be honest, I'm not certain how we should proceed."

"We don't exactly have very many courses of action, do we?" Lavender said after looking at him curiously for a moment. She thought he might be lying, but if he was he was very good at it. Which made Lavender more nervous. "We either give in or don't."

He looked at her carefully, and smirked a bit. "It sounds very simple when you say it like that."

"It is very simple, isn't it? That's part of the reason it's so difficult. No one wants to be arranged to the person they are with. Unless you count Parvati ," Lavender sighed and did her best to not look too upset. "We have to make the best of it, I suppose. Even if we have a year before anything has to happen, officially." She was annoying herself by how many times she brought up the 'year' thing, but part of her just wanted to get it over with and move on. "I don't know, honestly. How does someone make a decision when it's already made for you?"

"Now you just sound resigned," Blaise pointed out. "It's difficult to tell whether you're determined to make a stand against this union or whether you're going to go along with it. Have you made any decisions?"

Lavender was initially shocked at how Blaise just came right out and asked her that question, but mostly because she didn't want to answer it. "I-I," she stammered, looking down at the floor and then back up at him, "I don't know? I don't want to be married to anyone and I certainly don't want to be married against my will, but I don't see what sort of stand we can take against this. What choice do we really have? We don't do what they say and then they throw us a fine or...punish our parents? I have no idea what the punishment is going to be for such a thing."

Blaise thought about that. He doubted that his mother would be jailed or put in danger simply because he didn't marry the right girl. For one thing, his mother was very adept at talking herself out of trouble. It was far more likely that his life would be made difficult... but if they wanted to preserve bloodlines, they wouldn't be throwing him in Azkaban, either. "You might be able to avoid that, if you find some other pureblood to attach yourself to, romantically. If this is really just some attempt at keeping Wizarding families pure, then they won't care about the specific matches."

"I don't know," Lavender repeated for the hundredth time (at least in her head it was that many), "I don't think that it's the only reason. I haven't heard of any Gryffindors arranged with Ravenclaws or Hufflepuffs ...". Even as she said it, Lavender didn't realize what it meant. "Apparently it's important that we be attached to Slytherins or something." She shrugged and crossed her arms across her chest.

"Not all Slytherins are pureblood," Blaise pointed out, controversially. All Slytherins would certainly claim it, if they knew what was good for them, but statistically it was impossible. Some of the students had to be mixed. "There aren't enough of us to go around, for them to be so deliberately crossing House rivalries... It's ridiculous, anyway. We look down on the Hufflepuffs just as much as the Gryffindors... To be honest, we look down on everyone. And everyone hates Slytherin House, not just you. I've heard Ravenclaws mention that nonsense superstition that all evil wizards come from our house, too."

Lavender stiffened at Blaise's accusation, "I don't hate Slytherin." It was true enough, at least. The people in the house were the ones that she didn't like. Surely there were a few students who were nice and lovely and not trying to live up to the evil hype, but she had never come across one. "I just meant that everyone I know of is arranged with a Slytherin. Or a student who used to be a Slytherin."

"Well, we didn't ask for that. If it were up to us or our fathers, we'd be marrying within our Houses --" Blaise cut himself off. That wasn't necessarily true. He had been personally relieved that the name matched with his didn't belong to a fellow Slytherin. He knew the Slytherin girls far too well at this point to want to marry any of them. But he didn't think that his reaction was true for everyone. Surely Pansy Parkinson or Daphne Greengrass would much rather be paired off with him and Draco than ... whoever it was they were actually attached to. He frowned. "The only person who seems to be enjoying his match is Draco Malfoy . Which is why I suspected he might have been given an actual choice in the matter. Though that seems strange to me now, that we weren't paired off within our own Houses. None of us were. That ... bespeaks a system that wasn't random."

Lavender was becoming nervous again. All the talk about conspiracies and motives for the marriage law was making her head spin. It was supposed to be simple and random, but Blaise had a point. It probably wasn't random at all. "I have no idea what to think anymore." She brought both of her hands up to each of her temples and pressed, trying to keep away a headache that was bound to come on later.

That wasn't particularly helpful, but Blaise could sympathize with her. He hadn't been able to come up with anything better, on his own. He asked her, curiously, "Are you going to confront your mother?"

Lavender narrowed her eyes in thought before answering. She really wanted to confront her mother, but it would do nothing to make the situation better. "I might speak to my father," she told him, sighing lightly and shifting a bit on the bench. "If my mother tries to contact you again, I will. Will you tell me as soon as she does?"

"I see no reason not to," Blaise replied, honestly. It didn't really matter to him if there was dissent within the Brown family. It wasn't like Lavender's mother could really touch him, no matter how displeased she was.

"Thank you," Lavender smiled over at Blaise, "I'll let you know what my father says." She stood up and bent to pick up her backpack, "I suppose this means that we're working together?" That amused her quite a bit. Who knew she would ever be working with Blaise to try to stop the craziness that is life.

Blaise stood when she did, politely. "I suppose it does." He considered that, for a moment, and added, "if you believe that I can be trustworthy."

It was said with something of a smirk.

Lavender wasn't used to seeing Blaise smirk or look pleased at all, so it made her smile again. "You told me about Draco's bet and you told me about the letter. I think you're trustworthy so far." She stared to turn to leave, but stopped, "Have a good day, Blaise."

Taken somewhat aback by that, Blaise just nodded at her, and let her go. He had told Lavender's friend - and thus, Lavender - about the bet, even if that had been a failed strategic move. And he'd come forth about the letter... without really needing to. As far as she was concerned, he had been behaving rather... trustworthy. He'd have to think about that, later. He might be getting sick.