Heyyyy Andrea so I'm just wondering what are your thoughts on Blaise Zabini's mom? Like, I'm always love how you occasionally slipped her into your stories with Blaise, usually just some passing mention but the descriptions always got me very intrigued - so just want to ask what's your thoughts/views about her? Thanks <3
HA HA it’s not like I’ve been waiting my entire life for someone to ask me about blaise zabini’s mother or anything that would be dumb that would be i ns a ne im fine let’s do this:
for nineteen years, her name is elizabeth.
lizzie, her father calls her, with the same sort of simple, incredulous affection he directs at her mother—her mother, the witch, who brews potions that smell like anise and cinnamon, who wrinkles her nose at the rolling green hills of the english countryside, who wears a gleaming silver scorpion pendant around her neck and tells elizabeth bedtime stories about hot desert nights and crumbling pyramids and brilliant, scheming queens who spilled blood and conquered continents and stole thrones—and all with small, secret smiles on their faces.
elizabeth isn’t lizzie.
elizabeth goes to hogwarts; lizzie does not.
elizabeth is sorted into slytherin; lizzie is not.
elizabeth slinks through the halls, learns how to listen and how to lie and how to levitate a peacock feather; lizzie does not. elizabeth collects lipsticks she’s too young for, slick crimsons and glossy violets, highlights the arches of her cheekbones with burnished bronze powder and lines her eyes in liquid, velvety black; lizzie does not. elizabeth speaks and says nothing, lowers her gaze and sees everything, enchants as effortlessly as she entraps; lizzie does not.
instead, lizzie goes home for the summer, braids her hair into two neat plaits and picks wildflowers with her father, laughs pretty and easy and loud, loud like she can’t when she’s at school, because the dungeons have high ceilings and long memories and an alarming tendency to produce variables she knows she can’t control; not like elizabeth can.
elizabeth doesn’t make mistakes.
lizzie does.
lizzie is eighteen and punching her time card at the ministry and dreaming about palm trees swaying in a heavy summer breeze, about pillows of sand slipping through her fingertips, about crystal blue skies and sheer linen dresses and skin tanned a dark, silky brown by the heat of the sun.
and she meets a boy. a man. a visiting diplomat with a lilting accent and a fan of laugh lines around his eyes and a luxuriously appointed suite at the savoy that starts to feel like home—too much, too soon.
“you’re beautiful,” he tells her, and it’s elizabeth whose mouth curves up slyly, invitingly, as she replies, “i know.”
“you’re perfect,” he tells her, and it’s lizzie whose heart races, whose breath skips, whose lips tremble as she replies, “i know.”
“i love you,” he tells her, and she doesn’t know where elizabeth stops and lizzie begins when she replies, “i love you, too.”
and he buys her extravagant gifts and he makes her extravagant promises and then he unceremoniously leaves; goes back to italy—to his wife, to his children, to his peach-pink villa on the mediterranean coast with the sweeping balconies and the sparkling turquoise swimming pool—the day before she realizes she’s pregnant.
the ensuing rage—it’s quiet, really, a low, sad, gentle simmer deep in the pit of her stomach that could rock her to complacency if she let it.
she doesn’t let it.
instead, she considers her options. she sends a letter. she opens her own gringott’s vault. she calmly answers, “morning sickness,” when her nosiest coworker asks why she’s been late all week. she sends another letter. she moves into a nicer flat, the kind with a doorman and a concierge and a lot of wealthy neighbors. she develops a strange craving for candied dates. she bides her time.
elizabeth calls it justice; lizzie calls it blackmail.
the day after she discovers she’s having a boy, she sends one last letter, dusts the slow-drying ink with a gold-tinged powder that smells like anise and cinnamon, and she thinks about hazy, blistering sunsets shimmering red and yellow and orange, about wide-open limestone palaces and gods that expect you to start wars for them and buttery leather sandals caked brown with old blood.
elizabeth calls it justice; lizzie calls it revenge.
five months later, she’s gritting her teeth and squeezing the midwife’s hand and desperately wondering if the pain will ever end.
it does.
and then she’s staring down at a baby—hers, hers—and he’s impossibly tiny and impossibly warm and impossibly helpless. his mouth relaxes into a pout, and his eyes slit open, glassy and unfocused and so dark they might as well be colorless.
she names him blaise.
she names him blaise because blaise is a name that can’t be cut in half, and she watches him sleep while the midwife lectures her about feedings and nappies and the bare spot on her finger where a wedding ring should be. there’s a tightness in elizabeth’s chest, fierce and fearful, both, that does nothing but multiply the longer she looks at him, her son, and she understands—suddenly, and with a perfect stab of clarity—why her father had wanted her to be lizzie.
no one has ever hurt her twice.
no one will ever hurt him at all.
