Troll: 16. Boris (Patreon)

Preface

Here's the first of three Troll chapters owed this month.  Also, I've decided to run a flash live of A Colorful Life, mostly so I can figure out how that last scene is going to go and what I need to do with the interludes. If you don't read that one, don't worry about it.

Chapter 16: Boris

Blaise Zabini

Hogwarts, Great Britain

“Yes, the first Hogsmeade weekend will have sunny weather. Enjoy your date, a picnic sounds like a lovely idea. This isn’t terribly vital information so let’s just say a sickle’s worth of sweets from Honeydukes. I’m partial towards darker chocolates. Yes, I'm sending you on an errand. Deal with it.”

“No, your girlfriend isn’t cheating on you. She’s been busy preparing a birthday gift for you. That’ll be five galleons. Why is it so expensive? Because you’re projecting your own insecurities onto someone else. And more importantly, making it my problem. You can pay, or she can hear about you asking at all.”

“There will be a pop quiz in sixth year charms next Tuesday. That’ll be eight knuts. No, that’ll be a full sickle because you’re going to tell your friend and Travers didn’t study. Get compensation from your friend if you don’t like it.”

“Your kneazle prefers mice to fish or poultry. Why do you need a seer’s help for this? Never mind, I don’t care. That’ll be four knuts.”

“For the last time, no, he doesn’t like you. Me telling you his favorite flavor of ice cream won’t change that.”

“Are you seriously going to pay me to tell you that you shouldn’t ignore your little brother’s birthday? Fuck. Just take this money and get him something from Zonko’s, you blithering idiot.”

…

Three weeks passed and I grew to regret opening myself up to so many commissions. As it turned out, most requests were banal in nature. Sure, Hogwarts was a magical boarding school, but sometimes, the emphasis should be placed on boarding school. Most teenagers wanted teenager-like things from me, such as whether “Mr. Kneazle,” yes, that was the cat’s unfortunate name, preferred chicken or fish.

The smartest use of my power was from a seventh year Hufflepuff, who wanted my help locating a rather rare book in the library. A quick query saved the young man a good few hours of searching, only to find that the book had already been checked out by an enterprising Ravenclaw.

The book on gaseous conjuration seemed a bit niche, and far, far beyond what I could make use of currently, but I made a note of the title anyway. If two NEWT-level students were fighting over it, it probably had some good material.

I closed the door to the Slytherin dorm room. The rest of the boys were off doing something or other and it was a good chance to get some time to myself. I found myself doing that more often than not. I felt no real animosity for any of them, even Theo stopped trying to wake me in the middle of the night once I sicced the twins on him, but I found I couldn’t really relate to them either. They were off bullying some hapless badger and I didn’t feel like pretending I found their nonsense funny.

More to the point, my time was precious. With Somnolent eating up the hours in my day, I found myself careful with the time I had available to me. I saved a lot of time on schoolwork thanks to divination, and future-Leontes, but that just meant I was studying for the things that interested me rather than doing homework.

At the moment, my priority was on occlumency. The CYOA automatically guarded my thoughts, at least where my past life and “canon” were concerned. The protection extended beyond legilimency to cover compulsions and even veritaserum. If Somnolent was so thoroughly kicking my ass, and the golden vial of fate-breaking felix felicis was still there in my trunk, it stood to reason that the rest of the CYOA was equally valid.

However, I quickly realized that the protection did not extend to information I acquired throughout my time here, including things I learned as a seer. If I wanted to preserve the privacy of my clients and guard my ongoing plans, I’d need to learn occlumency beyond the basics that Blaise had known.

Blaise wasn’t lazy per se, but he strove to become an unremarkable wallflower. His ambition was to have no ambition, to do nothing that might draw the attention of his mother or her enemies. He lived life like a shrimp swimming amongst sharks. What little he knew of occlumency was enough to bat aside the sloppiest of attacks but little else.

He would at least be able to tell when his mind was under attack, but that wasn’t any great accomplishment. There was no such thing as a “stealthy legilimency probe” because the art drove one’s own consciousness into another’s; no amount of delicateness would allow for a legilimency attack to go truly unnoticed. As Valencia Zabini put it, “The mind is the bastion of the self. Anything that is not of the self sticks out like a splotch of red in a world of black and white.”

That was the first time she had ever taught him anything. It was a memory he cherished and dreaded all at once. Her legilimency probes had not been gentle.

Unfortunately, for me in the present, the lessons stopped once she realized her son’s mind was too terrified of her to absorb the lessons properly. She’d then promptly lost all interest in him, until I came along and brained dear Auntie Carmen.

Which meant it was up to me to learn to protect myself.

Minerva had been delighted when I sent her on her very first errand, to deliver a letter to mother-dearest. I explained my burgeoning affinity for divination, there was no way to hide that anyway, and then asked her for recommendations on protecting the mind. She’d apparently had Pooky raid our primary residence in Sicily before sending Minerva back with To Be as Nothing several days later.

The book itself was thin, not even a hundred pages. It was a journal from one of my ancestors who was apparently a hit wizard for the organization that would eventually branch off into the Sicilian mafia, as if my family wasn’t sketchy as fuck already.

Old-Blaise would have feared her too much to ask for a recommendation in the first place. Even had he drawn up the nerve, he would never have trusted the book’s contents for fear of sabotage. I at least knew that she had some affection for me, if only in the sense of a kindred murderer, so her recommendations could probably be trusted. Valencia Zabini was a great many things, but no one ever called her incompetent.

I’d read this book cover to cover now, and Dario Zabini was a fascinating man. He was someone who rejected traditional avenues of power to become an assassin. According to him, anything more than the usual cutting charm was unnecessary in combat. From blasting curses to the unforgivables, he rejected them all as exorbitant wastes of energy. Worse, dark magic was much easier to trace and raised more alarms, both unredeemable downsides in his opinion.

His preferred spell repertoire included everything from basic disillusionment to spells that could erase a man’s scent, negate the homenum revelio charm, and block scrying attempts. I hadn’t even realized that the last one was a possibility save for extremely rare spells like the fidelius charm. Unfortunately, most of his spells, some self-created, were far beyond my ability to cast at the moment, but this would be a book I’d be returning to for years.

Naturally, his emphasis on stealth extended to hiding the mind. To Be as Nothing was as literal a title as could be. From him, I learned that the essence of occlumency was not to build a “mind palace” as was so popular in other fictions, but to become a void to all external stimuli.

Snape once suggested to Harry that a great occlumens could project false memories indistinguishable from others. Those memories were so flawless that even Voldemort, a master legilimens, was unable to discover the spy in his midst. He wasn’t even aware that Snape knew occlumency.

Dario Zabini did things differently. Instead of moving on to the “projecting faux memories” phase, he’d expanded on the “emptying the mind” phase to unheard of levels. By turning his mind into a void filled with nothing but his sole objective, he could ignore all external stimuli, whether that be legilimency, obliviation, or torture.

According to him, he was even able to walk past a dementor, the soul-sucking creature incapable of sensing his emotions at all and so treating him as part of the scenery. Bogarts likewise stopped manifesting for him as well, incapable of discerning his greatest fear. I had no idea how true that was, but I wanted that kind of void for myself.

Not only would this keep my thoughts private, it would give me an almost supernatural drive needed to accomplish the goal I set. And, if I was honest with myself, someone using my services and then oblivating me to keep the acquired information secret was a major fear of mine.

So I worked to empty the mind according to Dario’s instructions. It was, in some ways, a walk of faith. I wouldn’t know how effective my training was until I had a legilimens probe it. And the only one I trusted was, funnily enough, my mother.

She was a monster, but she was a monster I knew. I knew her motives. I knew her methods. I could trust that she didn’t want me dead. Had she wanted to mold me into a puppet, she would have done so already.

She was, as paradoxical as it was to say, safe.

A wand of silver lime was supposed to be great for esoteric arts, including legilimency, but I didn’t know how much that would help with its opposite. I’d just have to see how much progress I could make in a single semester. I had plenty of motivation: If nothing else, disappointing my mother was likely to be an unpleasant experience.

X

It was the first of October and many of my house’s younger students were gathered in the common room. It was a little funny how we gathered around the announcement board like a flock of pigeons crowding an old man at a park bench for breadcrumbs. Today was the day we’d find out who had the private suite for each year and gender after all.

Well, that was the case in theory. In theory, the first of each month allowed the brightest, most cunning, or most influential students to brag about their accomplishments. The castle decided and the rest of the house was left to wonder exactly why the castle made this decision. A healthy spirit of competition would be nurtured and the subsequent months would see a shift in who occupied the private suite.

In practice, most everyone knew who would win each month. We lived with each other and largely attended the same classes after all. This was especially true of the first month, in which few if any schemes were seen through to completion. The rankings were based almost exclusively on the amount of house points earned in that case.

I spotted only one seventh year, three sixth years, and four fifth years amongst the crowd. Despite the castle’s best efforts, the social pecking order solidified by that point and only a few tried to compete for the top spot each month, seeing it as too much trouble for too little gain. They were all used to living together at that point; why bother?

To be fair, the first year winners weren’t a surprise either. Daphne hadn’t been idle since Lyra’s slipup during our first flying lesson. With Club Day being over and Violet’s status as the newest seeker confirmed during Gryffindor’s first practice session, she approached some of the older years to gain their support.

Granted, I had a feeling that our upperclassmen were bemused more than anything at Daphne’s power play. Or perhaps they were disappointed with the Malfoy scion and felt like expressing said disappointment in a tangible but largely harmless way that wouldn’t directly constitute an insult against House Malfoy as a whole.

No matter, the result was the same: I didn’t know what Daphne promised them, I didn’t care to dig up the answer, but I knew that at least one third year was spending time with Tracey out of class, probably teaching her a few useful spells. Whether Daphne could turn this arrangement into permanent allies remained to be seen, but for now, she was easily the most cunning Slytherin.

As for the boys…

“Oh, that is bloody nonsense,” Theodore whined. “What part of you is cunning?”

I shrugged and offered him a guileless smile. “What can I say? Maybe the castle likes that I’m an entrepreneur making his own spending money.”

“Anyone can think of that.”

“True… Say, do you remember our first transfiguration class?”

“What about it?” he asked sulkily.

I laughed. Not only did I drug a teacher, I made said teacher reward me for the privilege. And then, just to be sure she wouldn’t single me out afterwards, I made her reward the Ravenclaw too. McGonagall’s own pride wouldn’t allow her to retaliate after that.

That was what people could figure out, if they cared to look. Theo also knew I’d sicced the twins on him, though he obviously couldn’t prove it. And then there was what I’d done with Snape, getting him to see himself in me so I would hopefully have an easier time of things in the future. Though, for obvious reasons, I wasn’t going to go around bragging that I was manipulating my own head of house.

“Professor McGonagall doesn’t have a cat,” I called back as I headed out for lunch.

X

“What are you up to this time, Zabini?” Clara Warren, sixth year president of the art club, asked as she strolled by my easel. “Making one of your weird paintings again?”

I twirled a brush between my fingers. “I think I’m going to paint a dream I had.”

“Could be interesting. You know, I used to keep a dream diary.”

“Oh? Get anything good out of it?”

“Not in a divination sense, no. It taught me a lot about filling in the gaps of my own dreams. I don’t remember all my dreams clearly so the strings of words I wrote out became really cool prompts for me to experiment with.”

“Huh, neat. I bet it’s a good creative exercise. I heard you sell your paintings.”

“I do,” she said happily. “I’ve got a client who wants me to paint her portrait.”

“Really? Nice. Magical or muggle?” I asked, mildly interested.

“Magical, obviously. There’s almost no market for an unmoving portrait. I’m thinking about doing this full-time when I graduate,” she said with a sigh. She was a muggleborn, which unfortunately closed off higher-level ministry jobs for her. That she’d found herself a niche despite societal prejudice was impressive.

“How do you make a magical portrait?”

“You paint them like usual. Well, the paints and canvas need to be treated with potions. And it helps if the frame has runes carved into it for preservation and such. Oh, and the subject needs to be present so as to impart a copy of their personality and memories into the finished product; a photo won’t do.”

“Sounds a lot more involved than I expected,” I hummed. My brush glided across the canvas, slowly forming the face of a middle-aged blonde man in a muggle suit.

“It is. It’s a lot of fun though. And, no offense, but highly skilled or niche magic is about the only way muggleborns like me can get decent jobs.”

“None taken. It’s true,” I said simply.

“So… Who is that? I didn’t expect you to dream about a muggle.”

I leaned back to admire my work. I’d seen marked improvement in the past three weeks. At first, painting resulted in my hand cramping every few minutes as the convulsions wracked my body. Making anything visually distinct without the use of cogita pingere was impossible. I asked Madam Pomfrey about it and she promptly told me to keep at it. Apparently, painting was a good way to reacquire fine motor skills.

And she’d been right. My body was almost fully recovered now, I technically didn’t need my pimp cane, and the paintings I made now actually looked like the intended subjects. They weren’t masterpieces by any stretch, but I thought I’d fully regained the mediocre skills I had as Corbin, perhaps even a bit more.

The subject of my painting was an overweight, blonde man in an ill-fitting suit. His tie was the British Union Jack and his hair was all over the place, looking like an entire flock of seagulls picked their way through it. Despite the windswept look, he wore a wide, cheery grin, showing off a collection of yellowed teeth. In his hands was a tray with several mugs of hot tea, as if he was offering it to the viewer.

“That, my dear Warren, is your future,” I told her.

“Har-de-har. Do you have any idea how many times I’ve heard you lot compare muggles to gorillas?” she frowned. “The joke got old years ago.”

“I’m not insulting muggles. And this man isn’t a gorilla, more like an orangutan.” I quick-dried the painting with a severely underpowered ventus minima, another useful spell Warren showed me. Then, with a flick of my wand, my name, date, and the piece’s title etched themselves into the corner. I rolled it up and handed it to her. “I swear I’m not making fun of muggles. Frankly, your government does enough of that on its own. Just take it, okay? And, if you ever rejoin the muggle world, you’ll get a good laugh someday.”

She eyed me suspiciously. “You said you dreamed it.”

“Of a sort.”

“Bloody seers… Who the hell is Boris?”

X

“So, this is my new crib…” I muttered as I checked out my suite for the first time.

It was, in a word, luxurious, far grander than a boarding school dormitory had any right to be. Truthfully, it had more amenities than my own room at the Zabini manor.

The walls were a deep, black marble, over which banners of Slytherin-emerald hung. The silver serpents coiled and writhed inside each banner, as if searching for prey. In one corner of the room was a four-poster bed lined with the same green and silver sheets and curtains. There was a desk, two empty bookshelves lodged into a corner to make a miniature library, and my very own fireplace and sitting area, albeit without floo powder.

Those were all standard amenities, things that the castle provided to every student. Looking around, I could see that the castle had somehow adjusted itself for my personal use.

Off in the corner was an owl’s perch. It was made of lacquered rosewood and elegantly shaped into the form of a striking cobra, reminiscent of my cane. It was also a size or two bigger than other perches I’d seen, fit to house the new queen of the owlery when she deigned to pay me a royal visit.

Even the ceiling hadn’t been left untouched. It had been turned into a skylight of sorts. It opened out into the shores of the Black Lake, somehow without bringing in the chill of the Scottish autumn.

Minerva could come and go with ease, but I saw creatures pass by as if they hadn’t seen anything. How that worked, I had no fucking clue; I could only assume it was something similar to the windows in the common room that looked out into the lake Judging by the star chart and self-updating lunar calendar attached to one wall, the scenic view into the night sky was no accident.

At the center of the room was a circular standing desk, more like a bar table, with a little, three-fingered stand that formed a grasping sphere. I placed my crystal ball inside and, sure enough, it was a perfect fit.

Truly, magic was fantastic.

Author’s Note

A patron asked me if Blaise is going to make jokes about Trump. I told him that a painting of Donald with his itty-bitty hands saying “Covefe” would be something he’d make for the giggles. But then again, Britain has its own blonde idiot; they don’t need to outsource the job to America.

Animal fact? Sure. The largest predator species on Madagascar is the fossa. It looks like a cross between a cat and a dog and is a part of the Eupleridae family, a family that refers to the ten or so carnivorous species native to Madagascar. Yeah, scientists decided “fuck it” and gave Madagascan carnivores their own branch on the taxonomic tree.

Despite the “largest Madagascan predator” title, they’re actually only about 31 inches long from head to tail and weigh 19 pounds. Unlike in the movie Madagascar, they are solitary predators.