Lover of the Light

Truce

Lover of the Light

Chapter Nine: Truce

If there was something she'd say that she disliked about herself, it'd be the fact that she's stubborn. Most people would think that it's because she likes to be right a hundred percent of the time, but that's not entirely true. Though she didn't like to be challenged when someone wanted to change the accurateness of a solid fact, she really did appreciate a person's eagerness to get her to see things from a different angle. She was stubborn because she believed irrevocably in the things she was passionate about—and that within itself was a flaw.

She had spent almost two months sulking—going as far as doing something ridiculous as wishing upon a star every night in hopes that she'd wake up Hermione Granger again. But that wasn't her reality in those two months, not even now. She was Aria Zabini, no matter what her stubborn mind told her. And though she didn't want to be, her stubbornness to resume her old life had just hurt in the process.

She'd hurt herself by tormenting herself, by distancing herself from certain friends, by crying every day and night, hiding from watchful eyes, and straining relationships by trying to be Hermione Granger, the Muggle-born with Dentists as parents. And as if that wasn't painfully exhausting enough, she'd hurt others by that hardheadedness—and there was nothing worse for someone with a heart and soul like hers than to cause someone else pain. He was a true Slytherin at heart, but she'd stomped on her half-brother's heart without remorse or a second thought in those weeks of seclusion and rejection of the reality she'd been handed.

One of the greatest challenges is to try and change a stubborn person's mind, but Hermione was pushing herself to do so. It was hard, given her raging love for her previous life and history, but she was trying. If she couldn't do it for herself then she tried for others, and that somehow bullied her stubbornness to melt away millimeter by millimeter on a good day.

That effort had started because of Blaise.

After that very awkward meeting with his Slytherin acquaintances, after seeing the lengths the boy was going to so she'd so much as give him a square-inch inside her heart that he could call his own, Hermione knew that she had to start trying to live with what she had now. And that was him, a brother. So after the most uncomfortable hour of her life, after Hermione and the Slytherins had bid each other a farewell—Goyle going as far as bowing—and Blaise had walked her back to the Gryffindor tower, she had decided to spend a day with him every week. He'd been insulted that she was making him a schedule, but he'd been quick to let it go when he told her that if that was her form of working on their relationship then he'd take it. As such, she'd stopped hiding in classrooms, her common room, or in other locations in the castle. She took walks with him, studied with him in the library, paired up in classes they had together on occasions, and sometimes they'd hang out by the Black Lake on the weekend when she wasn't stressing over school. And those were the moments when they really started getting to know each other and she found that though he was too arrogant and demanding, he was also full of charm, unsettled grief, roaring laughter, and a cunning intelligence. He was also the intermediate between Hermione Granger and Aria Zabini; giving her a background of their family.

"Did she get along with Deon?" She remembered a conversation she had with him once, when they sat beside the lake together with bottles of Butterbeer and sandwiches he'd sworn he did not have the elves make. "Your mum?"

She noticed that about Blaise, that he tensed up, squaring his shoulders, whenever someone mentioned his deceased mother. It always took him a few seconds to let his bones loosen. "Yeah, why wouldn't she have? They shared a handsome son, you know. Look at my face and tell me I don't cause serenity."