Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

MINISTRY OF MAGIC
Department of Magical Records and Archives
Internal Operations Division
Level Seven, Restricted Correspondence

Recipient:
Mr. Theodore Atticus Nott
(Current Assignment Clearance: Level Grey)

Mr. Nott,

You are hereby directed to assume temporary residence at Blackthorn House, property currently warded and under limited surveillance.

You are to provide continuous assessment of the ward integrity, environmental stability, and residual arcane signatures present on and within the property.

You are to ensure the continued safety and monitoring of Resident Subject: Lovegood, Luna, whose voluntary habitation of the site is deemed of strategic significance. No intervention regarding the subject’s routines or magical practices is to be undertaken unless directly warranted by deterioration of containment conditions or immediate threat to life or limb.

Your presence is to be discreet. Your reports, should any be required, will be requested through nonstandard channels. No formal contact with other departments is authorised for the duration of this assignment.

Duration: Indeterminate. Termination of assignment will occur only upon formal notification.

No further instructions will follow. Proceed accordingly.

Office of Internal Operations
Ministry of Magic

He held the paper in both hands. His breath stayed slow, steady, even though his pulse had started to thrum just beneath his skin. It wasn’t until he lowered his eyes, just slightly, that he saw the second name.

It sat just below his. Not centered. Not bold. Just... there. As if it had always been meant to follow his.

His chest tightened. Not from surprise, but something heavier. Something like inevitability. Like this moment had already happened and he was only just arriving in it now. Her name didn’t shock him. It confirmed something he hadn’t let himself say out loud.

Luna Lovegood.

Written in the same hand. With the same care. A name that should have meant nothing in this context, but did.

It cracked something open in the quiet around him. Not because he knew her — he didn’t. Not really. But everyone who had survived the war knew who she was. They’d heard the stories. Felt the strangeness that lingered wherever she went.

Seeing her name printed right beneath his felt like standing too close to a ritual drawn in salt. The kind you know better than to touch, but still can’t look away from.She was a Seer. A real one. Not the kind who worked in street markets with fake tea leaves and memorized fortune scripts. 

The rare kind. The kind that spoke to things other people could not see and came back carrying pieces of what they had glimpsed. The kind of magic that twisted even as it revealed. The kind of sight that made people uncomfortable, because it was never neat and it was never safe. 

Her name had disappeared from official documents years ago, fading in that quiet way some people do when they were never built to fit inside structures. But the stories never stopped. The whispers only grew louder. They painted her in fragments. The girl who walked through the Veil and returned. The woman who called bones by name. The oracle who wept in her sleep for things that had not happened yet. Her truth was too potent. Her magic too wild. Her presence, even now, felt more like a ripple in time than a fixed point.

Somewhere in the Ministry folder that had probably accompanied this assignment, locked away in a drawer Theo would never bother to open, there would be a line, cold and clinical, printed near the top of the page. Subject is psychically unstable.  

Three words meant to contain her. To explain her. To reduce her into something small and manageable. Like a cracked wand to be catalogued. But she was not that. Her magic did not ask for understanding. It only asked for space to breathe.

Theo had spent too long around killers and gods to mistake instability for weakness. And what others dismissed as madness, he understood for what it really was. Danger. Not the kind of danger you could disarm with a spell or bind with a charm. The deeper kind. The kind that looked at the world and saw how easily it could be unraveled. The kind that had long since stopped pretending it wanted to be saved.

And if they were sending him to her now, it meant one of two things. Either she had seen something the Ministry could no longer ignore. Or she had become something they could no longer afford to leave unguarded. Either way, her name beside his was no accident. 

~

His boots were still damp from his last job, the kind of lingering detail that clung like a memory he did not need, a reminder of blood-wet soil and the quiet, methodical violence that lived in his muscles long after the mission had ended, and though most agents would have stopped to change, to clean, to recenter, Theo did none of those things, because he did not pause between assignments, did not indulge in the illusion of boundaries between tasks or moments or lives, and when he received the name, when her location appeared with quiet certainty on the edge of the page, he did not hesitate, did not question the absence of context or briefing or oversight, 

He preferred it this way, unspoken and sharp, without ceremony, without the weight of expectations or second-guessing, just coordinates and silence and the forward motion that kept him from having to think too hard about what it might mean that they had sent him to a seer, and so he closed his fingers over the paper, read the last known location was an old house on the Cornish coast, left off most maps, a place rumored to belong to ghosts and wind he apparated without another thought, because if there was one thing he had learned to rely on, it was the clarity of movement, and if he kept moving, kept acting before thought could bloom into doubt, then there was never any time to fear what came next.

He landed on the cliffs in the late afternoon, the sky already darkening with the weight of dusk, clouds heavy with salt and the scent of an incoming storm. The wind didn’t just blow—it howled, sharp and furious, tearing at his coat and dragging cold fingers through his hair. 

Below him, the sea churned with violent hunger, waves crashing into the rocks with a rage that could swallow a man whole. But Theo didn’t move. He just stood there, watching the house that clung to the edge of it all.

It looked like it had no right to still be standing. Crooked and stubborn, as if the earth had tried to shake it off and failed, as if it had started to collapse years ago and simply froze that way, too proud or too cursed to finish falling. The roof sagged. The windows were stained with grime  what might have been blood. The walls bulged inward, as if something inside them had curled up and refused to let go.

His gaze dropped to the garden next, where the ground pulsed with an odd, twitching life. Vines thick as ropes slithered through cracked stone paths, leaves edged in silver that snapped open with the wind like teeth. They gleamed like polished bone. It might have been a hallucination, except one of them struck mid-air, catching a bird in flight and dragging it down into the brush. The foliage trembled. Not like it was reacting. Like it was breathing.

He stepped forward slowly. Moss and brittle earth gave way beneath his boots, each footfall swallowed by the strange quiet beneath the wind. He didn’t know what sort of magic held the place together, didn’t yet understand the pattern of the wards or the ancient weight humming beneath the surface. But he felt it settle around him anyway. Thick. Watching.

Without a word, he reached for his wand, not like he was expecting to be attacked. He better than to underestimate what looked ruined but still stood. He told himself it was for the house. Not for her. He didn’t know her yet. Hadn’t seen her face. Hadn’t heard her voice.

And yet, when his fingers closed around the familiar wood, the wind stopped for just a breath.

As if the house had felt him coming. As if it knew.

Before he could lift his hand to knock, before knuckles met wood or breath caught in his throat, the door creaked open on its own, not flung wide in alarm or curiosity, but with slow, deliberate ease, as if the house had sensed him long before his boots touched the first loose stone in the walkway, and through the widening gap appeared a face that did not belong to the world outside, a small, pale, quietly still, a face untroubled by surprise or wariness, framed in hair the color of moonlight, too long and too wild to have been touched by anything mundane in weeks, and her eyes, impossibly wide and silver-bright, regarded him with a serenity that felt not detached but ancient, like she had looked through him and past him and beyond him all in one blink, and still found him unremarkable, still kept the door open.

She did not ask who he was. She did not request identification or reason. She simply tilted her head, blinked slowly, and said, in a voice so gentle it felt like prophecy soaked in velvet, “I wondered how long they’d wait before sending someone,” then stepped back just far enough to let her words settle like fog between them before adding, “It’s been twenty-seven days since the last death.”

He stood there, utterly still, spine held straight by instinct, not confusion, not concern, but the deep, watchful tension of someone who had seen many kinds of madness and many more kinds of truth, and could no longer always tell the difference, and the words she spoke did not seem intended to shock him, though they might have, had anyone else said them, but rather to anchor him in the quiet certainty that she already knew why he was here, already counted him as part of something she had long been expecting, and the realization slipped beneath his skin like cold water.

There was no greeting. No smile. No offered name or hesitant curiosity. Just a sentence lined with blood and a calm that made his hand twitch at his side. He blinked once, slow and sharp, and spoke her name without thinking, the syllables heavier on his tongue than he anticipated, “Lovegood,” not as a question but a statement, one that had already begun to sound strange in the air between them.

She responded not with confirmation or pleasantries, not with any of the socially acceptable masks people wore in the presence of strangers, but with a tilt of her lips that was not quite a smile and a line so strange it forced stillness into his spine, “Theodore. You’re humming, you know.”

He wasn’t. He never did. Humming was not a thing he allowed himself, not in public, not in private, not even in the moments between violence and sleep, and her observation wasn’t teasing or accusatory, just quiet and absolute, like it had already been written down elsewhere, like it was a memory she’d plucked from the air.

She opened the door a little wider, still not inviting, not truly, but leaving just enough space for him to see her fully now. She stood in the threshold, framed by the crooked interior hallway behind her and the dying light that spilled in from the outside, barefoot on the cold stone floor as though the chill never touched her. Her feet were pale, scuffed with chalk dust or salt, her legs bare below the hem of a dark skirt that fell too long and too uneven to belong to anything fashionable. 

Her wand wasn’t clutched in her hand like most witches trained by war, but was instead tucked carelessly into the back of her waistband, as though she had slipped it there absentmindedly and forgotten it entirely. On each of her fingers glimmered a different ring, silver and copper and bone, one carved like a serpent swallowing its own tail, another cut from moonstone that caught the last light like ice. None of them matched, not in shape, not in material, not in intention. It was as if she had chosen them for reasons known only to her, for power or for memory, for how they hummed against her skin or whispered something secret when pressed against the world.

There was nothing performative in the way she stood, no attempt to disarm him or manipulate the situation, only a kind of stillness that felt ritualistic, the stillness of someone who had been waiting for this moment with complete awareness, and now that it had arrived, saw no need to rush the unraveling.

“I’m not here socially,” he said. His tone was flat, unbothered — the kind of blunt delivery that didn’t leave room for misunderstanding. He didn’t wait for a nod or an invitation. He just stepped inside, like the door had opened just for him, like someone somewhere had already decided he belonged here.

Crossing the threshold sent a strange sensation through him. Not quite magic, not quite air. More like static, like something sharp and invisible had been waiting just under his skin and now pressed into him all at once. But he didn’t pause. Movement was safer. Stillness could give too much away.

“The Ministry sent me to guard you,” he said, already sweeping the space with his eyes, noting exits, shadows, symbols or anything out of place. His voice stayed calm, measured, like this was just another job, just another name to protect until something spilled blood. “You’ve been flagged as a target.”

She didn’t flinch. Her calm was eerie, untouched by the weight of what he’d said. If anything, she sounded bored  like danger was an old story she no longer bothered to read.

“I’ve been a target since I was twelve,” she said. Not bitter. Not dramatic. Just... stating it. Like it was something she'd filed away ages ago, too familiar to matter anymore.

Then, as if that sentence was nothing but a footnote in some much larger conversation, she tilted her head, her smile quiet and oddly personal.

“Would you like some tea?”

He didn’t even blink. “No.”

But her smile only grew, undisturbed by his refusal. She didn’t seem offended, didn’t even seem to notice. She turned away with the slow, graceful ease of someone who moved through time differently, someone who never had to rush. Her bare feet made no sound against the floor as she slipped into the kitchen, her body moving like smoke, like something half-remembered from a dream. Her voice drifted back toward him, soft and unfocused, as if speaking wasn’t something that required her full attention. “You’ll like the guest bedroom. It faces the sea. The ghosts keep it warm.”

Theo stayed in the entryway for a long moment after she disappeared. His eyes narrowed, posture still, as if the house itself were something that needed to be studied. Something felt wrong. Not in any obvious way. There was no blood, no broken magic. But the air hummed strangely beneath the floorboards, and the scent in the room kept changing. At first it was salt. Then something floral, but wilting. Like crushed roses hidden in the spine of a forgotten book. Underneath it all, a faint sharpness, something metallic, something that made his skin feel too close to heat.

He looked down and noticed that the floor wasn’t completely solid. It shimmered faintly beneath his boots, marked by narrow lines of runes that blinked in and out of view. They pulsed like a living thing, like they were keeping time with a heartbeat that didn’t belong to him. Just off to the left, where the staircase curved upward into a spill of shadow, a portrait on the wall had tilted slightly. The painted surface moved, slow and soft, like it had only just returned to its frame from somewhere else entirely. Somewhere it shouldn’t have been.

The woman in the painting wore a dress from no era he could name. Her mouth was too small, her face stretched a little too long, her eyes narrowing as they settled on him. Then, with a voice like parchment cracking open in the dark, she whispered. Not to him, but about him.

“He’s prettier than the last one.”

He didn’t answer. Didn’t blink. He didn’t give the portrait the satisfaction of a reaction. He had learned long ago that not everything deserved acknowledgment, especially in places where even the walls seemed to be listening.

By the time Luna returned with the tea, its scent drifted through the hall like incense in a forgotten temple, quiet and strange, the kind of fragrance that lingered even after you stopped noticing it. Theo was already in the guest room, exactly where she’d said it would be. He sat in the rickety armchair closest to the window, posture still and deliberate, the ocean wind tapping softly against the glass behind him. The chair looked like it had survived centuries. Its cushions were sunken, the fabric near the edges frayed and worn through, but he sat with the calm confidence of someone who never needed an invitation to take up space. His hands were steepled in front of him, fingertips pressed together as if mid-thought, and his boots were still on, planted squarely over the faint runes etched into the wood beneath him, as if daring the room to challenge him over it.

She stepped inside without pause, barefoot and quiet again. Her movements were slow, but never careless, like each step had already been taken somewhere else before she arrived here. She carried the tea on a tray made of pale, unfamiliar wood that shimmered slightly in the soft light spilling in through the window. No theatrics. No ceremony. Just a careful placement of the tray onto a small round table beside him. The table shifted under her hand, almost imperceptibly, the surface rippling as if it were less furniture and more memory holding itself together, something pretending to be ordinary just long enough to be useful.

“You’re very quick,” she said. Not smiling. Not surprised. Just stating it, like it was something true and obvious.

“I don’t need your permission to do my job,” he said. His voice stayed calm, gaze fixed ahead. The words came out without edge, without invitation. Not cruel, just measured. Every syllable stripped of warmth, pared down to what needed to be said. This was the line he understood. 

The space between duty and something else. And he meant to keep it exactly where it was.She didn’t seem offended, nor did she seem particularly interested in the edge of his professionalism, only hummed a small, strange sound from deep in her throat, thoughtful rather than dismissive, and responded as if she were answering an entirely different question, her head tilted slightly to the side as though listening to something he could not hear, “That’s the thing about protection,” she said softly, almost musing, her gaze flickering out the window toward the distant crashing of waves against rock, “it doesn’t always ask.”

He said nothing in return, not because he had no answer, but because there was nothing in her tone to argue with, nothing that demanded rebuttal or reply, only that faint, unnerving calm that settled around her like another layer of clothing, and he understood, in that quiet moment, that whatever rules he had expected to govern this assignment, they would not survive here.

She sat across from him with a kind of quiet ease that didn’t look like a decision so much as the next step in something already unfolding. There was no sharpness to the movement. It was soft, unhurried, almost ritualistic. Her body folded into the armchair like she had always belonged there, her posture more feline than human, self-contained and deliberate. She tucked her legs beneath her, smaller now, but not diminished. Her stillness didn’t feel passive. It felt like a choice. Like she had claimed the center of the room without needing to move or speak.

She held her teacup in both hands, not like it was just something warm to drink from, but like it meant something. Like whatever was inside it mattered. Her fingers curled around the porcelain as if it held fire, something precious and fading. She hadn’t challenged him, hadn’t even made a statement, but he felt her attention anyway. Not sharp, not invasive. Just... steady. Quiet. The kind of gaze that didn’t wait for permission. Like she’d already decided she was going to understand him whether he allowed it or not.

The silence between them stretched out, not awkward, just full. Like something old was rising to the surface, and both of them could feel it. When she finally spoke, her voice came low and soft, threaded with that strange rhythm people used when they were used to not being fully believed. Like she wasn’t trying to be understood anymore, just trying to reach whatever part of him still had enough wonder left to listen.

“They told you I was mad, didn’t they?” she asked. There was no bitterness in it. No sarcasm. Just a calm kind of knowing, her words drifting through the room like smoke. Her eyes stayed on him.

He didn’t react. No blink. No shift. He held still, the tension buried so deep it barely registered on his face. Then he answered, calm and controlled.

“They said you were unstable.”

The words came out flat. Not cruel. Just factual. Like something copied from a file, written in ink, folded away neatly in a drawer — stripped of all the things it couldn’t explain.

“Same thing,” she replied quietly, as if the distinction no longer interested her, as if she had long since stopped arguing with the labels other people chose to give her, and there was no sarcasm in her voice, no anger beneath the calm, only the resignation of someone who had been called far worse by people who knew far less.

He raised one brow, not dramatically but subtly, the small movement betraying a flicker of curiosity he hadn’t meant to reveal, and said, with a dryness that might have been challenge or might have simply been inquiry, “You don’t deny it.”

Luna took another sip of her tea before answering, and when she did, it was with the tone of someone peeling back the surface of something others were too afraid to look beneath, her gaze still calm, still unsettlingly direct, “There’s more truth in dreams than people like you are comfortable with,” she said, and her words did not carry accusation, only the weight of understanding, the kind that came from years of listening to the world whisper things no one else wanted to hear.

“And people like you?” he asked, the question soft but pointed, not mocking, not cruel, just curious in the way a knife is curious about the depth it can cut.

She tilted her head slightly at the question, as if considering it not for the first time but for the thousandth, and replied with that same distant clarity that felt like it belonged to a different decade entirely, her voice low, steady, and strangely kind, “We stopped being comfortable years ago.”

Conversation came easier than he expected, not because she was particularly talkative in the traditional sense, and not because he offered anything freely, but because the space between them seemed to loosen the longer they remained in the same room, the air growing warmer, heavier, softer around the edges, as if the walls themselves had decided to let them speak without consequence. She asked questions that most people would hesitate to think, let alone say aloud, odd, fragmented things that felt disconnected at first, as though she were pulling them from dreams or from the edges of thoughts he hadn’t yet formed, questions with no preamble, no explanations, and certainly no apologies, only the smooth, steady cadence of her voice drifting across the room like incense, gentle and certain in its strangeness.

“Do you dream in colour?” she asked, and she didn’t look at him when she said it, didn’t smile or fidget or explain what she meant, just let the question hang between them like something sacred, and before he could begin to consider an answer, she followed it with another, just as softly, “Have you ever eaten snow in a ritual circle?” then took a sip of her tea as if she’d asked about the weather, as if she hadn’t just threaded her voice through a place he wasn’t used to being touched.

She didn’t wait for his responses. She didn’t seem to expect them. The questions came like petals falling from a tree shaken by the wind, beautiful, strange, and strangely inevitable.

“Do your hands ache after you kill someone?”

That one hung longer.

She said it without malice, without judgment, as if she already knew the answer and was simply curious about how he would carry it. As if the weight of his silence had already told her more than words could.

He didn’t answer. Not that one. Not the others. Not out of defiance, but because silence was his instinct, the first language he’d ever mastered, and because speaking would have made it real, would have taken what she offered and shaped it into something solid, and he wasn’t ready to give her that—not yet.

Still, he stayed.

He stayed in the chair that creaked under his weight every time he shifted. He stayed as the sky outside darkened into velvet and the sea pressed itself harder against the cliffs, the sound of it like breath caught in a throat. He stayed while she spoke in those soft, strange riddles, half-memories and prophecy fragments and impossible questions spoken aloud like poems meant only for the dying. He stayed as the house pulsed faintly around them, as if its walls were drawing breath and memory at once. He stayed even as the room grew colder, even as the shadows thickened, even as he felt the old instinct to retreat curl against his ribs.

Because despite the questions, despite the quiet, unnerving knowing in her eyes, despite the way she seemed to already understand parts of him he had not yet decided to show, he realized, with the slow certainty of a man stepping into a circle he could not leave, that she did not want anything from him—not in the way others did—and that was the most dangerous kind of comfort of all.

The wind moved through the house not as air but as presence, slipping through the cracks in the warped walls with a voice that sounded less like nature and more like memory, howling softly where the stone had split, sighing where the wood had bent beneath the weight of years, and it did not relent through the night, did not rest or still, but threaded itself through every room like a thread pulled tight, rattling loose charms that hung in forgotten corners and brushing against the pages of books no one had opened in decades, until even silence seemed to hum with the shape of it. The air itself was thick, brined with salt that clung to the skin and burned faintly in the lungs, a constant presence that settled along the floorboards and stained the window glass, and beneath that, beneath the sea-wind and the ghosts in the stairwells and the soft click of cooling stone, there was something else, something older than the house, older than the cliffs, something that did not make itself known with sound but with weight, a pressure that pressed low behind the eyes and whispered beneath the ribs, the quiet promise of something buried too deep to name but not deep enough to forget.

Theo did not sleep that night, not because of fear, not even because of the strange girl who had opened her door before he knocked or the questions she asked that bled into his thoughts like ink in water, but because the house itself would not allow him rest, not truly, because when he closed his eyes, when he let the stillness settle and the noise fade, there was something in the walls that shifted too softly to ignore, something that spoke not in words but in suggestion, in fragments, in the half-murmured hush of magic that had gone too long without a name, and though he had lived in places where screams bled through stone and silence meant death, though he had survived the hum of cursed chambers and the sharp breath of dying magic, this was different, this was not fear in the traditional sense, this was the bone-deep tension that came from being in a place that knew him before he introduced himself, that remembered things he had not spoken aloud, and the whispers, if he let himself hear them clearly, would say something he would never be able to unhear.

~

Theo stepped into the kitchen with the kind of controlled stillness that came not from caution, but from habit, his footsteps silent against the stone floor as if he were walking through a space that didn’t entirely belong to this world, and the shift in temperature was immediate, the air here warmer than the hallway behind him, not from sunlight—there was none, only a faint, colorless glow creeping in through warped windowpanes that fogged at the edges—but from something else, something older, a lingering heat that lived in the bones of the house itself, like the memory of fire long since extinguished but unwilling to fully let go.

She was already there, of course, seated at the far end of the long, crooked table that seemed to list slightly toward the sea-facing wall, her posture relaxed but not careless, as though she had settled into the morning hours with the kind of certainty that could only come from someone who had seen this moment before it arrived, and her hair, long and loose, caught what little light there was and turned it to frost, draping down her back like a spell still in progress. She held a book open in her lap, its spine curved and worn, the pages inked in a script Theo did not recognize—curling characters that looked less like language and more like sigils meant to be whispered rather than read—and though she made no effort to hide it, there was something in the way her eyes skimmed the page, slow and steady and almost reverent, that made him feel as though interrupting her would cost him something he hadn’t yet named.

On the table before her, beneath a chipped porcelain teacup that steamed faintly in the quiet, there was a rune circle etched so lightly into the surface that he might not have noticed it at all had the steam not caught the edges, illuminating the pattern in brief, silvery flashes—an old circle, carefully worn down, but still active, still humming with quiet intent, and she traced one of the outer glyphs with her finger absently as she turned the page with her other hand.

Without lifting her eyes from the book, without looking at him at all, she spoke, her voice unhurried, the tone soft enough to be mistaken for civility if not for the words themselves, which fell into the room like an invocation, “I dreamt you’d arrive with blood on your tongue.”

She said it as if she were remarking on the weather, not as an accusation or a riddle, but as a truth she had already made peace with long before he crossed the threshold, and though the words should have unsettled him, though something in them should have bristled against the back of his neck, Theo gave no visible reaction, only continued his quiet approach, every movement calculated not to give her the satisfaction of response.

He did not answer. He did not look at her.

Instead, he moved through the room with the deliberate, fluid motion of someone cataloguing a space for the first time while pretending not to, his eyes taking in the angles of the shelves, the placement of the doorways, the thin cracks in the stone above the hearth where runes had been burned into the frame and half-scrubbed away, and he made his way toward the far end of the counter with the casual indifference of a man far too focused on his own routine to be drawn into games, though his senses remained tuned to her presence like a second skin.

He found the kettle by touch more than sight, filled it with water drawn from a silver-handled spout that did not seem attached to any known plumbing, and lit the old gas burner with the same efficiency he brought to every small task, as if his hands had long since learned to complete motions without need for thought, and all the while, he said nothing, offered no greeting, no commentary, no acknowledgment of the words she had dropped into the room like a spell daring him to pick it up.

And through it all, she watched him.

She did not blink. She did not smile.

She simply sat with the book open in her lap and her fingers still circling the rune beneath her cup, her eyes tracking him like a tide that never receded, quiet and patient and utterly relentless, as if she were waiting not for him to speak, but for him to reveal the thing she already knew he would try to hide.

He said nothing as the kettle hissed softly behind him, steam beginning to rise like breath from a body that had just remembered it was alive, and he could feel her gaze brushing against the side of his neck, not invasive, not even forceful, but constant in the way wind pressed through cracked stone, the way salt worked its way into wounds long after the bleeding stopped. He poured the water slowly, methodically, allowing the scent of steeping tea to fill the space, something herbal and sharp, unfamiliar but not unpleasant, and still he said nothing, not because he didn’t have words, but because he was counting the beats between each of hers, waiting for her to reach again, to probe at the silence between them as though it were a thread she could unravel.

And she did.

Her voice came quiet, not much louder than the sound of the flames beneath the kettle, but it moved through the room with precision, brushing against the edge of something buried deep in his chest, and the words she chose were not soft, not vague, but sharp in the way only honest curiosity could be, the kind that did not ask for permission before cutting, “When you kill someone,” she said, as if she were asking him whether he preferred sugar in his tea or none at all, “do you ever see their face later? Not in dreams. Just… in moments that shouldn’t matter?”

The air shifted. He didn’t look at her.

He held the cup in his hand for a second longer than necessary, as though considering whether it was hot enough to burn, and then took a slow sip without answering, allowing the silence to stretch out long and taut, a rope pulled tight between them, and he stared at the far wall as though it held something worth focusing on, some crack or flaw or mark that might ground him in the present, something small and simple and not made of memory.

She said nothing else for a moment, letting her question hang there with the weight of something already known, already named, and it pressed into his skin with the soft insistence of someone who had long since stopped needing to be believed and now only needed to be heard.

He breathed in slowly, steady and cold, then finally replied without looking at her, voice low and rough like stone dragged across stone, “I don’t dream.”

The lie didn’t taste bitter. It didn’t even register as untruth, not at first, because it had become a reflex, a shield so often lifted that he no longer felt its weight, and he spoke it with the practiced detachment of a man who had told himself the same thing enough times that it had begun to rewrite the shape of his memory.

But she heard it for what it was, heard the way it curled slightly at the edge, not false in the loud way, not dramatic or defensive, but soft and strained and distant, like someone speaking from behind a glass wall that only she could see through.

“Liar,” she said gently, her voice quieter now, but closer, and the word was not an accusation, not a strike, not a punishment, but a kind of sadness, a kind of recognition, as if she knew the shape of the wounds he guarded not because she had seen them, but because she carried similar ones, and her tone carried no heat, no cruelty, only the faint disappointment of someone who had asked a question not to pry, but to offer something, and now knew it would not be accepted.

He exhaled through his nose, not sharply, not even audibly, but just enough for his shoulders to shift slightly as he stood near the window, the teacup resting in his hand untouched, and the light behind the glass had grown dimmer, though the sky had not changed, and he wondered, absently, whether the house itself was listening, whether the runes etched into the floor and burned into the beams were drawing his words into themselves like breath, storing them somewhere deep in the walls to whisper back at him when the night grew quiet again.

“I don’t dream,” he said again, this time not as defense, not even as defiance, but with a low steadiness that felt more like ritual than conversation, and he kept his eyes on the grain of the wood beneath his fingertips because he didn’t want to see whether she was still watching, didn’t want to see if she was still smiling with that too-patient mouth.

Behind him, her chair creaked softly as she leaned forward, just enough for the air to shift again, and when she spoke, her voice felt closer still, no louder than before, but intimate in that strange way that made the room feel smaller, made the walls press inward without moving at all.

“I see them,” she said, and she wasn’t smiling now, he didn’t have to look to know it, because her voice had changed, flattened into something worn but unafraid, something fragile without being weak, and she continued, steady as a pulse, “not always in dreams. Sometimes just in reflections. In mirrors. In cups of water. In the moment before waking. I see their faces long after they’re gone. Sometimes I think I carry them with me, like coins sewn into the lining of a coat I can’t take off.”

He said nothing, but his fingers curled more tightly around the rim of the cup.

“They don’t ask for anything,” she added after a moment. “They just look.”

The quiet that followed wasn’t empty. It was full of things unsaid, full of weight and breath and the soft shifting of something beneath the floor. The kettle was still warm. The light still low. The rune beneath her cup was glowing now, just faintly, as if it had been activated by the weight of their voices alone.

He finally looked at her.

Just for a second.

And what he saw wasn’t madness, wasn’t fragility, wasn’t even danger.

It was recognition.

He didn’t look at her when she asked it.

It came not as a provocation or a trap, not with sharpness or demand, but with the kind of softness that made it more dangerous than either, spoken between sips of tea and the slow shifting of light across the table, her voice steady and calm, as though she were asking about the weather, or about the name of a flower she had once seen in a dream, and it wasn’t even phrased like a question, not really, more like a statement wrapped in breath and waiting to be unwrapped, “What do you remember about the war?” she said, and though her tone did not waver, something in the room did, something subtle, something beneath the floor, as if the bones of the house itself flinched at the word.

Theo did not answer.

He didn’t even move, not at first, only shifted his gaze downward, away from her eyes, away from the soft pulse of magic still thrumming beneath her teacup, and instead focused on the surface of the table between them, the way the woodgrain moved slightly beneath the faint ring of runes, the way the light caught the carvings and made them look deeper than they were, and when he finally spoke, it was not in reply, not really, because his voice was too carefully empty, too deliberately placed, and the words were not meant to bridge the distance but to erase it altogether.

“Why haven’t you left this place?”

His tone was casual, the kind of casual that had been honed over years of training and control, a blade disguised as breath, and though the shift in subject was abrupt, it wasn’t messy, wasn’t clumsy, because Theo never stumbled, not even when running from ghosts he refused to name.

Luna didn’t flinch.

She didn’t press. Didn’t repeat herself. Didn’t try to pull the thread of his silence tighter.

Instead, she sat back slightly, her spine resting against the worn curve of the chair, her cup cradled between her hands as though it were an anchor in a sea of things no one else could see, and she looked out the window, not toward the sea, not toward the cliffs, but toward something deeper, something within the walls of the house that even he could not trace, and when she answered, her voice was soft, but not evasive, not distant, only tired in the way old things are tired.

“Because I’m bound to it,” she said, and the words landed without emphasis, without decoration, as if they had been spoken many times before in places where no one had listened, and she blinked slowly, like something passed behind her eyes and vanished before she could name it, “because I’m waiting for the house to say I can leave.”

There was no drama in it, no mysticism for performance’s sake, and that, more than anything, unnerved him, because she wasn’t trying to be strange, wasn’t trying to convince him of anything at all, only speaking truth as she knew it, and he found that he could not immediately dismiss it, could not cast it aside as delusion, because something in the house itself echoed with the rhythm of her claim.

It did not feel metaphorical.

It felt literal.

And that unsettled him.

So he leaned back in his chair, cup still untouched in his hand, eyes narrowing slightly as he watched her with the caution of a man assessing the sharpness of a blade he might one day have to pull from his own skin, and after a moment that stretched just long enough to make silence feel purposeful, he asked, voice low and dry and almost sardonic, “Are you always like this?”

The question should have been an insult.

Should have landed like a judgment, or at least a defense, a thin shield raised between them to keep her strangeness at bay.

But she only tilted her head at him slightly, her expression not amused, not offended, just thoughtful, as if she were searching through memory for the correct shape of an answer, and when she found it, her lips curved just a little, not quite into a smile, more like an echo of one, and she said, without hesitation, “No.”

Her eyes met his.

“I used to be stranger.”

There was no irony in it. No humor. Only the soft cadence of truth told plainly, and it struck him with a weight he didn’t expect, because she wasn’t joking, wasn’t exaggerating, wasn’t hiding behind whimsy or madness or masks—she meant it, meant every word, and in that moment, he realized he was not sitting across from someone trying to be mysterious, but from someone who had simply stopped pretending to be anything else.

The room was too quiet after that.

The wind outside had stilled.

The rune beneath her cup faded slowly into invisibility, like it had heard enough.

And Theo, for the first time since he arrived, found that he had nothing useful left to say.

So he drank his tea.

And it was cold.

Later, when the sky had deepened into that strange, blue-grey hush that belonged only to places on the edge of sea and spell, when the corners of the house had darkened with the kind of shadow that moved too deliberately to be natural, she asked him to follow her down a narrow hallway that twisted just slightly too much to be architecturally sound, the ceiling sloped, the doorways uneven, and the walls pulsing faintly with warmth like the house was exhaling through its bones. She didn’t say where they were going, only glanced back once over her shoulder with the same expression she wore before she asked impossible questions, soft and curious and unafraid, and he followed not because he trusted her, but because there was something in the air that made standing still feel like a trap.

She led him to a small room at the end of the hall, the door half-cracked open, its hinges groaning in protest as she nudged it wider with her fingertips, and the air inside was thick with paint and old incense, the scent of turpentine mingling with something sweeter, like dried violets soaked in ink. The room was filled with canvases—dozens of them, maybe more, propped against the walls and stacked in uneven towers, their edges curling, some half-finished, others violently complete, and the light in the space flickered not from candles or spells, but from something hidden in the corners, something pulsing like a heartbeat muffled by silk.

“They aren’t exactly paintings,” she said, her voice low, not quite whispering, but quieter than usual, like she didn’t want to wake something that might be listening, and she moved to one of the walls where five pieces had been arranged with more care than the others, all roughly the same size, each painted in thick, heavy strokes that shimmered faintly when the light passed over them. “They’re echoes,” she added, touching the top edge of one with her fingertips, “of things that haven’t happened yet. Or maybe things that already have. I don’t always know the difference.”

He stepped closer, not too close, not enough to let his coat brush against the edges, but enough to see the details—the strange, distorted colors, the unnatural sharpness of the outlines, the way the paint seemed to shift slightly when he wasn’t looking directly at it—and then his eyes fell on the fourth canvas.

It was simple. A figure with his back turned. Standing in shadow. Shoulders broad, head tilted slightly toward the left. Nothing dramatic, nothing grotesque or symbolic, no sigils or blood or celestial ruin. Just a man. Alone. Back to the viewer. Caught in a moment that looked too still to be ordinary.

And something in his chest went tight.

It wasn’t the shape of the figure’s stance or the shadow coiled at his feet that caught him. It was the shoulder. The left one. Just barely raised, just slightly marked by an old scar that most would never notice, a curve in the posture that was his and his alone, etched into muscle from years of holding tension in the same spot, year after year, war after war, memory after memory.

He said nothing, but she noticed the shift in his breath.

“I didn’t know it was you until last week,” she said gently, and she wasn’t looking at the painting now, she was looking at him, and her expression held nothing triumphant, nothing mischievous or pleased with herself, only a quiet solemnity, like she understood the weight of what she was giving him and had already made peace with the consequences. “Sometimes I paint before I know what I’ve seen.”

He turned slightly, eyes narrowing, jaw tightening, and she must have seen something pass through his face, something rawer than he meant to show, because she stepped forward without hesitation, reached for his wrist with a motion so fluid and so natural it didn’t register as contact until her fingers had already pressed against the inside of his arm.

The touch was brief.

Bare skin to bare skin.

And something in the room shifted.

One of the runes near the window pulsed sharply to life, a thin, brilliant thread of silver slicing across the wooden beam and illuminating the air between them like a wound reopening in silence. He felt it in his spine, the flicker of energy laced with memory, not painful, not magical in the way spells usually were, but deep, instinctive, a recognition in his nerves that made his blood hum in a rhythm he did not understand.

She let go a second later and stepped back like nothing had happened. Like she hadn’t just carved a mark into the moment that would follow him into the next room, the next breath.

The house felt heavier.

Not darker. Not cursed. Just dense in a way it hadn’t before. Like the space between them had thickened. Like the walls had heard the contact and were now holding their breath, waiting for what he might do.

His fingers curled reflexively, the pressure of her touch still alive on his wrist even though it was gone, and when he looked at her, truly looked, he saw no apology in her eyes, no explanation, no fear. Only a kind of steady patience that rattled him more than anything she could have said.

“What are you doing?” he asked, voice low, sharp, thinner than he meant it to be, the tension in his chest finally catching in his throat, and he didn’t mean it in the way people usually did when trying to draw out motives, he meant it in the way a knife asks the hand that holds it why it shakes.

She tilted her head slightly. Not mocking. Just considering.

“I’m not playing,” she said softly, and then after a pause that dragged against the inside of his ribcage, “but if it feels like a game, maybe you’re not ready to understand the rules.”

He hated how the words landed.

Hated how close they came to something real.

And hated more than anything that he didn’t walk away.

He stood in that room with the paintings and the pulsing rune and the girl who saw too much, and for the first time since he arrived, he realized he might not be the only one with knives.

After dinner, the light in the house shifted the way it does in places where magic sleeps with one eye open, the shadows stretching longer even though no new hour had arrived, and the salt air pushed more insistently through the cracks in the windows, not cold, but damp, clinging to the corners of the ceiling, to the worn stone near the hearth, to the base of Theo’s spine like a touch that didn’t belong. They hadn’t spoken much while eating. Luna had filled their plates with quiet efficiency, moving through the kitchen like someone following steps she’d dreamed in detail, every gesture soft, unhurried, strangely reverent, and though he had expected awkwardness, or questions, or more of her riddling curiosities, the meal passed in companionable silence, broken only by the sound of utensils against ceramic and the occasional creak of the old wooden table adjusting its posture.

He hadn’t meant to stay for dinner. Hadn’t intended to sit, or eat, or let the house settle around him like it had a claim to his body. But he had. And now, as the plates sat empty on the table and the light took on a blueish hue, casting the runes in the far corners into sharper relief, she rose with the same soundless grace she always carried, collected the plates, and moved them to the sink without a word, her bare feet silent on the floor, her hair half-lit by whatever glimmer passed for illumination in this house.

He watched her without meaning to. Not with hunger. Not with suspicion. Just with the tense, unmoving posture of someone who had spent years watching everything that moved too slowly to be trusted.

When she turned back toward him, her hands now clean, her expression unreadable, she stood for a moment at the head of the table, eyes skimming the room as if listening for some invisible cue, then tilted her head and said, with that familiar softness that was somehow never soft, “Would you like tea?”

It was the third time she’d asked him since he arrived.

The first he’d refused immediately. The second, she’d offered while seated in that strange guest room with the sea behind him and the portrait whispering above the stairs. He had refused then too, more to keep control than out of preference. But this time, something had shifted.

He didn’t know why he said yes.

Maybe it was the silence.

Maybe it was the way her voice didn’t sound like an offer, but like the final step in something that had been unraveling since the moment he stepped onto the property. Maybe it was the hunger sitting beneath his ribs, not for food, not for warmth, but for something that had no name and no mercy, something that curled in his spine whenever she looked at him for too long.

He nodded once. “Fine.”

She smiled.

Not wide. Not smug. Not gleeful. But deep.

A knowing smile. A victorious one. The kind that didn’t gloat, because it didn’t need to.

She moved to the far counter without saying anything else, retrieved the same strange tea blend he had seen her use before—black leaves mixed with pale threads that looked almost silver in the dim light—and filled the kettle with the same graceful motion she gave every task, as if even mundane actions held ritual meaning. He didn’t move. Didn’t fidget. Only watched her hands as they moved through the motions of boiling, steeping, pouring, the curl of steam rising in gentle spirals as the scent of something old and wild filled the space again.

When she set the cup down in front of him, it was placed atop the same old rune-burned coaster she had used earlier in the day, and he noticed—too late to stop himself—that the moment his fingers curled around the porcelain, the rune beneath the cup bloomed faintly with light.

Not a flare. Not a burst. But a glow.

Soft and pulsing.

Silver-white and steady.

The mark had been barely visible before, just a faint circle etched into the tabletop, too faded to be functional, too gentle to draw power. But now it glowed as if something inside it had been waiting to wake.

She didn’t comment on it.

Didn’t acknowledge it at all.

Just took the seat across from him once more, folded her hands on the table, and watched as he lifted the cup to his lips and drank.

The taste was nothing he recognized. Not floral. Not bitter. Not sweet. It was like warmth itself, laced with something that lingered just behind the tongue, not unpleasant but impossible to name, and he could feel it move through him not like a spell, but like something older than spellwork—like a memory being reminded of itself, like breath being coaxed from stone.

She said nothing.

She only sat there, the faintest smile still touching her mouth, her fingers resting near the edge of the rune as if she could feel the energy through the wood.

And he didn’t ask what it meant.

Didn’t demand to know why the rune had responded to his acceptance, why the room now felt warmer, why the silence had deepened instead of broken.

Because he knew.

Not in language.

But in instinct.

He knew she had wanted him to say yes not because of the tea, not because of politeness or ritual, but because yes was a kind of opening, a kind of turning, and now something had turned.

Something that would not turn back.

And Luna Lovegood, sitting across from him with her eyes too wide and her smile too still, looked at him like someone who had just remembered the final step of a spell she began casting years ago.

Chapter Text

The letter arrived with the kind of bureaucratic cruelty that only the Ministry had perfected over decades of policy masquerading as reason, printed not on fresh parchment but on that soft, smudged kind they used for internal memoranda, the edges already curling as if the paper itself had tried to escape its contents before anyone had a chance to read them.

Theo recognized the handwriting on the envelope before he even opened it. The impatient scrawl belonged to a senior coordinator who had never liked him. Someone who had likely volunteered to assign him to the quietest corner of a cursed house out of spite or boredom or both. He didn’t need to read more than the first three lines before his jaw started to tighten.

The directive wasn’t a suggestion. It wasn’t a temporary placement. It didn’t even carry the cold indifference he usually preferred in bureaucratic orders. It was a command, barely dressed up as policy. Neat, clipped phrasing told him he was now expected to remain on-site with Miss Lovegood for an indeterminate amount of time. Not just guarding her from a distance, but living in the house with her. Cohabitating. Sharing a protective perimeter until the Ministry reassessed the threat level—or, more likely, until someone found a way to pass the responsibility off onto someone else.

He read the letter twice. Once standing, once seated. Not because he didn’t understand it, but because he didn’t trust the sensation creeping up the back of his neck. That low-bellied hum of inevitability. The quiet shift from assignment to something else. Something less structured. Something personal. This wasn’t about policy anymore. This was proximity used as pressure. This was closeness as a tactic.

The next day, just past noon, under a sky the color of unspoken threats and salt-heavy clouds, he apparated to the edge of the cliff path. He had more than just his wand and his coat. The house stood groaning in the distance, crooked against the horizon, and the sea bared its teeth at the rocks below. Theo paused in the overgrown garden, standing a moment longer than he meant to.

He adjusted the strap of the travel bag over his shoulder. At his feet, a small trunk vibrated faintly with protective enchantments. And in his left hand, held without ceremony as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, was a reinforced clear carrier. Inside, nestled on a bed of hay, sat a guinea pig.

The creature was almost offensively fluffy, an unapologetically plump little ball of indignantly perfect fur, its body shaped less like an animal and more like an exceptionally overstuffed pastry that had rolled itself in cinnamon bark and honeyed cream. It blinked up at him with the serene, unbothered gaze of a creature that clearly suspected the entire world existed to provide it with snacks and admiration. 

Artemis seemed to possess no understanding whatsoever of the storm-wrapped house it was about to enter, nor any real awareness of the man standing there who was already regretting this decision far more than he cared to admit. As he moved toward the door, boots crunching over the cracked stone path lined with twitching vines and half-muttering charms, he did not pause, did not hesitate, did not knock. He simply pushed the door open and stepped inside like he already belonged there, which, if he was honest, was a lie the house was very generously allowing him to tell for now.

Luna, who had been halfway through rearranging the knives above the hearth for reasons known only to herself and perhaps the fireplace, turned at the sound of the door and blinked once. It was not at the sight of his face that she reacted. She had already expected him. She had probably heard the change in the wind, probably counted the footsteps on the walk before he even reached the door. It was the animal in his hand that caught her attention, her expression flickering from calm to astonished in the space of a breath, then breaking into something that very nearly resembled delight.

"You brought a familiar," she said softly, her voice touched with something like awe, though it carried that same strange certainty she always seemed to possess, the kind of tone that made her words feel more like omens than questions. She stepped forward with an almost reverent curiosity, the kind one might show to a creature spun from the bones of dreams. "Does he speak in riddles or in rhymes?"

Theo did not answer right away. He set the carrier down on the table beside the stack of runes she had left drying in the sun, his movements deliberate, careful, as though some part of him was already second-guessing this decision. Then, with a low mutter that barely rose above the hum of the house around them, he said, "He is not a familiar. He is mine."

“So,” she said, voice light but woven with something silkier, like she was already playing the opening notes of a melody only she could hear, “you have a pet?”

He didn’t look up right away. He was kneeling near the base of the chair, adjusting the soft charms on the edge of the travel crate where the guinea pig had begun to fuss with a corner of straw, and his reply came low, gruff, almost distracted, but honest in the way only tired truths could be, “I like him.”

That made her smile. Not widely. Just enough to register. Just enough for her eyes to narrow with that soft, delighted mischief she never tried to hide.

“So you have a soul after all.”

Theo turned his head slowly toward her. Not with annoyance. Not even sharply. Just that same careful, measured movement he gave to strangers in alleys and ghosts in doorways. He was not hostile. But he was watching. Assessing. As if trying to determine what she might uncover if she kept speaking.

His mouth pressed into a thin line. Not quite displeasure, but close enough to carry its shape.

“Is there a reason for this conversation?” he asked.

His voice had settled back into its usual tone, cool and detached, smooth as stone pulled from deep water. “He’s my pet. Please don’t upset him.”

Luna didn’t flinch. She blinked once, slowly. The kind of blink cats give when deciding whether to tolerate you or leave the room. Then she took a step forward. Her gaze drifted to the carrier, where Artemis sat huddled in a nest of hay, blinking up at her with the expression of a creature who had seen too much and cared too little.

“Why would I do that?” she asked.

Her voice was soft. Almost innocent. As if she genuinely didn’t understand why someone might accuse her of unsettling things, even when chaos followed her into every room and curled up beneath the furniture like a housecat with teeth.

Theo didn’t answer right away.

He straightened. Brushed his palms against his trousers. His eyes remained fixed on the guinea pig for a long moment, as if trying to remember what had possessed him to bring the animal at all. As if the idea had made more sense before the house began whispering beneath the floorboards.

“He doesn’t like many things,” he said at last.

The words were quiet. Unassuming. But something inside them weighed more than they should have.

“And one of them is new people.”

Luna tilted her head slightly, a glimmer sparking in her eyes that was too bright to be pure sympathy and far too amused to be mistaken for anything gentle. Then she stepped forward, just enough to lean down and peer more closely into the crate, her hair falling like pale waterfall silk around her cheekbones as she crouched with that strange, eerie grace that always made her seem half untethered from the ground beneath her.

"Does he have a name?" she asked, her voice soft and lilting, delicate as moonlight against glass, but her mouth was already curving in a way that promised trouble.

Theo crossed his arms and felt his jaw twitch, a muscle tightening beneath his cheekbone. "Artemis," he said flatly.

For a beat she said nothing, her face a study in serenity, but then, with the solemn air of one conducting an ancient rite, she lifted her hand and gave the guinea pig a soft, ceremonial wave, fingers fluttering as if greeting some small deity whose favor one did not dare take for granted. The gesture was perfectly absurd and entirely intentional. Without another word, she straightened, turned, and began to drift toward the doorway, moving with that strange composure that made it seem as though even the house arranged itself to let her pass.

She almost made it out without looking back. Almost.

But at the threshold, she paused. Her head turned halfway, her pale hair sliding over one shoulder, and her gaze flicked sideways to him, sharp and precise, her mouth tugging into a smile that was far too pleased with itself.

"You do know Artemis is a girl, right?" she said, light as air.

And with that, she vanished down the corridor.

Theo froze. Truly froze. It was not the kind of freeze born of anger or disbelief or even indignation. It was the stillness of a man whose brain had just misfired in slow motion, locking itself in place while the words echoed mercilessly through his mind. He looked down at the carrier. The guinea pig blinked up at him, round and fluffy and radiating the serene confidence of a creature entirely unbothered by such mortal concerns as gender.

Theo rubbed a hand down his face, slow and deliberate.

"How was I supposed to know?" he muttered to the empty room, to the carrier, to the house that was no doubt already laughing behind the walls. "They said he was a male."

Artemis sneezed.

Theo sighed, the sound long and weary. Somewhere in the corridor, faint but unmistakable, Luna’s laugh rang once, bright and delighted, before the house swallowed it whole.

~

Theo began his job in the garden, though calling it that felt generous, considering the place more closely resembled a half-feral graveyard of broken hedgerows and creeping vines that curled toward him as if curious, twitching faintly at the edges of his boots like they’d never quite decided whether to strangle or shelter. 

The path that led to the southern rise had been swallowed almost entirely by moss and brittle lavender stalks, the scent sharp and heavy, and somewhere beneath the loose stones, he could feel the pull of ley threads misaligned by time, dragging magic in slow, reluctant circles that weakened the surrounding field like a wound left to fester.

It was late in the day. The cliffs groaned beneath the weight of the wind. Below, the sea hissed against black rock with the restless rhythm of an old god muttering beneath its breath. Behind him, the house stood still, though not entirely. It seemed to lean westward ever so slightly, its angles wrong in ways that could not be seen all at once but could be felt, subtle and unsettling beneath the skin. He stepped past the threshold of the old garden wall, letting his fingers brush the wards that had once been laid to hold this place steady, though nothing here had felt steady in a very long time.

He knelt near the base of the eastern boundary stone, set his satchel on a patch of cleared earth, and began.

His hands moved automatically at first, chalk in one palm, thread unwound with careful fingers, charm-hammer balanced in his grip, ward nails driven into the soft rot of the fence posts that had long since surrendered their fight against the salt air. The muttered words that slipped between his lips came in a language he had only ever spoken for this purpose, an old tongue etched into his memory through repetition and necessity, a language that did not ask the world to obey but reminded it of what it had once promised.

The earth was wet from last night’s rain. It clung to his knees. His palms smeared brown and green and salt when he pressed them flat against the mud to anchor the first rune deep. The magic didn’t hum, not right away. It resisted, sluggish and lazy, like something half-asleep that resented being touched. But he didn’t relent.

He never did.

Theo worked in silence for hours.

He moved clockwise around the perimeter, setting anchor stones in each cardinal corner, tracing lines of ash and powdered bone into the cracks between fence and cliff, whispering to the land itself until the wind began to turn in toward him instead of out. He marked sigils into the bark of the old hawthorn tree that leaned over the northern slope, and as he whispered the binding knot beneath its lowest branch, the tree shed a single leaf that landed on the nape of his neck like a benediction.

The farther he moved from the house, the deeper the magic changed.

Not darker. Not dangerous. Just older.

He could feel it through the soles of his boots, veins of magic that ran beneath the soil, cold and ancient, not malevolent but wild, the kind of raw earthbound energy that had no interest in being shaped. It did not push back. It simply waited, as though testing his intent before deciding whether to yield.

By the time he reached the western cliff’s edge, dusk had settled fully across the sea, turning the water into a sheet of black glass that stretched endlessly toward the bleeding sky. He paused there, just for a moment, hand braced on a jagged rock as he squinted into the dark, the wind curling around him like fingers tangled in his collar, the chill cutting through his coat in a way that made it feel less like weather and more like warning.

The final ward went into the soil beneath a twisted root where the fence had collapsed into a scatter of rusted nails and splintered wood. He drove a copper stake deep, chanted once, twice, three times until the air shifted, until the pulse of magic beneath the dirt flared hot and clean and awake.

He leaned back on his heels, mud caked up to his thighs, hands trembling faintly with the weight of so many overlapping spells humming in his blood, and for a moment, the world was so still it felt as if the sea had stopped breathing.

By the time he finished resetting the last of the wards, Theo’s body was humming with the kind of exhaustion that settled in bone rather than muscle, a deep, dragging weariness that came not from physical labor alone, but from the delicate, punishing precision of magic sustained over hours without pause, without food, without warmth, the kind of work that required more of him than he liked to admit even when no one was watching. 

The dirt caked to his hands had long since dried and cracked, flaking from his knuckles like dried blood, and the chill had soaked deep into the seams of his coat, curling cold fingers around his spine as he trudged back across the broken garden path, boots sinking slightly in the damp soil, each step heavier than the last. The house rose ahead, still listing slightly to the left, the windows flickering with low light, as though the place had watched his work and now waited in smug silence, and he did not bother muttering his arrival as he stepped through the door. The wards would recognize him. They always did. He had built them that way, his own name woven into the anchor spell, just enough to keep out everything else.

He did not expect comfort. He did not expect tea. He expected silence, maybe the faint sound of the wind moving through the floorboards, maybe the hiss of the hearth sighing in the other room. 

What he did not expect, what made his jaw tighten before he even fully crossed the threshold into the guest room, was her. Lovegood. Perched cross-legged in the center of his bed. His bed.

And not just perched like a trespasser or a momentary accident. No. She was settled. In his room. Completely and utterly at ease, as though the room had never been his to begin with, her pale hair draped over her shoulders in a loose, tangled braid that shimmered faintly in the low light, her fingertips stroking softly through the long fur of Artemis, who was currently sprawled across the pillow beside her like a willing disciple, and she was talking to the guinea pig in a low, murmuring tone that might have been lullaby or prophecy or something entirely between, her voice patient and sweet and utterly unbothered by the tension radiating from the doorway.

He stopped mid-step, mud dripping from the hem of his coat onto the wooden floor, and it took several long, taut breaths before he trusted his voice enough to use it.

“Do not touch him, Lovegood.”

She didn’t look up. Didn’t stop stroking the guinea pig. Only smiled faintly and replied, voice maddeningly soft, “Her.”

Theo’s eye twitched. He inhaled slowly through his nose.

“I specifically told you not to upset…” and he swallowed, ground his molars together, then finished with restrained venom, “…her.”

Luna didn’t seem the least bit remorseful. She merely tilted her head, continued petting the guinea pig, who seemed completely uninterested in the escalating drama, and said with the smooth confidence of someone who had never once questioned her own place in the world, “She was lonely. And I’m good company.”

He took a step closer. His fists clenched.

“According to who?” he asked, voice dangerously quiet, a threat coiled beneath each syllable, not because she frightened him, but because nothing about this house belonged to logic anymore, and he was too tired to pretend that it didn’t bother him.

She looked at him then. Really looked. And with that same maddening calm, she answered, “According to Artemis. She likes being talked to.”

Theo blinked.

He turned his face slightly toward the ceiling as though appealing to some long-suffering god, then muttered under his breath, “She cannot speak…whatever.” His fingers twitched at his side, not quite reaching for his wand, not quite pulling away from the doorframe. “Please leave her alone. And leave my room. Please.”

There was a pause.

Then Luna looked back down at Artemis with a final stroke of her fingers, rose slowly, smoothing her skirt with the lazy elegance of someone who had never once been in a hurry to obey, and as she reached the doorway, she stopped beside him, close enough that he could smell the faint trace of lavender oil and salt on her skin, close enough that the magic stitched into her hem brushed against his thigh like a soft warning.

She tilted her chin slightly, met his eyes, and said, with perfect serenity, “This is my house, Theodore.”

And then she walked past him.

Like she hadn’t just cracked something open with that single sentence and left it bleeding quietly behind her.

He stepped out of the shower with the kind of weariness that went beyond tired. It lived in the joints, in the spine, in the slow ache of muscles pulled too tight from crouching over wards and carving protection into salt-thick earth. Hours had passed like that. Bent low, breath held, sweat running between his shoulder blades. Now, even after the heat of the water, fatigue clung to him like mist. The kind of exhaustion that came from magic, not motion. The kind that settled into the marrow and stayed.

Steam curled around his ankles as he ran one hand through his damp hair. Water traced lazy paths down his chest and back, gathering at the hollow of his spine. He didn’t reach for the towel. Not right away. This was his room. His corner of the house. The only space that didn’t murmur when he closed the door. He had earned this moment, even if it wasn’t rest. Even if it was only silence.

So when he opened the bathroom door, the fog of the shower trailing behind him in slow, heavy waves, he didn’t expect to see her.

But of course she was there.

Lovegood.

In his room.

Again.

And not just passing through, not even pretending to be curious or lost. She was seated cross-legged on the floor beside the low table, talking to the guinea pig. Not absentmindedly. Not distractedly. But with the focused attentiveness of someone deep in conversation. Her head was tilted slightly. Her expression was calm. Artemis blinked up at her with his usual combination of confusion and long-suffering.

They looked like two witches at a séance. Ancient and strange. Sharing secrets over invisible tea.

Theo stopped mid-step.

Dripping. Naked. Cold now, despite the heat still clinging to his skin.

She looked up.

And for a moment, neither of them moved.

The silence didn’t feel charged. It didn’t feel dangerous. It just stretched, wide and surreal, until it pressed at the edges of his nerves. Until it became absurd. Until it became infuriating.

He stood there, water pooling at his feet, steam curling around him like breath, and all he could think was that this house was trying to break him in ways he hadn’t trained for.

Something had to be said.

“For fuck’s sake, Lovegood,” he ground out, eyes narrowed, voice rough and half-wrecked from how little sleep he’d gotten, “privacy.”

But she didn’t flinch. She didn’t apologize. She didn’t look away from him or blush or stammer or even act remotely phased by the fact that he was standing there, completely naked, water still dripping off his collarbones, arms flexed with the kind of tension that made most people stop and reconsider their next breath.

Instead, she tilted her head slightly, gave Artemis one last affectionate pat, and said, with that unbearable calm that bordered on holy detachment, “I’m not interested in your cock, Theodore.”

He blinked.

His entire body tensed from the sheer audacity of the statement, the dry, disinterested delivery of it, as though she were commenting on the weather.

And then she kept talking.

“Although,” she added, eyes flicking downward with an infuriating hint of curiosity, “you may be God’s favorite, judging by the size.”

Theo turned scarlet in under a second, every drop of heat in his body surging to his face like a hex gone wrong, and he reached for the towel so fast he nearly slipped on the tile, yanking it around his waist in a motion that was more instinct than grace, hands knotted in the fabric like it was the only anchor he had left to reality.

“Lovegood,” he snapped, breath sharp, eyes narrowed dangerously, “this is my room—”

She stood up slowly, gracefully, lifting something from the floor with both hands as she turned toward him, and the look she gave him wasn’t mocking, wasn’t angry, wasn’t even particularly interested in his flustered state—it was amused, the kind of quiet, infuriating amusement that said she knew exactly how to hold a knife without ever touching the blade.

“At my house, might I add,” she said coolly, as though his room were nothing more than a borrowed square of space she’d generously allowed him to occupy out of mild tolerance, and then she stepped closer, calm as moonlight, unbothered by his glare, her gaze flicking once more to the corner where Artemis sat untroubled on the pillow. “So if I decide to introduce Sol to Artemis,” she said, tone maddeningly serene, “it is my grace. Guinea pigs need company. So do you.”

And before he could summon a single word in reply, before his brain could untangle the furious embarrassment from the burn of half-swallowed insult and the fact that he was still dripping wet and half-hard from the shower and now holding a towel like it was a shield in a war he didn’t remember signing up for—she stepped forward, gently, reverently, and placed a second guinea pig in his hands.

Small. Golden. Fuzzy as sin.

Then she turned on her heel and swept out of the room, bare feet soundless on the wood floor, braid swinging low across her back like punctuation, and she didn’t say another word.

She didn’t need to.

The door clicked shut behind her.

Theo looked down at the second guinea pig, now nestled against his chest, blinking up at him like this was all perfectly normal.

“Fucking hell,” he muttered, towel barely hanging on, heart racing for entirely too many conflicting reasons, “what the fuck is a Sol.”

The guinea pig squeaked.

And Artemis, from her spot on the pillow, squeaked back.

~

One thing became perfectly, undeniably clear by the end of the first month, not through any single revelation or thunderclap moment of clarity, but through the slow, relentless accumulation of signs that built themselves into certainty like frost forming along a windowpane, inch by inch, until the view beyond was no longer visible. 

It was not something Theo would have admitted aloud, not even under pressure, not even in jest, and certainly not to her, but it was true in a way that could not be reasoned away, and he felt it with the same quiet surety as one feels gravity, or dread, or the weight of an emotion unnamed.

The house belonged to her.

The house bent toward her like light bends through glass, subtle and constant and absolute. It responded to her moods with a fidelity that was not conscious, not magical in the traditional sense, but alive. When she laughed, the floorboards held their creaks until after she passed. When she sang beneath her breath, those strange, off-rhythm tunes that felt like hymns for something older than gods, the air warmed, and the corners of the rooms softened, and the shadows tucked themselves politely into the edges of bookshelves.

And when she was pleased with him, the house responded in kind.

He hadn’t noticed it at first. He was too busy counting the ward lines, anchoring symbols in the earth, tracking the fragile perimeter between this realm and whatever dream-world bled through Luna’s presence like perfume. But eventually, it became impossible to ignore. The house was kind to him only when he was kind to her.

The tea would stay hot longer when he didn’t correct her tone. The doors would open more easily when he replied to her questions without scorn. The runes he inscribed along the perimeter would hum louder, stronger, more stable, on the days when he let her speak without interrupting, when he let her sit beside him in silence, when he accepted her small offerings without sarcasm or tension.

But the reverse was also true.

On the days he let frustration get the better of him, when his voice grew sharp and his hands closed too tightly around nothing at all, the house would turn, imperceptibly at first, then with more confidence. Doors would stick. The wind would find its way through cracks that hadn’t been there the night before. The lights would flicker when she left the room. His wards would take longer to settle. The floor outside his bedroom would creak endlessly all through the night, even when no one walked across it. Even Artemis would hide from him, nestling deep beneath her blanket and blinking at him with the cold judgment only an animal in love with her keeper could offer.

And Lovegood? She never acknowledged it.

Never pointed it out. Never smirked or gloated or offered a single verbal thread that might confirm what he already knew.

She simply went about her days with the quiet certainty of a woman who understood she had no need to enforce her reign—because the house, and everything inside it, would do that for her.

And Theo, for all his training, for all his control, for all the walls he had spent years learning to reinforce, found himself paying attention to her moods the way a soldier learns to read the sky before a storm. Not out of sentiment. Not out of affection. But survival.

Oh, and survival it was, because the woman he had been assigned to protect, live with, monitor, endure, was utterly, completely, almost religiously obsessed with animals, herbs, and books in quantities that defied logic and bordered on pathological. 

It was not just that she enjoyed those things. No, enjoyment was too gentle a word, too pedestrian. Lovegood was possessed by them, woven into the roots of them, a creature whose entire being revolved around feeding, collecting, cultivating, and speaking softly to things that did not speak back, except, somehow, to her. 

He could not pass through a single corridor without tripping over some half-woven herb bundle meant to ward off intrusive thoughts or hearing the faint sound of her reading aloud to plants as though they required narrative arcs. The windowsills were a chaos of sprigs and leaves and strange fungal colonies she swore were sentient. He found pressed wildflowers in the pockets of his coat and unidentified feathers stuck in the soap dish. And do not even get him started on the goddamn guinea pigs.

He hadn’t had a peaceful afternoon in weeks. Not one. Not a single fucking moment of undisturbed quiet. He would settle into the far corner of the guest room with his files and his maps and the delicate runework he had to maintain by hand, a steaming cup of tea beside him that he had just poured, and then—without fail—the door would creak open with no knock, no announcement, no shame, and Lovegood would glide in like a ghost with an agenda, holding Sol in one hand like an offering and Artemis already tucked into the crook of her other arm, eyes shining with that particular kind of blissful disregard for his boundaries as she announced, without looking at him, that she was just bringing them together so they could “bond properly” and “become best friends” because “social bonding is critical to guinea pig health, Theodore, do try to keep up.”

She said this every time. And every time he bit his tongue harder than necessary.

Until today.

Today, he didn’t hold back.

Today, as she placed both guinea pigs gently onto the foot of the bed he had just finished making, smoothing the blanket beneath their tiny feet with a flourish that was far too ceremonial for rodents and sat beside them without so much as glancing in his direction, the silence between them stretching into something nearly theatrical in its defiance, he finally glanced up from his work with the slow, deliberate irritation of a man pushed an inch past his patience, leaned back in his chair like a prince entertaining a particularly disruptive subject, and said, voice low and dry and soaked in tired smugness that he didn’t bother to disguise, “Lovegood, if you want to spend time with me, you can just say that.”

She didn’t blink. Didn’t turn her head. Didn’t even stop the lazy, rhythmic stroke of her fingers behind Artemis’s ear, as if the comment had been nothing more than ambient sound, as if his presence didn’t register on the scale of relevance, and her voice, when it came, was so calm and so level that it sliced clean through his ego without any effort at all, “Why would I desire someone’s company who doesn’t want mine?”

The words didn’t sting at first. Not exactly. They landed soft, like mist, but crept in like cold, and it wasn’t until a full breath later that he realized they had settled somewhere under his ribs, heavy and sharp and completely accurate. He shifted in his seat, stiffening without meaning to, recovering with a scoff, his hand flitting in an exaggerated gesture toward the scattered Ministry documents and rune diagrams on his lap like they were some kind of shield, “I’m working.”

She turned to him then. Finally. But her expression didn’t carry heat or malice. Her voice remained light, infuriatingly light, “You can leave, you know, right? Or, if you’d rather see your partner, he can come over.”

He froze. Fully. His breath stalled. His grip tightened on the edge of the parchment in his hand until it crinkled. And for a moment, the world narrowed to the sound of his pulse kicking hard against the inside of his ears like it wanted to claw its way out. Partner. The word echoed with venom it didn’t deserve, and he didn’t know if she had said it to provoke him or if it was just another one of her eerie guesses, but it struck like a spell misfired at close range.

“I do not have a partner,” he said, carefully, slowly, with each syllable dragged through grit and fire. “I don’t have a girlfriend. I don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t have anyone. I’m here to work. I cannot leave you.”

She blinked once. Tipped her head just slightly to the right, as though listening to something only she could hear, and then nodded with a serenity so intact it bordered on supernatural. Her lips lifted into a faint, composed smile that was neither kind nor cruel, simply present, and somehow that made it worse.

“Very well,” she murmured.

Then, without flourish, without drama, she leaned down, kissed Sol gently on the top of the head like a tiny prince in need of nightly reassurance, scooped both guinea pigs into her arms with the kind of softness that made his chest hurt for reasons he did not understand and hated trying to, and walked out of the room with the unbothered grace of someone who knew the entire house would always open for her. 

The door shut behind her with a soft click, the kind of sound that sounded too much like finality, and Theo sat there staring at the spot she had just vacated, surrounded by parchment and silence and the distant thud of his own humiliation still ringing in the back of his throat.

The silence returned.

But it wasn’t peace.

It was the kind of silence that followed after a small earthquake, where everything might look fine but nothing would ever sit quite the same again.

He sat there, blinking at the now-empty spot where the guinea pigs had been, and tried to remember how to breathe.

This woman was absolutely mental. Completely and profoundly untethered from normality. She needed constant attention, constant stimulation, constant interaction, and he had no interest in providing any of it—except, maddeningly, she always managed to pull it from him anyway, like gravity, like heat, like something he never agreed to.

And it was fucking annoying.

~

By the fifth week, Theo had memorized the rhythm of the house at night.

It was not difficult, at least not at first. The house moved on a loop, breathing in long corridors and sighing into stairwells, its bones creaking predictably when the wind changed or when a window refused to latch properly. There were patterns, subtle and strange, but consistent enough to follow: a floorboard in the west hall that groaned not under weight but under silence, a chandelier that flickered only when passed beneath too quickly, a draft in the library that always came from the third shelf behind the alchemy books, as though the pages themselves exhaled when left alone too long.

Theo patrolled each night not because he did not trust the wards, he had laid them himself, each thread of protection woven with bone magic and precision, but because the house did not care about his work. It responded only to her, and when she slept, or claimed to, he moved through its belly like a stranger in a cathedral, alert, still, half-expecting it to shift around him like a dream.

The portraits watched him. Not all of them blinked, not all of them spoke, but some whispered too quietly to hear, lips moving behind glass, and some simply followed his movement with narrowed eyes, expressions sour or smirking or faintly amused, as though they knew why he kept walking the same halls even after the wards were settled. He ignored them. Mostly.

He carried no lantern. He didn’t need one. The house glowed in odd places, pools of soft light blooming at the base of the stairs or beneath doorframes, casting his shadow ahead of him like a warning. He moved silently, boots muted by old charms and layered rugs, wand tucked into his palm more out of habit than fear.

He had just passed the second archway leading into the drawing room, the space chilled and quiet in that particular way reserved for rooms too old and too filled with memory to ever feel entirely empty, its fireplace long since gone cold, the embers dulled to a memory, and the enchanted painting above the hearth half-lost in a dream, snoring softly beneath its crooked frame, when the sound reached him. It was not loud. Not deliberate. It came like breath against a windowpane or the memory of a footfall long after the walker had gone, soft and barely there, so faint it might have been imagined had he not already learned the difference between what was real and what the house made real.

He heard the press of bare feet, the delicate creak of old wood shifting under no visible weight, and a sigh so light it could have been the house itself settling deeper into its bones, and he didn’t turn. Not right away. Not because he didn’t care, but because he already knew who it was. He didn’t need to look. Because she never tried to hide.

She followed him the way she always did, like something elemental, like mist rolling in at dawn or the tide reaching for the edge of the shore, her movements unhurried, her posture unbothered, her pace drifting just slow enough to seem incidental, and yet never quite far enough to be unintentional. 

She didn’t speak. She never did when she did this. There were no greetings, no explanations, no declarations of presence. Just the soft repetition of footfalls behind his own, a steady echo half a beat too late to be mistaken for coincidence, trailing him through the corridor at a distance too far to invite conversation and too close to be dismissed.

Her steps made no sound, and yet he heard her. Or perhaps it wasn’t his ears at all. Perhaps it was the house, ever-watchful, ever-whispering, tilting itself toward him in quiet conspiracy and murmuring along the walls that pulsed with old knowing, she’s here, she’s watching, as if the house could feel her gaze and decided, as always, to share it with him.

He walked a little faster now, with the quiet frustration of a man who knew he would be followed regardless, and she, without effort or even visible thought, matched his pace in that way she always did, unhurried yet perfectly in step, like her body had memorized the rhythm of his stride long before he’d noticed.

He came to a stop near the window that faced the sea, the old glass warped with time and memory, waves of imperfection catching the crooked light from the moon, which sat just above the cliff like an eye half-lidded in judgment or sleep, and the corners of the window were furred with salt, trapped there like sorrow, crusted like old tears that no one had bothered to wipe away, and he stood there, staring at the sky, at the edge of everything, longer than he needed to, not because he was lost in thought, but because standing still gave him a reason not to face her just yet, and his breath stayed even, his pulse annoyingly calm despite the way tension prickled just beneath his skin.

"Is there a reason you’re following me?" he asked eventually, the words low and restrained, a blade dulled only by exhaustion, and still sharp enough to cut, voice clipped and even, as if each syllable had been measured carefully before being released.

Behind him, there was a pause that stretched a second too long, enough for the air to thicken, to shift, the house tilting just slightly toward the moment, as if holding its breath for the answer.

"I wasn’t following," she said at last, and her voice was light, not playful, not teasing, but soft in that bone-deep way that settled between the ribs and hummed there like a lullaby, like something ancient and familiar murmured in the dark before sleep, and there was no flippancy in it, only the strange, steady calm she always carried like a second skin. "I was walking."

He turned then, slow, precise, as though unwilling to give her the satisfaction of anything so quick as a reaction, and she was already looking at him, eyes wide in the moonlight, unblinking in that way that always made his breath catch for reasons he would never admit, and her hair was loose, flowing in soft waves over her shoulders, catching the silver of the night like it belonged there, a tangle of light and shadow that framed her face like something carved from memory, and her nightdress was simple and thin and colored like dust clinging to a dying star, the hem whispering against the floor as if she moved without weight, and her arms were bare, always bare, the pale skin marked by faint ink that pulsed gently in the glow, runes that seemed half-awake, half-listening.

"Walking behind me," he said, quieter now, but still with that edge, the weight of correction folded neatly into the words.

She stepped closer, slow and thoughtful, hands tucked behind her back with the serene posture of someone who had never once been hurried in her life, her expression unreadable, her tone effortless. "You patrol like the house is a cage."

"It’s my job to keep it safe," he replied, eyes not quite meeting hers, like safety was something he could claim without choking on the taste of it.

She smiled then, but it wasn’t warmth or mockery. It was something gentler, something older, as though she were humoring him, as though the question she asked next was only half for him. "Safe from what?"

And he didn’t answer, not because he refused, but because the answer didn’t exist, or if it did, it was buried too deep to touch, and whatever words might have risen in his throat dissolved there, swallowed by the house and the night and the cold, watching moon.

The house wasn’t dangerous. Not in the way most places were. It was just… full. Thick with things that didn’t like to be seen, and things that liked to be seen too much.

And she, as always, moved through the space not as a guest or an intruder or even a companion, but as someone whose breath the walls had memorized, whose silence was stitched into the seams of the floorboards, whose presence bent the very architecture toward ease and warmth and belonging, as if the air itself parted slightly when she walked so as not to impede her passage, as if her existence belonged more to the bones of the house than to the world of the living that fluttered nervously beyond its edges. 

She took another step forward, slow and deliberate, her bare feet soundless on the cold wood, each movement so quiet it might have been imagined had he not already begun to measure his awareness by the pulse of her nearness.

"I like the way you move through it," and her words lingered for a breath too long before continuing, "like you expect it to hurt you."

He didn’t meet her eyes, didn’t soften his stance or temper the edge in his tone, only muttered under his breath, jaw held tight with resistance he could no longer properly name, "I don’t expect anything."

Her response came quieter, but not gentler, and it was the gentleness itself that made it cruel, because she said, "Liar," with a kind of patience that turned his bones to stone.

The quiet between them didn’t bristle, didn’t sting, didn’t explode into the kind of shouting match he was better trained to handle. Instead, it settled around them like snowfall, full of breath and softness and the ache of something unspoken, something that swelled instead of broke. He should have told her to return to her room, should have asserted again that he didn’t need anyone watching him patrol hallways that bent toward her like supplicants, should have reminded her that he liked his space quiet and empty, untouched by the scent of salt and lavender that followed her like a second skin, but his tongue stayed heavy behind his teeth.

Because she was already turning, already stepping away from him and gliding further into the corridor, her pale silhouette catching the dim light like a memory on the edge of fading, no longer following him but leading, and the house, unrepentant, treacherous, always hers, responded to her movement the way trees respond to wind. The sconces along the stairwell bloomed to life one after the other in slow, obedient sequence, each flame warm and gold and beckoning, as if the house itself recognized her as sovereign and bowed in silent devotion.

Theo watched her, silent and still, his thoughts as knotted as the string around his wrist, then turned and kept walking, not because he had anywhere left to go, but because forward motion was the only answer he had left to give the house that no longer listened to him, and the woman who never had to try to be heard.

Because if he allowed the silence to fill the space between them, if he let it speak for him in place of words he refused to say, he was no longer certain what it would reveal. He did not trust what it might pull from beneath his ribs and pour out into the dark.

~

He woke to the sound of whispering. It was so soft at first that it barely rose above the beat of his pulse or the fading edge of the dream he had just escaped. It was more breath than voice, more thought than sound, curling at the edges of awareness like the chill of an open window in a room that should have been closed.

It was not a voice in any ordinary sense, not the kind of sound people meant when they said they heard someone. It was deeper than that, older, a presence made of breath and stillness and memory, brushing lightly against the inside of his mind like an idea that did not belong to him.

There were no creaking floorboards. No whisper of wind beneath the door. No shift of weight or disturbed magic to explain it. Yet it was close. Too close. As if the house had chosen not to speak through its walls or windows, but through him. As if it had woven its words through his thoughts with an aching, reverent intimacy that turned the air in his lungs to ice.

She’s hurting.

Those two words, no louder than a breath caught on a memory, struck him harder than a scream, cold and unyielding and impossible to ignore. He shot upright, the motion violent and half-conscious, his body reacting faster than thought, breath caught somewhere between ribs and throat, his pulse hammering with the urgency of something primal and deeply known. He spun toward the sound even though it had not come from any direction he could name, wand already in his hand before his feet touched the floor, every muscle coiled tight, every instinct drawn sharp with the kind of focus born not from logic but from the deep, unspoken recognition that something was wrong, deeply wrong, and the wrongness was hers.

But there was no one in the room. No attacker, no specter, no trick of light or illusion of sound. The corners were still shadows. The paintings were still asleep. The night pressed quietly at the window like it always did, heavy and damp with mist, and for three full seconds he stood perfectly still, chest heaving, wand raised, until understanding settled like a cold coin dropped into the center of his spine.

The house had spoken to him.

Not through Lovegood’s voice. Not through the ambient murmurs of ancient enchantment laced into its walls. But directly. Intimately. Personally. It had reached inside him and woken him, and that realization bloomed with a kind of terrible finality.

He was moving before the next thought fully formed, feet bare, breath still uneven, limbs caught somewhere between control and urgency, the wards flickering faintly beneath his steps as he passed over each rune-etched plank of the corridor, crossing through the seam of the house that separated his room from hers. 

The air changed the moment he crossed the invisible boundary into her side of the home. It thickened. Dipped. Slowed. As though the magic here breathed differently, older and more fragile, like a bruise that hadn’t quite healed. He could feel the presence of the house still watching, still aware, and as he approached her door, the hinges offered no resistance, swinging open with the eerie smoothness of something that had already expected him to come.

She was there. Curled tightly on her side, body folded in on itself, back to the room, knees drawn in and arms wrapped beneath her chest like she was protecting something precious or hiding something broken. Her silver hair fanned out over the pillow in a tangle of moonlight and motionlessness, and there was no candlelight, no illumination but the dim, watery glow of the moon through the fogged glass of her window. It painted her in shades of silence, in layers of blue and silver and something so vulnerable he nearly forgot to breathe.

He could feel the pain before she spoke. Not a sharp pain. Not a scream. Something gentler, sadder. The ache that lives in the breath of someone who has long since grown used to hurting quietly. The kind of pain that doesn't demand attention, but waits, folded neatly into the corners of the body, into the creases of a night like this, so quiet it became sacred.

“What’s wrong?” he asked as he stepped into the room, his voice lower than it should have been, barely audible over the sound of the house itself breathing around them. “What happened?”

She didn’t lift her head. Didn’t look at him. Only pressed her face deeper into the cradle of her elbow and murmured with a softness that tried to dismiss but could not quite hide, “I’m okay, Theodore.”

But she wasn’t. And he knew it. Because the house had told him. And he had listened.

The lie was transparent, too soft to stand on its own, and he didn’t hesitate. He knelt beside the bed and slid his arms beneath her in a single, fluid motion, lifting her as though she weighed nothing at all, and when her body folded into him without resistance, without protest, he felt the shape of her pain pressed beneath her skin like a storm drawn out over hours. He held her tighter without meaning to.

She made no sound as he carried her through the corridor, one arm hooked beneath her knees, the other wrapped firmly around her shoulders, her breath quiet against the hollow of his throat, and the house responded to each step he took, lights brightening slightly as they passed, temperature warming degree by degree until the air no longer stung. He moved into the kitchen without ceremony, setting her down gently on the long bench near the hearth, the fire leaping higher the moment she settled beside it.

“I’m making tea,” he said without waiting for her permission, his voice still carved from frost, but his movements precise and practiced as he moved through her kitchen like someone who didn’t want to belong to it but had learned its map by heart. 

He was already pulling down the ceramic jars she kept tucked behind the mismatched mugs, already reaching for the small vial tucked like an afterthought into the farthest corner of the highest shelf. The vial was dark, amber-glassed, filled with a blend of pain relief potion she’d brewed herself weeks ago and then promptly forgotten. Of course he’d noticed. Of course he remembered.

“I’m also giving you something for the cramps,” he added, his tone clipped and dry, but not unkind, the way he always sounded when he was trying very hard not to be gentle.

“I’m fine, Theodore,” she said again, the words soft but stretched too thin to stand.

He didn’t answer her right away. Didn’t turn. He just stood at the counter with his back to her, pouring boiling water into the teapot with a focus that looked like silence but felt like worry. “Well,” he said eventually, his voice quieter now, less brittle, almost conversational. “The house told me you were hurting.”

That made her pause.

He felt it before he heard it—the stillness that settled behind him like held breath, too quiet to ignore, too loud to be mistaken for anything but surprise. And when he glanced over his shoulder, just briefly, just enough to check without making it obvious, she was already watching him with those wide, moonlit eyes, her expression unreadable beneath the blanket he hadn’t seen the house lay over her.

“It happens every month,” she said after a moment, barely louder than a breath, the confession pulled from somewhere raw but familiar. “And it’s—”

“I know how cycles work, Lovegood,” he cut in, not cruelly, not mockingly, but with the kind of dry reassurance that tried not to sound like concern. He turned back to the teapot, checking the steep like he’d done it a thousand times, and maybe he had, in his head. “And I know I’m supposed to be understanding. Attentive. Gentle. Gently relieving your cramps. That’s what I’m doing. You’re awfully pale.”

She didn’t laugh, not even a smirk, but her resistance quieted. Her silence softened. She didn’t reach for a rebuttal this time.

“It will pass,” she said quietly, not with finality, but with that same weary distance people used when they meant to say this is how it is, not this is what I want.

He walked to her without hesitation, the mug in his hand warm and fragrant, steam curling up in gentle spirals that seemed to glow against the dim light of her room. The herbs had steeped perfectly. He could smell the ghost of wormwood and marigold, the gentle edge of white willow bark, and the faintest hint of mint—fresh and wild and soft, the exact kind she once told him made her feel like her mother was nearby. He hadn’t forgotten. Not one word. Not one flavor. Not one detail she gave away like it was nothing.

“This will help,” he said as he approached, and this time there was no edge in his voice, no scoff folded into his tone, only something quiet and stubborn and real.

He held the mug out to her with one hand, and when she took it, she didn’t look at him, but she didn’t resist either. Her fingers curled around the porcelain like she trusted it. Like she trusted him. Or maybe just the tea. But it was enough. And he stayed standing there beside her, not hovering, not pacing, just standing, arms crossed lightly as if to keep himself in place, watching her sip the first slow mouthful, the steam trailing across her cheek like breath. And for just a moment, everything in the room slowed. Quieted. Held its shape.

She didn’t thank him. She didn’t need to.

And when she rose a few minutes later to return to her room, pale and slow and wrapped in silence, she found her bedding already changed, the sheets warmed with a charm he hadn’t taught the house, the pillows fluffed, the scent of crushed lavender on the air. The temperature had risen by three degrees. The runes above her headboard glowed softly in the darkness.

She didn’t say anything.

He didn’t mean to stay in the hallway.

He didn’t intend to linger outside her room, not like a ghost, not like a man too affected by something he should have already pushed aside. He told himself he was just waiting. Just making sure the potion took effect. Just listening for any sound that might signal pain or fever or something worse the house couldn’t fix. He told himself it was duty, the kind that came with his assignment, the kind that made sense. And maybe part of him still believed that. Maybe a smaller, quieter part already knew it wasn’t the whole truth.

The door was cracked, just enough for the firelight to spill out in a faint golden line across the hall. The soft scent of the tea still lingered on the air—mint, lavender, wormwood. He stared at the floor where the light fell. His heart was quieter now. Slower. Not calm, not really. Just waiting.

And then he heard her.

Not loud.

Not even certain she meant it to be heard.

A breath. A whisper. A thread of sound that wove itself through the doorway and caught on the air like silk caught in thorns.

“Thank you.”

He didn’t move. Didn’t breathe for a moment. The words settled into him with a strange finality, soft and heavy, as though they’d been meant for something larger than just the moment. She hadn’t said it for effect. She hadn’t said it to be acknowledged. She had said it because she meant it. And for reasons he didn’t want to examine, it hit harder than anything she’d said to him in weeks.

He stood there, rooted, eyes on the narrow sliver of light, and behind it, the house responded.

The runes in the hallway pulsed once. A breath moved through the walls. The floor beneath his feet seemed to settle, as if pleased. As if she had done something right, and now he was being rewarded for hearing it.

He swallowed hard.

The instinct to walk away was sharp and immediate. He had always been good at retreating before things grew too close, too complicated, too real. But something in him stayed.

Because the house had spoken to him earlier.

Because she had taken the tea.

Because the way she had looked at him—pale and pain-drenched and open in a way that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with trust—had cracked something in him that had never quite been whole in the first place.

He leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, and let himself listen.

Not for danger.

Not for noise.

But for her.

And for the first time since he arrived, he realized, truly realized, that she might not be the only one who belonged to this house.

Chapter Text

The beach below the cliffs smelled sharp, the air damp and heavy with salt. Morning mist clung low, curling around their ankles as they made their slow way across the uneven stones. The first light hadn’t yet broken the horizon, and the whole world felt pale and silver, like it hadn’t decided if it was awake.

Theo kept a few steps behind Luna, boots slipping now and then on patches of slick moss, but she moved easily, barefoot and graceful, as if she belonged to the tide itself. Her hair was wild, her dress loose and catching in the wind, and she hummed under her breath—a soft, wandering sound that didn’t seem to belong to any song he recognized.

“This really couldn’t wait until the sun was up?” he asked eventually, his breath coming out in a visible puff.

Luna glanced back, eyes bright but unreadable. “The salt is better before sunrise,” she said. “It remembers the moon better than it remembers us.”

Theo raised an eyebrow. “So the salt has… feelings?”

She gave a small shrug. “Most things do.”

It wasn’t worth arguing. It never was, with her. He simply kept following, his boots crunching against the damp rocks while Luna moved with the sort of focus that made him feel like an intruder just for being there.

When she bent over a shallow tidepool, fingers skimming just above the water’s surface, he took a moment to study her from behind. She touched everything gently, reverently, as if greeting old friends. The tide lapped at her ankles, froth clinging to her skin like it didn’t want to let her go.

He shoved his hands into his coat pockets, exhaling hard through his nose. “You could have at least warned me that the seafoam is apparently in love with you,” he muttered.

Luna smiled without turning. “Jealous?”

He huffed. “Of the tide? Maybe.”

A few more minutes passed in quiet. She crouched low, gathering salt that had formed in pale, crusted veins along the jagged rocks. Every time she collected some into a small glass vial, she paused and whispered something low and quiet, as if blessing it—or bargaining.

Theo didn’t ask what she was saying. He didn’t really want to know. But the longer they stayed, the heavier the air felt. Not cold exactly, but dense. Close.

When Luna stumbled near a tidepool, her foot slipping on an unseen ridge, he reacted before thinking. His hand shot out, catching her elbow firmly, steadying her before she could fall.

She turned toward him, close enough that her hair brushed against his cheek, her expression soft but strange. “You always catch me,” she murmured.

Theo held her gaze a little longer than was necessary. “Someone has to,” he said quietly.

Then she smiled again, that maddening, knowing smile of hers, and moved away as if nothing had happened, crouching once more over another patch of salt.

But something had shifted. He felt it as he walked a little slower, trailing her more deliberately now. The mist was thickening, curling tightly around their legs, but moving wrong. It wasn’t drifting. It was curling. Twisting.

Theo stopped at the edge of a narrow outcrop, narrowing his eyes at the horizon. The sea and sky blurred together, all gray and silver and uncertain. And in that uncertainty, he heard it—a sound that wasn’t wind or wave, but something lower, something older. It wrapped around his ribs, cold and soft.

He tensed, hand brushing the hilt of his wand.

Without turning, without looking up from where she was kneeling, Luna spoke, her voice soft, calm, and terribly certain.

“Not everything that watches means harm.”

Her palm lifted from the sand, fingers pale in the half-light, grains of salt clinging to her skin like frost.

She didn’t say more. She didn’t look back.

Theo stayed where he was, his muscles tight, his pulse loud in his ears.

The mist pressed closer.

~

Her library felt more like a hidden hollow than a room, round and quiet, tucked at the very back of the house where even the walls seemed to breathe slower. The air inside was thick with the scent of paper and old wax, with something herbal underneath, soft but persistent. It didn’t feel lifeless or still. It felt like stepping inside something that was awake and watching, though it didn’t speak.

Books didn’t wait politely on their shelves here. They drifted through the air with a lazy grace, pages fluttering like birds preening themselves. The scrolls, tied up in threads as fine as hair, rearranged themselves on the high shelves whenever Theo wasn’t looking, as though the library itself had ideas about how things should be kept. Along one wall, maps were layered almost carelessly, pinned with gold studs into the wood, their ink lines shifting when he got too close. Sometimes he thought he heard them murmur — little warnings or names of forgotten places.

He had come here for a reason. His notes were tucked under his arm, his expression set, his thoughts sharp. There were anomalies in the outer wards, and he intended to trace them properly, methodically. But before he could even sit down, Luna appeared at his side. Barefoot, quiet as breath, holding two mismatched mugs that steamed in the dim light. The smell of mint and sea salt drifted from them as she held one out to him, fingers brushing his just enough to make it feel deliberate.

“Tea?” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

He took the mug without a word, though his brow furrowed slightly as he watched her settle next to him without a care for his papers, without hesitation or apology. She sat as if this was her usual spot, folding herself down easily, hair still damp from the sea, smelling faintly of rosemary and salt air. One knee bumped lightly into his leg, but she didn’t seem to notice, or if she did, she didn’t care.

The table between them served as a workbench and altar, and apparently also as her preferred tea spot. She didn’t glance at the documents he had spread there. Her fingers curled around her mug, shoulders relaxed, entirely at home. It felt less like she had joined him, and more like he had stumbled into a rhythm she had already been living.

Luna folded her legs beneath her with practiced ease, sinking into the cushion of the floor as if it had been shaped for her alone. Her knee brushed lightly against his without the slightest sign of awareness or concern. The scent of salt and rosemary clung to her damp hair, loose strands catching along the back of her neck as she bent forward to sip from her tea.

The room seemed to breathe around them, scrolls gently shifting their places in midair, candles flickering higher whenever attention drifted their way. They sat in a silence that felt thick but not uncomfortable, dense with unspoken things, the air almost expectant. Minutes passed, maybe longer — it was hard to tell in this strange, timeless space.

Then, wordlessly, Luna rose. She moved with that same fluid grace as before, crossing to a shelf that Theo was almost certain hadn’t existed a moment ago. Her fingers trailed across the worn spines of the books as if they recognized her touch. She paused, her hand resting on a slim, black volume bound in cracked leather and stitched at the edges with shimmering silver thread.

When she returned, she laid the book down between them, careful but casual, as though it were an old friend she was introducing. Theo felt a strange prickle crawl along his spine.

Without hesitation, Luna flipped through its pages, scanning as if she knew exactly where she was going. She stopped suddenly, her fingers coming to rest on a delicate diagram drawn in ink that shimmered faintly despite the book’s age.

“This,” she murmured, her voice soft, distant, like she was speaking through water, “I saw it once. When I was dead.”

Theo froze. For a beat, he couldn’t tell if he’d misheard her. “You were dead?” he asked, slowly turning to face her.

She nodded, her gaze still fixed on the diagram as if it might speak back if she stayed quiet long enough. “Briefly. It didn’t stick.”

Her casual tone made the words hit differently, and he felt the air shift between them. His instinct was to push, to ask questions until he had an answer that made sense — but instead, he reached out, fingertips brushing the edge of the strange inked sigil. The parchment warmed beneath his hand, not burning, but gentle, like breath fogging against skin.

“What kind of dead are we talking about here, Lovegood?” His voice was low, careful now.

She finally turned to look at him, her expression calm but unreadable, her mouth curling into something that was almost but not quite a smile. “The kind where everything stops,” she said quietly. “The kind where this house cried for three days. The kind where I saw something smiling back at me from beyond the veil.”

Theo swallowed, throat suddenly dry. “That supposed to reassure me?”

“No,” she said simply. “But it wasn’t cruel. And that matters.”

His gaze drifted back to the diagram, watching as it seemed to pulse faintly beneath his fingers, as if reacting to her words. “So this... this came back with you?” he asked.

Luna shook her head, finally pulling her gaze from the page to meet his. “I remembered it,” she said. “It was written on the walls. Not like this, though. Messier. Alive. I wrote it down the next day. The book found me later.”

He let out a slow breath, finally lifting his hand from the page, though the warmth lingered on his skin. “You keep things like this just sitting here? In your personal collection? Casual death-magic?”

She tilted her head slightly, eyes clear and steady. “It’s not death-magic,” she said softly. “It’s what comes between. Like a bridge. Like breath after a scream.”

Theo didn’t press further. The words scraped against something inside him, but before he could decide what to say, the house itself seemed to shift around them. The walls exhaled gently. The floor beneath them pulsed, slow and steady, as if something large and sleeping had just turned in its bed. The pressure in the air changed, warm and oddly comforting, as though the house itself agreed with her.

A subtle shiver ran along the edge of Theo’s jaw, and for one disorienting breath, he felt like he didn’t quite belong in his own skin. The library felt too alive, the air too close, the sigil on the page pulsing gently beneath his gaze.

“You’re scaring me, to be honest,” he muttered at last, keeping his eyes on the glowing ink. His voice dipped low, softer than before, as if raising it might wake something neither of them could control. “You were strange at school... but this? This is worse.”

Luna turned her head toward him with slow deliberation, her expression impossible to read, a faint catch of light glinting in her eyes that made them look almost silver. “Thank you,” she said calmly.

He blinked once. “That wasn’t meant as a compliment.”

She dipped her chin in a small, almost prim nod, as if accepting a perfectly wrapped present. “I know.”

Theo let out a long breath, annoyance creeping into his chest without a clear reason, his gaze returning to the diagram that continued to pulse softly between them. “You’re impossible.”

“You’re welcome to stay in your room if you’d prefer peace,” Luna replied lightly. “I won’t stop you. The walls might, but I won’t.”

That made him finally turn his head to look at her properly. Frustration tightened behind his eyes. “I’m not here for peace, Lovegood. I’m here to protect you.”

The silence that followed felt sharp, immediate, intimate in a way that made the air between them hum. She tilted her head just a little, her gaze softening around the edges like a curtain slowly pulling back.

“I see,” she said at last, her voice low and steady. “Then, unfortunately for you, you’ll need to listen to me.”

Theo exhaled sharply through his nose, a sound caught somewhere between breath and bitter amusement. “Unfortunately.”

Her lips curved slightly, a smile barely there, and the page resting between them seemed to pulse again, slow and deliberate.

Somewhere beneath their feet, the house itself felt like it was listening too.

~

It began with a low creak, not sharp or sudden but long and aching, like the groan of something ancient shifting after being still for far too long. The sound stretched out just as Theo passed beneath the archway leading from the dining room into the deeper corridors. He froze mid-step, fingers twitching toward his wand but not quite drawing it. It wasn’t just the sound of an old house settling. No. This felt deliberate, like something brushing the edge of the world just enough to leave a ripple behind.

By the time he reached the hall that led to her bedroom, the air itself had changed. The walls seemed to hum, quiet but insistent, as if the stone was remembering something it had tried to forget.

Luna was already there. She stood perfectly still in the low light of the sconces, directly in front of an old oval mirror framed in black iron and wood, one that Theo remembered from the family records — it had belonged to her mother. She didn’t turn as he entered. She didn’t speak.

Her gaze was fixed on the glass as if whatever she was seeing wasn’t her reflection at all, as if something deeper lived in the silver backing. The air was colder here, the floor beneath his boots pulsing once in a way that felt too intentional to ignore.

“You shouldn’t provoke the house,” Theo said quietly. His voice carried more than he meant it to, soft but steady, and the stone walls caught it, letting it echo back to him like they were waiting for more.

Luna didn’t react, didn’t so much as blink. Her arms hung loosely at her sides, fingers relaxed, her spine lit in a soft line by candlelight. Finally, she spoke, and her voice was quiet but clear. “I didn’t provoke anything,” she said simply. “You did.”

His brow furrowed as he took a careful step forward. “By doing what, exactly?”

That was when she turned, slowly, gracefully, like the sea pulling itself back onto shore. Her eyes met his easily, without hesitation, and when she spoke again her voice was calm, steady, and strange in its certainty. “By thinking too loudly.”

And as if summoned by the very sound of her words, the mirror cracked.

Just once.

A single, clean fracture split the glass straight down the middle. The sound was almost too soft to hear, but it felt final in a way that made Theo’s breath catch.

Behind him, the sconces flickered, dimmed, then flared again, their glow uneven and sharp, like a heartbeat under strain.

The crack didn’t spread. It simply stayed there, cutting the reflection neatly in two, silent and watching them both.

Theo took another step forward, pulse beginning to quicken, not out of fear but from the heavy pressure that seemed to be curling right into his skin, right between his shoulder blades, as if the house itself was leaning in. It felt too close. Too heavy. Like it was listening not just to his words but to his thoughts.

“Is this your way of telling me you know everything?” he asked. His voice had turned sharper without him meaning it to, tight around the edges.

Luna’s answer came soft, almost like a sigh. “No. It’s the house telling you I know enough.”

He let out a breath slowly, his jaw tightening as he glanced around them. The air felt thicker with every second, heavy with salt and iron, humming faintly. A rune carved into the doorframe near her bedroom glowed softly, heat rising from it, not burning but aching, like something that had waited too long to speak.

“You keep acting like this place is alive,” he said. “Like it listens to you.”

Her head tilted slightly, her gaze steady. “It doesn’t listen the way you mean. It listens for truth.”

Theo moved closer again, closing the distance between them so that barely a foot separated them now. The whole house felt like it had stopped breathing, like it was waiting.

“What does that even mean?” he asked, quieter now.

Luna’s eyes flicked to the cracked mirror beside them, to the thin, perfect line down the center of the glass. “It means you can’t lie here. Not to me. Not to yourself. Not to the walls.”

His laugh came out as a sharp, breathless thing, more reflex than amusement. “I’m not lying.”

“You are,” she said gently, her voice steady, almost tender. “You pretend this is all duty. That you don’t care. That you aren’t pulled toward the way this house feels when I’m in it. You lie to your own thoughts. And now they’re leaking into the wood.”

He stared at her then, fully, feeling that truth land heavier than it should have. The air between them pulsed again, like the house itself agreed.

“You think I want this?” he asked, voice rough.

“I think you don’t know what you want,” she whispered, her words so soft but so certain. “And that terrifies you.”

Silence stretched between them, deeper than before, almost oppressive. The rune on the doorframe brightened, casting a warm amber glow that flickered over her face. The mirror shimmered faintly.

His throat felt dry as he forced out, “If you know so much, then tell me what the house wants.”

Her lips curved into the smallest smile, not mocking, not kind, but knowing. “It wants what it’s always wanted,” she murmured. “Harmony. Truth. Magic that isn’t broken.”

Theo had no reply for that. None he trusted himself to say.

But she didn’t seem to need one. She turned, her fingers brushing lightly against the cracked glass. The fracture didn’t vanish, but something in the room shifted all the same. The air softened. The flickering stopped.

And somewhere deep beneath their feet, the house exhaled, long and slow, as though it had finally heard enough.

Theo walked briskly toward the kitchen, moving like a man trying to convince himself that he wasn’t rattled. He wasn’t frightened, not exactly, but something about that conversation with Lovegood had gotten under his skin. It sat there now, sharp and small, like a splinter he couldn’t quite reach. His steps had an urgency to them, as if he could outrun the echo of her voice or shake the memory of her gaze just by moving fast enough.

It was a ridiculous thought. He knew that. But still, his mind kept circling back to her, retracing every word she had said, the impossible way she seemed to know what he was thinking before even he did.

That woman creeped him out. There was no polite way to put it. She was strange, but not in any way that announced itself. No, it was in the quiet between her sentences, in the way her hair didn’t shift even when the air moved, in the way her steps didn’t creak the floorboards no matter how old they were. She was strange in the way shadows feel strange at the edge of firelight—quiet, soft, but somehow watching.

Even as he told himself he was being irrational, another thought kept sliding in beneath all the others. There was something about her that he couldn’t name, something that didn’t fit neatly into magic or madness or even into the haunted house that wrapped itself around her like an obedient animal. It felt older than that. Older than spells, older than rules. Like she belonged to something ancient, something raw, as if her very magic had roots that twisted through the ground, deep and wild, untouched by the careful hands of books and teachers.

He rolled up his sleeves. Not because he needed to, but because it gave his hands something to do, a reason to keep moving. He reached for ingredients almost blindly, pulling them from the pantry in a quick, automatic rhythm. He didn’t want food. He just needed the act of chopping and boiling and measuring, something tangible to focus on while his thoughts spiraled.

The kitchen was warm, golden with charm-light. It smelled of old wood and faint herbs. Jars shifted themselves into easier reach when he stretched for them. The cutting board slid helpfully across the counter. Even the salt, freshly collected that morning, waited on the table like some quiet reminder. But none of that helped.

His mind was stuck on her.

On the way she had stood before that mirror, motionless and strange, as if her reflection wasn’t what she saw at all. On the way she spoke about the house as though it breathed, as though it listened. On the way the mirror had cracked, clean and perfect, splitting the glass in a way that felt like a line drawn straight through him too.

He thought of the way she smiled, soft and secret, at moments when no one should smile.

The pot boiled over. He didn’t notice right away. Only when the charm-flame flickered and hissed did he swear under his breath and move to adjust it, steam curling thick and fragrant around him.

He leaned forward, pressing both palms flat against the counter, grounding himself in the solid feel of it. The air smelled of rosemary and garlic, sharp and good and familiar—but all he could really taste was that metallic edge, that sharpness she had left behind somewhere inside him.

He didn’t know what Luna Lovegood was.

But whatever she was, she was changing him.

And that, more than anything else, scared him.

~

The room didn’t have a name, not officially, not in any way that was written down or spoken aloud with any consistency. But like all places touched too often by magic, it had grown into something specific anyway, shaped quietly over time by breath and repetition, by how magic itself settles into corners the way smoke lingers in old fabric. No one called it the ritual room, not because they didn’t know what it was, but because naming it out loud felt wrong. Too final. Too small for what it held.

The walls curved just slightly inward, a subtle thing, easy to miss if you weren’t paying attention. But the curve made the room feel like it cradled everything inside it, like it had been carved not for comfort but for containment, as though this space had always known it was meant to hold something sacred.

The air was thick with scent. Beeswax clung to the stone walls, sweet and heavy like a second skin. Ash from burned incense had gathered in the corners over years, giving the place a faint, smoky undertone. Sea salt left its sharp, mineral edge near the baseboards, mingling with the softer breath of dried lavender that had been ground into the candle bases. Every breath inside this space tasted of all of it — sweet, sharp, bitter, old.

Candles sat on uneven ledges around the room, not in straight lines or any obvious order, but in a pattern that felt deliberate in ways only magic understood. Their flames flickered, golden and warm, and the shadows they cast trembled as though they were alive, leaning inward the longer you looked at them.

The heat wasn’t overwhelming, but it felt close. Intimate. The kind of heat you find beneath a blanket shared too long, the kind that clings after someone whispers something that lingers. The kind that makes the air feel not just warm, but expectant.

Luna sat quietly at the center of the room, poised on a low stool carved from pale driftwood. The surface was worn smooth where countless hands had touched it over time, faint runes still visible but fading, like something slowly forgotten. Her gown, loose and pale, pooled around her in soft folds, the hem trailing over the cool stone floor like spilled milk.

The fabric had slipped from her shoulders, but not with any sense of performance or seduction. It had simply fallen that way, as if she had long stopped caring what her body meant to anyone else. The neckline had loosened, falling open across her back, baring skin that caught the candlelight gently. The slope of her spine and the soft lines of her shoulder blades glowed faintly, as though they had soaked up the light itself. Beneath that smooth skin, something deeper seemed to pulse — the shimmer of magic just under the surface, like runes that hadn’t yet been drawn but were already waiting.

Her hair was loosely braided, a silver ribbon of raw silk threaded through it, twisted and pinned without care for neatness. Strands had slipped free, curling damp at the nape of her neck, clinging to her skin as though reluctant to leave.

She didn’t speak. She didn’t move. Her stillness filled the room more completely than any incantation could have. This was the stillness of someone who was prepared, who had accepted what was to come, who was simply waiting. The air felt heavier for it, almost warm, like breath held too long.

Beside her, resting on a low table carved with ancient sigils for grounding and breath and boundary, was the ceramic bowl they had prepared earlier. Inside it, the salt they had gathered before sunrise had been ground fine, so fine it almost floated when stirred. It had been folded carefully into golden honey, still warm from charm-fire. The mixture glowed softly, but the glow wasn’t from heat. It pulsed faintly with something older, like memory. Moonlight and water. Salt drawn from stone. Tidepools touched by quiet hands. The scent of it was sweet, thick, but edged with something sharp, like copper or blood or something more intimate still.

Theo knelt behind her slowly, deliberately, every movement quiet and measured. It felt as though even his breath had to be counted now, as though the room itself was holding its breath with him. He didn’t speak. There was no ritual phrase, no muttered protective charm. He didn’t need to say anything.

His face stayed still, unreadable, a mask carved from control, but something beneath that control hummed. His body was tight, not with fear, but with something quieter and more dangerous. Anticipation, maybe. Or reverence. Or a kind of dread that came wrapped in want. The magic under his skin stirred like static waiting to catch, brushing at the edge of every nerve.

When he reached for the bowl, he did it without hesitation. His fingers dipped into the mixture, and the honey parted around them easily. The warmth of it sank into his skin at once, thick and smooth, laced with tiny grains of salt that gleamed when they caught the candlelight, bright and sharp like stars scattered in gold.

Still, he didn’t speak. He didn’t take his eyes off her back, pale and bare and impossibly still before him. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t tense. There was no fear in her posture. Only breath. Only patience.

And in that patience, in the waiting, there was something that felt even more dangerous than any spell.

When he reached for her, his touch was careful in a way that spoke of practice, the quiet, measured precision of someone used to handling dangerous spells, delicate traps, blood-slick seals. But this wasn’t that. This wasn’t defense. This was an offering.

His hand hovered, just for a breath, before lowering to her back. His fingers pressed gently into the small hollow where her spine curved, warm and smooth and soft beneath his touch. Her skin felt impossibly steady, as if it had been waiting for this, and for a moment he forgot himself entirely.

The first rune he traced was simple but ancient, so old it didn’t have a name or translation, only purpose. A mark meant to seal, to contain without caging, to hold the self safely together and keep the soul from unraveling at the edges. The honey moved easily under his fingers, its glow trailing behind each stroke before disappearing into her skin, as though it belonged there, as though it had always belonged there.

Her spine stayed steady beneath his hand. Her shoulders remained relaxed. Her breath stayed deep and slow, so calm it made his chest ache.

The second rune came next, a little higher, right where her shoulder blades met in quiet symmetry. This one was more intricate, a sigil meant to help her discern friend from foe, shadow from light, self from intrusion. He traced it slowly, carefully, letting the curves settle into her, letting the salt and honey mark her in more than protection — letting them say that he saw her, that he acknowledged her.

His fingers moved with a care that didn’t come from training but from something else entirely. Reverence, maybe. Devotion, maybe. It felt ancient, as though the memory of this act was older than he was, older than the magic itself. And even as the glow of the rune faded, soaked gently into her skin, he could feel it humming quietly under his fingertips, as steady as a heartbeat.

Then her breath caught.

It was so soft he might have missed it if he hadn’t been watching her so closely. Not quite a gasp, not a sigh. Just the smallest hitch in the even rhythm she had kept all along — but it was enough to change everything. That tiny break pulled something tight in his chest, sharp and immediate, a feeling that wasn’t fear or surprise, but something far more intimate.

He felt as though her body had spoken to him without words, had let him hear something he wasn’t supposed to hear.

But she didn’t move. She didn’t look back. She didn’t offer any comment or question or complaint. She simply kept sitting there, spine bare, skin open, breath slow, presence steady. She was offering herself to this moment, but not in surrender, not passively. It was choice. Pure, deliberate choice. And that distinction pierced deeper than any spell could have.

Theo kept going, his hands moving slowly, reverently, but this reverence wasn’t something he had ever been taught. It wasn’t part of any Ministry-regulated ritual, no formal sequence of charms or protections.

This felt older. It felt instinctive, rising from somewhere beneath his skin, from blood and bone and memory itself. He didn’t understand it completely, but he felt it, humming under his skin, humming under hers.

And it told him that this, whatever this was between them, was already far beyond any spell.

As he shaped each rune across her bare back, the mixture of salt and honey shimmered briefly beneath his fingers. Each symbol he traced lit up for just a moment, a soft, golden glow before fading from sight — not gone, but sinking slowly into her skin, into whatever lay waiting beneath it. Because he could feel it now. Something was watching. Not with eyes, not in any ordinary sense. But with presence. With a kind of awareness that felt close and sharp and impossibly old.

The bowl emptied slowly, though time itself seemed to stretch between them. The candlelight felt thicker, slower. Every breath between them seemed to echo in that hush, drawn long and careful. The honey that had clung so thick to his fingers at the start grew thinner, a delicate sheen now as he worked, the salt glittering faintly along the edges of his nails, caught in the small creases of his palms like dusted stars.

The room didn’t breathe. It didn’t stir. It simply waited.

Waited like it was listening.

Waited like silence itself was a kind of magic.

And with every new mark he traced, that silence deepened. It sharpened. It wasn’t empty, not anymore. It had become a spell in its own right, binding them together more tightly than any charm could.

When he reached the space high between her shoulder blades, right at the meeting point where breath seemed to settle, where memory lived and grief curled quiet beneath the surface, his fingers slowed. His movements lost their smooth, steady rhythm and became careful. Almost hesitant. The magic that had guided him so easily before seemed to pause with him now, recognizing that this final mark mattered more than any that had come before.

This last rune wasn’t meant to contain, or bind, or shield. It was simpler than that. It was a mark meant to bear witness. To hold everything else that had been drawn. To keep it safe. To acknowledge, without controlling.

The shape itself was small, just a curve and a line, but it carried the full weight of what this was — the act of touching someone not to claim, but to care.

His fingers lingered as he traced it, moving slowly, letting the last warmth of the honey meet the heat of her skin. And then he simply stayed there, his hand resting quietly against her back, neither of them moving, the moment suspended.

She bowed her head then, just slightly. The movement was small, easy to miss, something that could have been mistaken for nothing more than breath or the pull of gravity. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t submission or tiredness or a reaction to the magic itself.

It was something deeper.

It was acceptance.

A quiet, unspoken acceptance that didn’t belong to the ritual at all. It belonged to this. To him. To whatever it was they had built together in the hush and heat of that waiting room.

It was permission, clear even without a word.

The last drop of honey disappeared into her skin, absorbed not just by flesh but by spellwork, by intention, by the memory of everything that had come before it. The ceramic bowl sat empty now, scraped clean, its surface cooling in the hush.

The room reacted almost immediately, as if it too had been holding something in its lungs and could finally breathe again. The pulse came first, soft but heavy, a low thrum that moved through the floorboards, through the walls, through their skin.

Then the candles flickered all at once, not from a draft but from something deeper, as though the air itself had shifted. It felt like the whole room exhaled. A long breath let out from somewhere unseen.

Somewhere in the walls, deep where stone met timber, something else seemed to sigh. Not loud, not even truly audible, but present all the same — the kind of shift that makes skin prickle and breath catch without knowing exactly why.

Neither of them spoke.

Not because there was nothing to say, but because any word would have felt too fragile, too artificial, too small to hold the weight of what had just passed between them.

The silence stretched long and thick, but it didn’t feel empty. It was full, dense with the unspoken recognition that they had shared something more than a ritual, more than magic. It trembled just beneath the surface of the quiet, heavy with meaning neither of them could name.

To speak would have shattered it.

To name it would have cheapened it.

The hush that held them now was not the absence of sound, not the ordinary stillness that follows when a spell is complete. This was different. This was a silence that watched, a silence that bore witness to everything they couldn’t say yet — everything they might never say.

It was the kind of quiet that wasn’t untouched by magic, but shaped by it, sculpted by breath and intention and something older than either of them.

And somewhere in that quiet, in the space where thought and speech no longer mattered, the house itself remained awake. Listening.

~

It was late afternoon when it happened, that slow, golden hour when the light softened into something rich and thick, almost like honey, slipping through the tall arched windows of the east hallway. Dust drifted lazily in its path, suspended in the glow like breath held too long.

Theo hadn’t planned to find her. He hadn’t even really realized he was looking. He’d come to fetch the book she’d mentioned yesterday, the one with the forest-buried runes in the final chapter, the one whose old parchment smelled faintly of moss and ink.

But when he stepped into the small study tucked near the end of the hall, there she was.

Luna crouched low on the floor, barefoot, surrounded by a mess of parchment that looked like it had been pulled straight out of a storm — crumpled, torn, edges darkened by time or flame. Her hair fell loose around her face, her fingers quick and careful as they traced over a half-burned map.

She didn’t look up. She never did. But she always knew.

“It’s on the second shelf,” she said, her voice soft, distracted, almost like she was speaking to herself rather than to him. “But it keeps hiding.”

Theo frowned faintly. “Books don’t hide.”

“That one does.”

He didn’t argue. He rarely did anymore.

The floor creaked quietly under his steps as he crossed the room, the house holding its breath again the way it always seemed to when they were near each other. And there it was — the book she had spoken of, sitting exactly where she said it would be. Only he could have sworn it hadn’t been there a second ago.

He reached for it anyway, fingers brushing the spine, rough and rune-etched and warm under his touch. The leather seemed to hum faintly as if it recognized him.

Without thinking, without ceremony or pause, he turned and offered it to her. The movement felt so natural it was almost reflex, like breathing out after holding breath too long.

He wasn’t really looking at her when it happened. Not the way he watched for threats, not with that sharp focus he reserved for things that didn’t make sense. He was already turning, already halfway to the door, already pulling that familiar cloak of detachment around himself — the one stitched out of silence and practiced indifference, the one he used to pretend he wasn’t rattled.

But then her arm lifted.

The movement was so natural, so easy, the quiet confidence of someone who knew exactly what would happen next. Their hands met in that small space between them — a soft brush of skin and intention that barely lasted longer than a breath. His fingers grazed the inside of her forearm, skin bare and warmer than he expected, warmed by the sunlight pooling around her as if the sun itself had cradled her there.

And the second that contact happened, the world shifted.

It wasn’t pain that hit him. It wasn’t pleasure either. It was something stranger. He felt it rush through him too fast, filling him up with something that didn’t belong, hollowing him out and then overrunning him all at once. Heat shot up from his palm, ran along his wrist, curled into the base of his spine. It felt like a live wire, sharp and electric, threaded with memory and magic together.

Before he could react, before he could ask or pull back or even breathe, he was gone.

The study vanished.

The warmth.

The scent of parchment and dust.

Even the quiet hum of the house fell away.

And when the world steadied again, he was standing somewhere else entirely.

He was standing on a cliff.

The wind tore around him, sharp and wild, carrying salt that felt like razors against his skin. It howled from every direction, slicing the air clean. Below, the sea churned in dark fury, a deep slate color, and the sky hung low, heavy and bruised with clouds.

And there she was.

Younger by years. Almost a child, really. Thin, wild, hair tangled and whipping across her face. Her knees were scraped, hands bleeding. Barefoot. Standing right at the edge of the cliff, as if the wind itself could take her at any moment. Her whole body trembled, but she didn’t move. Her wide eyes were fixed on the sea, unblinking, as though she could hear something in it that no one else could, as though the horizon had whispered a promise meant only for her.

Her lips moved.

Not in a spell, not in prayer, but in a soft, broken rhythm, barely audible even before the wind stole the sound away. But he knew what she was saying. He felt it like a pulse in the air.

She was reciting names. One after another. A list of ghosts.

Theo’s knees gave out. His breath left him in a rush, like the memory itself had been too much for him to hold. He stumbled back blindly, catching himself on the nearest bookshelf, fingers slick with sweat before he even realized it.

The room came back slowly. Piece by piece.

The smell of dust settled first, thick in his lungs. The faint crackle of a candle burning low followed, soft and sharp at the same time. Then her breathing — quiet, steady, smooth, like nothing had happened at all, like the tide rolling in against a shore that kept its secrets.

She hadn’t moved. Not even a shift in posture. Not one muscle.

And somehow that stillness felt more jarring than the memory itself.

When he turned to look at her, his breath caught, sharp in his throat. His pulse thundered in his ears. His hands were shaking, and he couldn’t hear anything except that wind. Those names. Still echoing inside him.

“What the fuck was that,” he rasped. The words felt torn from him more than spoken, cracked and raw like something had splintered inside his throat. His voice didn’t sound like his own.

She blinked at him slowly, completely unbothered. It was that eerie way she had of looking at him without really looking, as if her gaze could move straight through him, as if she wasn’t seeing him at all but whatever lay just behind him. Wide and unhurried, her expression didn’t carry surprise or concern. It was just watchful — the kind of gaze that belonged to owls or old magic, patient and still.

Then she spoke, her voice soft, almost kind, but there was something about the gentle way she said it that made it feel sharper than it should have been. “The house must like you.”

He shook his head. His chest still ached, tight with the ghost of sea spray and the heavy drag of grief that clung to his ribs like something damp and heavy. “That wasn’t you,” he said, even though part of him already knew it wasn’t that simple. The memory still sat inside him like a stone.

She tilted her head slightly, her expression as unreadable as ever, and answered, “Yes and no. It keeps pieces. Sometimes it shares them. Usually only when it thinks someone needs to see.”

His fingers tightened around the edge of the bookshelf. His jaw locked, his breath coming fast, sharp through his teeth. “I didn’t need to see that.”

And then, finally, she really looked at him. Not vaguely, not with that detached calm she so often carried, but directly. Her eyes narrowed just slightly, like she was weighing him against something only she could see.

“Didn’t you?” she asked quietly.

He didn’t answer.

He couldn’t.

Because what he had seen wasn’t just a vision. It wasn’t some story from her past to be retold and set aside. It was pain. Pain that had been made into something solid, something he couldn’t stop feeling even now.

Grief fossilized in magic.

And somehow it had sunk inside him, anchored itself where he couldn’t shake it loose, settled into his ribs like it belonged there.

It wasn’t something he could forget.

It wasn’t something he could explain or escape.

Because it wasn’t just a memory anymore.

It was a wound.

And now it lived in him, too.

~

The steam reached him before anything else did, curling slowly through the dim corridor like fingers stretching out from some unseen place. It was thick and warm and carried more than just heat — there was something alive in it, fragrant and strange, almost sacred. The scent clung to the walls as if it had soaked into the house itself, rising now in quiet, steady waves.

Theo paused just outside the door, aware that this wasn’t where he’d meant to go. He hadn’t come looking for her. He hadn’t planned to be here at all. But the house had guided him, as it so often did, bending the hallway subtly until his feet found this path, until every step he thought was his own had led him here instead.

The steam wrapped around him as he stood there. The air was thick with it, scented with crushed lavender and the sharp brightness of citrus rind, but under it all was something darker — something damp and rich and earthy, like moss warmed by moonlight and soil still wet from rain. It didn’t just hang in the air. It slid under his collar, pressed into his skin, sank into him.

The warmth was impossible to separate from the feeling itself, the strange sense that this wasn’t just heat but invitation. That the house wanted him to stand here. That the house wanted him to see.

He raised his hand to knock. He didn’t know why, not really. Habit, maybe.

But before his knuckles could touch the wood, the door creaked open — slow, smooth, and entirely deliberate.

And the steam slipped out into the hallway like a secret that had been waiting for him all along.

And there she was.

It didn’t exactly surprise him. The house never let him stumble without intention. But still, the sight of her caught something sharp in his throat and held it there — a moment suspended too delicately to name.

Luna sat half-submerged in the old stone bath, the basin dark, veined granite, its rim etched faintly with protective runes so worn they only showed themselves when candlelight struck at just the right angle, like breath catching on bone.

The water around her was heavy with herbs, clouded pale green and streaked with cloudy white swirls. Ribbons of something soft and translucent drifted lazily across the surface, petals maybe, their shapes blurred but glowing faintly where the light caught them. Steam rose in long curls, wrapping itself around her bare shoulders, her back, her neck, cloaking her in heat and scent and something that felt very close to magic.

The room didn’t feel like a bathroom. It felt like the inside of a spell. Sacred. Half-formed.

She didn’t startle when he stepped inside. She didn’t even look over her shoulder. She just sat there, spine straight, back bare, skin glistening where water and oil clung to her, as if the room itself was breathing against her.

“You’re early,” she said, voice low, softened by steam, her words drifting toward him as though even the air wanted to hold them. Her hair was swept up carelessly, pinned loosely, with silver strands escaping to curl damp at the nape of her neck. Droplets clung to her skin like glass beads, and Theo felt something twist low in his chest — a quiet discomfort he couldn’t easily name.

It wasn’t just that she was undressed, or that this was intimate. It was that it didn’t feel abstract. It didn’t feel conceptual. It was visceral. Present. Too real.

He cleared his throat, but it came out rougher than he intended, a noise he hadn’t even meant to make. “I didn’t know you were...” He trailed off, unsure if he was about to say bathing, or undressed, or beautiful.

She only hummed in reply, a soft sound that was somehow still an answer. She lifted one hand lazily from the water, droplets sliding down her fingers as she gestured toward the small wooden table nearby. On it sat a vial, small and fragile-looking, its glass surface catching the candlelight, inside a dark liquid threaded through with streaks of iridescent blue, like the distilled remnants of a dream.

“It won’t work without the last ingredient,” she murmured. “You brought it.”

Theo glanced down and felt a flicker of something like dread as he realized he was already holding it. The vial was in his hand. He had no memory of picking it up, no recollection of being given it. But of course he was holding it. The house didn’t forget.

And neither did she.

“You want me to add it?” he asked, but the question came out rougher than he wanted, the heat and scent already curling under his skin, winding through his thoughts.

She nodded without opening her eyes. “Just three drops,” she said softly. “But you have to kneel. It needs proximity. Skin to water.”

He froze. Not from fear, but from the overwhelming need to remind himself this was still just a ritual. Just a spell. Just magic.

Not what it had become in the quiet space between them.

He told himself it was her body, not her. Her back. Her shoulders. Her breath. It couldn’t mean anything.

But his feet moved anyway.

He stepped closer, careful and measured, until he reached the edge of the stone bath where the steam curled thick and fragrant around him, wrapping the air in warmth and scent, coaxing him forward like an invitation he could not refuse. The bath was wide and deep, its marble frame softened and worn by years of use and quiet ritual, sunken into the floor like something ancient and patient, waiting for him.

When he knelt, it did not feel like intrusion, not even like he was a guest in this room or in her presence. He knelt as someone caught in something larger, quiet and deliberate, fully aware that whatever this was between them, it had already begun long before he ever stepped into the room, long before he could have named it for what it was becoming.

The vial in his hand trembled slightly, just enough for the dark liquid inside to ripple against the glass. He pulled the cork free with slow precision and the scent that rushed upward struck him harder than he expected, sharp and impossibly clean, with a strange metallic bite that caught at the roof of his mouth and settled there, like silver threads unspooling in the air around him. Beneath that sharpness was something softer, floral and distant, a scent he could not place, something that felt dreamlike and half-forgotten, as though it belonged to a garden that no longer existed anywhere except in memory. The smell was so arresting, so complete, that for a long moment he nearly forgot why he had come, caught instead in the heat rising from the water and the strange pull of the moment unraveling between them.

Luna’s breath hitched then, so slight it might have been missed, the barest catch of air that lifted her shoulders a fraction before falling again. Her head tilted toward the scent, though she did not open her eyes, as though some invisible thread had tugged at her from within. When she spoke, her voice was quiet and smooth, softened by the air itself, her words seeming to rise from the water rather than her lips as she reminded him gently, “Three drops.”

His hand moved with care, but it was not hesitation exactly. It was something more fragile, a reverence so acute it bordered on fear, the kind of trembling awareness that came when standing at the edge of something sacred. He tilted the vial slowly, breath held, until the first drop swelled at the rim and fell into the bath. The sound of it was impossibly small, instantly swallowed by the steam that swirled around them, but the reaction was immediate. The surface of the water rippled outward in slow spirals, pale light blooming gently where the drop had fallen before fading back into the heat, as if the liquid had sewn itself into the memory of the bath.

The second drop followed with a breath’s pause, darker than the first, its path through the air deliberate and slow as it curled through the water’s surface, moving almost toward her, as if drawn to her skin, as if it recognized her body and had waited to return.

The third drop trembled at the edge of the glass for a long, suspended moment, as though the vial itself hesitated alongside him. When it finally broke free, it fell straight between her shoulder blades, landing so precisely it felt impossible to believe it had not been guided by some unseen force.

This time, the water’s response was different. The surface shimmered violently for a breath, a tight quiver of tension, and then it stilled all at once, so completely that even the air seemed to stop moving.

And then the sound came.

Low, full, resonant. A note that seemed to rise from nowhere and everywhere at once, rich and deep, like a bell rung far underwater, or the song of a singing bowl drawn out with slow, loving care. The sound filled the space between them, between thought and breath, saturating the room until there was nothing left except that vibration, and in that moment he could feel the weight of everything that had passed between them settling quietly in his chest.

The steam still curled around him, heavy and fragrant, thick with lavender and citrus, earthy with something older that clung to the corners of the room like memory. And there she was, not a surprise exactly, because the house never let him arrive without intention, but even so she caught him — not just his gaze, but something deeper, something behind his ribs that tightened at the sight of her and refused to let go.

Luna sat half-submerged in the water, the dark stone bath cradling her as if it had been carved just for her shape, the faint glimmer of ancient runes catching at the edges where the candlelight fell. The water itself felt alive, steeped with herbs and oils that turned its surface a cloudy green, laced with translucent petals that swirled lazily around her skin, catching the light in delicate, trembling flashes. Steam rose in slow, curling threads around her shoulders and the long column of her neck, wrapping her in a kind of veil, half-hiding and half-revealing, and the entire space felt less like a room and more like the inside of something sacred — a spell unfolding, a secret that hummed instead of spoke.

She did not glance at him when he stepped closer. She did not shift or speak or even acknowledge him in any way other than to simply continue being, her posture straight and still, her bare back glistening with droplets of water that clung like glass beads to the pale skin along her spine. The curve of her shoulder blades caught the light and something in him ached at the sight, though he told himself it was only the heat, only the strangeness of this house and her magic and this moment that did not belong to him and yet had claimed him nonetheless.

“You’re early,” she said softly, her voice low, almost lazy, softened by the steam so that her words drifted toward him like smoke curling through the air. Her hair was swept up, not neatly but without care, pinned loosely so that silver strands fell to curl damp at the nape of her neck, catching droplets of water and shimmering faintly where they touched her skin.

He stood there, momentarily struck mute, caught between politeness and awe and something more raw than either. He cleared his throat, the sound rough and uneven. “I didn’t know you were…” but he could not finish the thought, unsure if the word he was searching for was bathing or glowing or unmaking him.

She only hummed in reply, a quiet sound that did not ask for words. With a lazy grace she lifted one hand from the water, droplets sliding from her fingers as she gestured toward the table nearby where a small vial sat nestled among dried chamomile blossoms, its glass catching the candlelight in a flicker of oily shimmer. “It won’t work without the last ingredient,” she murmured, “you brought it.”

He looked down, realizing with a slow, creeping awareness that the vial was already in his hand. He could not recall picking it up. He could not remember who had given it to him. But it did not matter. The house remembered, and so did she.

“Three drops,” she said, her voice soft and steady, not a command but a truth, something woven into the air itself.

His fingers trembled slightly as he uncorked the vial, and the scent that spilled out was sharp and clean, metallic and herbal at once, with a strange undertone that pressed against the back of his throat and filled his lungs like something pulled from a forgotten dream. Beneath that sharpness was something softer, floral and elusive, a scent he could not name, something old and delicate, the smell of a garden long vanished from any map.

Luna’s breath hitched so subtly that he might have missed it if he hadn’t already been watching her too closely, her head tilting toward the scent with a quiet, languid grace. She did not open her eyes, but her presence filled the space between them like another breath, thick and weighty and impossible to ignore.

His hand moved slowly, not hesitant but reverent, and the first drop slipped from the vial with a weightless grace that belied its significance. The water accepted it without a sound, but a ripple spiraled outward from where it fell, pale light blooming briefly before fading again into the haze of heat and herbs.

The second drop followed a breath later, darker than the first, its descent deliberate and slow, curling into the surface of the bath as though it knew where to go, as though it was searching for her skin. The water responded gently this time, the light softer, a quiet acknowledgement.

The third drop hesitated at the edge of the glass, trembling there as though the vial itself was reluctant to let it go, and when it finally fell, it landed perfectly in the hollow between her shoulder blades. The effect was immediate. The water shimmered violently for a moment, tension tightening through the air, and then it stilled completely, so perfectly still that the steam itself seemed to pause.

Then the sound began.

It was not loud. It did not rise. It simply existed, low and resonant, a note drawn out as though from deep beneath the water itself, like a bell rung far below the surface, filling the space between breath and thought, saturating the room until there was nothing left but that sound. It moved through him, through her, through the walls of the house, soft and low and impossibly patient, and for a moment it felt as though the whole house was breathing to its rhythm.

Luna exhaled slowly, a release more than a breath, her voice barely a whisper yet clear and unmistakable as it drifted back to him. “It likes you,” she said. “It responds better to you.”

His hand remained suspended above the water, the empty vial trembling between his fingers, and he could not move, not with her voice in his ears and that sound still filling the room and the heat curling into his skin. The candlelight flickered and in the small mirror across the room he caught sight of their reflection — or rather the absence of one. The mirror showed only fog now, thick and white and blooming outward from its glass, as though even the reflection had decided this was too much to witness.

She tilted her head toward him, slow and graceful, and when she opened her eyes they were not wide or sharp but heavy-lidded, half-closed, steeped in something far older than seduction, far older than anything he could name. She was deep in trance, her gaze unfocused and dark, as though she could see something layered behind the skin of the world itself.

Her voice came again, soft and smooth, not loud but impossibly present. “Do you hear it?”

And though he could not find the words, though his throat was dry and his breath too tight, the answer was already in his chest. He did hear it. Not outside of him, not in the room or in the steam or in the hum of the air, but within him, wrapped around his heartbeat and humming through his bones, a lullaby from something so ancient it could not be named.

She lifted her hand again, not to touch him, not to invite him closer, but simply to place her palm gently into the air between them, occupying that narrow space with the shape of her presence alone, and her next words came thinner, softer, almost belonging more to the water than to her throat. “The water remembers. It always does.”

His mouth felt too dry, his voice too rough, but still he managed to ask, his words born more from wonder than intent. “What is it remembering?”

She smiled then, but it was not for him. It was inward, small and fragile, private, the kind of smile that belonged to grief or longing, a reflection of something too fine to name aloud, and when she finally answered her voice was stripped bare, threadbare with sorrow but not pity, not warning — just the truth itself, offered gently into the quiet. “Everything we don’t say aloud.”

He didn’t notice the moment the vial slipped from his fingers. He didn’t hear the soft plunk of it falling into the water, didn’t watch as it vanished beneath the surface. It simply left him, the spell no longer needing it, the moment too full to hold anything more.

She leaned back then, slowly, arching her spine against the stone rim of the bath, the last of the light catching at her skin and painting silver curves along her back, the sight of it sharp enough to steal his breath.

And then she hummed, just once, a sound without shape or name, a sound old and low and born of a place no language could reach, and as that tone unfurled into the water and wove itself around the hum already vibrating beneath the surface, he realized there was no way to tell where her voice ended and the water’s song began.

Theo remained on his knees at the edge of the bath, still and hollow and full all at once, and behind him the mirrors remained fogged, the condensation heavy and unmoving, as if even the house itself was holding its breath.

~

The ceiling offered him nothing, no change, no mercy. It remained flat and pale, shadowless in the faint glow cast by the wards outside, as indifferent as stone, and yet Theo stared at it as if it might crack and give him relief. His body was rigid, trapped in stillness, one arm folded beneath his head, the other draped across his stomach, the fingers curling slightly as if they might still the churn beneath his ribs. Every breath was measured too carefully, pulled slow and shallow through his nose, then exhaled through parted lips, like he was trying to outpace the heat rising inside him.

The cool air did nothing. This was not about temperature. This was him. This was her. Always, somehow, it came back to her.

The bath had ended hours ago. The vial had emptied. The ritual was complete. The candlelight had long since faded, her low hum swallowed by the water itself, vanishing without a trace. But the moment refused to loosen its grip on him. It circled in his mind like a spell cast without a countercharm. He could see it too clearly, every time he blinked — not the structure of the ritual, not the steps he should have memorized and catalogued, but the sight of her. The slow curve of her spine as she leaned into the water, the way droplets clung to her skin, sliding down her shoulder blades like molten pearls, the soft steam rising and curling around her as if it knew her, belonged to her, caressed her in ways no living hand was allowed.

It hadn’t been indecent. She had not intended it for him. But it had rooted itself in him all the same, like a sweetness that turned sour too late to spit out.

He turned over with a quiet, frustrated noise, something between a sigh and a curse, dragging his gaze to the bookshelf across the room. The wards above it blinked lazily, their glow tracing slow, even patterns, meant to soothe. He tried to follow their rhythm, willing them to lull his thoughts back into order. It didn’t work. The scent of lavender still clung to his skin, sharp and sweet and insistent, as though the bath had branded him without touch. Beneath it, that stranger scent — the metallic bite of the oil, the haunting trace of herbs — curled into the back of his throat. He could still feel it on his fingers, still see it shimmering faintly on his skin when he closed his eyes.

He reached for the book on his nightstand, the one he had been reading the night before. Something dense, dry, reliable. Safe. He read two lines before the words blurred together, refused to hold. Her voice echoed instead, that soft command: just three drops. He turned the page without realizing. He pressed his thumb hard against the spine until the knuckle whitened. He clenched the book tighter, her breath slipping through the edges of memory and curling into the silence around him.

Her skin. That was what stayed most of all — pale, wet, gleaming with heat and light. Every memory seemed stitched into the lines of her throat, her collarbone, the slope of her back. It made his chest ache and his pulse quicken in ways that defied every discipline he had trained himself to master.

The book fell from his hand, hitting the floor harder than he intended, and he sat up suddenly, dragging a hand through his hair. His breath felt wrong, too quick, as though it belonged to someone else, someone drowning in a dream that refused to end.

He told himself again, almost angrily, that it was a ritual. Just a ritual. Magic. Nothing more. Another warding bath, another strange evening in a house that lived on old enchantments and layered secrets. But his body didn’t listen. His body remembered.

He lay back down carefully, slowly, almost cautiously, as if any sudden movement might summon her back to him, might conjure her voice from the bath, her humming curling around his ears. The sheets beneath him were clean, cool, untouched — yet his hands gripped them tightly, fingers curling into the fabric as though he needed to anchor himself to something that was still solid, still real.

His eyes closed, not for sleep but in surrender, and still the scene returned, slow and treacherous, slipping beneath thought and reason.

Steam rising in waves. The way candlelight had caressed the curve of her ribs. The delicate motion of her hand above the water, lifted just enough to reach toward him but not touch.

His own breathing now seemed too loud, too fast, as if his lungs were trying to calm a heart that had been hexed into frenzy.

Theo turned onto his side, facing the wall, willing the house to still itself, to silence its many watching eyes, but the house never spoke in silence. The house spoke in the language he couldn’t help but understand — the one that hummed beneath his skin and lived in the memories he couldn’t exorcise.

The ritual had been brief, a spell so simple it was almost mundane: a bath, a salve, a sequence of runes, a few whispered ingredients, careful timing. He was trained to record such details, to store them precisely. That was what he did. That was how he survived. But none of those details survived now. Only her.

Luna Lovegood had walked into his discipline like a fire set loose in a library, burning through every page, every careful note, until there was nothing left but the smoke curling through his thoughts and the memory of flame.

He had thought he could forget. He had believed that time or sleep or space would blunt the edges of this ache. But it hadn’t. The ache sharpened with distance, not dulled. Every hour without her, every breath away from that room only carved it deeper, sharper.

He remembered the way her shoulder had shifted beneath his hand when he traced that final rune. He remembered how the water had sighed beneath her. He remembered the pulse of the house itself, matching his own, as if the very bones of this place wanted to teach him how to ache properly.

And ache he did.

His breath caught. Not because of the memory, but because of what it meant. Because he wasn’t thinking about her like someone you protect. He wasn’t thinking about her like an assignment, or even a person. He was thinking about her like a problem he couldn’t solve. An echo he couldn’t silence. A hunger he couldn’t name.

He told himself it wasn’t about her body. That it was about the magic, the energy that clung to her like perfume, the way she moved like she belonged to something older than the world. But that was a lie. Because he couldn’t stop thinking about the exact shape of her back. The way her skin glowed, damp and warm and alive, and the way it had felt under his fingers, like pressing into light.

His nails dug into the sheets again, harder this time. He swallowed, throat dry, and rolled to his back, eyes wide, seeing nothing. His mind was no longer replaying the memory. It was living in it. Building new ones, imaginary ones, where she turned, where she looked at him, where she said something he couldn’t bear to hear. Where her hand reached not just toward him, but for him.

He shoved the heel of his hand against his sternum, a hard, silent command to stop. But there was no stopping it. Not now.

He was unraveling.

Chapter Text

The kitchen was already flooded with sunlight when he stepped in. Morning light poured through the open windows, golden and slow, wrapping itself around everything it touched. The breeze carried with it the sound of waves folding against the shore, soft and constant, and it stirred the curtains just enough to make them shift like they were breathing. The floor beneath his bare feet felt warm, like the house had risen earlier than he had and was waiting for him to catch up.

The table was a mess, but not in a careless way. It was a kind of curated chaos that felt entirely lived in, as though it could only belong to her. Teacups sat on top of dog-eared books, a pear cut in half and already browning near the edge, a scattering of potion vials crusted at the rim, glowing faintly from whatever odd residue they held. And in the center of it all, perched like a tiny, judgmental queen, Artemis sat curled in her little cloth-lined basket, watching him.

Luna, of course, was already there. She sat at the far end of the table, one leg folded beneath her in that way she always did, a posture that should have looked uncomfortable but didn’t. It suited her. Her hair was half-up, held by a length of vine that probably hadn’t been intended for that purpose, a loose strand falling forward where she hadn’t bothered to tuck it back. The thin cotton robe she wore slipped from one shoulder without her noticing, or maybe without caring. In her hands she cradled a chipped mug that looked older than either of them, its surface worn smooth in places, the faint trace of an old protection rune barely visible beneath her fingers.

Theo stopped in the doorway longer than he meant to. His shirt clung to his back, still damp with sweat from a night that hadn’t given him rest, and his hair stuck in uneven pieces to his forehead. His eyes burned, red-rimmed and heavy, but none of that mattered right now. None of it could override the way his attention pulled toward her, toward the lazy way she traced a fingertip over the rim of her mug, the way she sipped so slowly it made the whole kitchen feel like it had been paused around her, the way she didn’t look up, not even once.

For a moment, he just stood there, taking in the sight of her—this quiet, still moment she had carved out without effort, without even acknowledging that she was doing it. She made it look easy, this peaceful ritual of existing inside a space like it belonged to her, like she belonged to it. And maybe she did.

His breath caught somewhere between inhale and exhale, sharp and too full, as if the air in this room held something heavier than it should. Something he couldn’t quite name, couldn’t quite release.

And then, finally, she spoke, without lifting her gaze, her voice soft and simple, like she had known he was standing there all along.

"Tea’s still hot," she said. "You can sit, if you want."

"The ward lines pulsed all night. Did you hear them, or were you too loud in your own head?"

The question caught Theo mid-step, sharp and intimate, even though she hadn’t looked at him yet. She didn’t need to. The house had already whispered his secrets to her, and they both knew it.

He stepped further inside, each movement heavier than the last, like he was moving through water instead of morning air.

"You always up this early?" he asked, his voice rough, still tangled in whatever restless thoughts had kept him awake.

Luna sipped from her mug, finally turning her head just enough for him to catch the tilt of her mouth. It was almost a smile, but softer, quieter, like she was amused and unsurprised at once. She took a bite of the pear in her hand, chewed slowly, then answered as if she had all the time in the world.

"The house doesn’t sleep when you don’t," she said simply. "It paces."

He didn’t reply, just moved toward the counter, grabbing the nearest mug. He rinsed it without thinking, his hands going through the motions even as the rest of him felt stretched thin, strung tight. He could feel her words inside his chest, lingering in the spaces between heartbeats. She hadn’t asked what was wrong. She didn’t need to. And that simple fact rattled him more than he cared to admit.

It wasn’t until something sharp clamped onto the cuff of his sleeve that he noticed Artemis. The little creature latched on with tiny, furious teeth and a determined squeak.

Theo jerked his arm back instinctively, startled not by pain but by the sheer nerve of it. He glared down at the guinea pig, whose expression was pure judgment.

Luna didn’t even blink.

"Artemis finds you very emotionally repressed," she said in a tone so casual it could have been mistaken for weather talk. She stirred her tea with slow, deliberate movements, her spoon circling lazily. "She thinks it’s causing digestive issues."

Theo narrowed his eyes at the animal, still stubbornly attached to his sleeve. "She thinks?"

Luna finally looked at him properly, her gaze calm, almost too steady. "She’s quite intuitive."

He pried Artemis off his sleeve with as much patience as he could manage and set her carefully back in her basket at the center of the table. The guinea pig turned her back immediately, as if deeply offended.

The kitchen was bathed in warm morning light, golden and soft. The curtains swayed gently in the breeze, the air filled with the quiet rhythm of wards pulsing across the walls, and the scent of bergamot, lemon, and something sweeter he couldn’t quite name.

Theo sat stiffly, every movement controlled, as if posture alone might hold him together. He reached for toast, spread marmalade he couldn’t taste, and ate too fast. His hands trembled as they worked.

The silence between them was thick, not empty but brimming with everything they weren’t saying. She sat there wrapped in her robe, one shoulder bare where the fabric had slipped. Her legs tucked beneath her, a half-eaten pear in one hand, her hair catching the light like something elemental.

It should have meant nothing. But it didn’t. It meant everything.

The words escaped before he could stop them, sudden and sharp, cutting right through the fragile quiet like a spell interrupted mid-incantation.

“Did you… mean for me to see you like that yesterday?”

Luna tilted her head slowly, the movement almost avian, her expression unreadable. For a moment, he thought she might ask him to explain himself. But she didn’t. Instead, she simply smiled, small and strange, shaped like a secret, and without a word poured him another cup of tea.

He stared at the cup. Then at her.

“I didn’t mean to—” he began.

“I know,” she replied, her voice even.

“It wasn’t… I didn’t look at you like—”

“You weren’t looking at me like I was naked,” she said softly, not hesitant, just stating a fact. “You were looking at me like I was on fire.”

The air seemed to hitch in his lungs. He stopped breathing for a moment and then looked away.

The tension between them broke without ceremony, the ease of something long expected. She popped a piece of pear into her mouth, chewing thoughtfully, then began speaking as if he hadn’t said anything at all.

“I once tried to bathe with kelpies,” she said suddenly, her tone completely serious. “They weren’t thrilled about it. I thought they might appreciate the salt, but they bit through the copper basin and dragged it into the river. We didn’t see the mayor’s cat again after that.”

Theo blinked, unsure whether it was meant as a joke. It didn’t matter. The heat twisting inside his chest lessened, just slightly.

She rose then, carrying her mug to the counter, the robe slipping a little further down her back, and he quickly looked away again, forcing himself not to think about the shape of her shoulders, the memory of water clinging to her skin like it never wanted to leave.

But she did not leave the room. She moved behind him, her bare feet soundless on the stone floor, and paused just at his back. He felt her breath first, warm against the shell of his ear, before she spoke.

“You smell like iron this morning,” she whispered.

He froze, muscles tightening all at once. “What does that mean?”

She gave no answer.

The silence that followed settled like a weight between them, heavy and deliberate, lasting just long enough to scrape at his nerves.

Then the house began to hum.

A slow vibration rose through the walls, quiet but undeniable, like a string being pulled too tight. One of the sigils near the stove flared red for a heartbeat, casting warped shadows across the kitchen shelves.

Luna didn’t flinch. She turned, calm as ever, lifting her wand from its place on the windowsill.

“You should finish your toast,” she said, her tone smooth and almost careless.

Theo stood abruptly. “Why?”

She glanced at him, already walking toward the hallway.

“Because someone’s about to try to kill me,” she said lightly, “and I don’t think blood pairs well with citrus.”

Theo’s voice sliced through the air, low and rough, edged with panic that sat too close to fury. “What the fuck are you talking about?” The words tumbled out before he could catch them, sharp and breathless, and he was already pushing his chair back, already standing, already strung too tight. His heart raced, thudding high in his throat, and the taste of iron settled on his tongue without warning.

Luna didn’t even flinch. She turned just enough to glance at him, her gaze impossibly calm, like the moment had not shifted, like the air around them wasn’t tightening. “Your hearing is excellent,” she said, her voice as soft and infuriatingly measured as ever.

That calm only poured fuel over the fire clawing its way up his chest. He closed the distance in two steps, heat rising fast and raw beneath his skin. “Don’t fuck with me, Lovegood,” he snarled, every word heavier than the last, his breath uneven, almost ragged. “Is someone trying to kill you? Today? Here? When? Answer me. Now.”

But she was already slipping away from him, moving down the hall with that quiet grace she always carried, as though nothing urgent had been spoken, as though danger did not live in her shadow. His control snapped. He lunged after her and caught her by the arm, spinning her back toward him, pressing her gently but firmly against the cool wall. His hands gripped her arms, not rough, but firm enough to still her, to force her to stay.

Not to hurt. Never to hurt. Only to anchor himself.

His breath was shallow, his heart racing fast and uneven, but it was the stillness in her that nearly undid him. Her calm sat there between them, sharp and patient, like she was waiting for him to catch up to something she already knew.

Her reaction was immediate. No hesitation, no raised voice, no warning. Luna’s fingers closed around his throat with shocking ease, not hard enough to choke, but firm enough to stop him in place, firm enough to remind him she was not someone to be grabbed without consequence. Her expression didn’t shift. Her voice stayed maddeningly soft.

“Say sorry.”

He froze, completely thrown, heart hammering. “What?”

“You hurt my back,” she said, simple and matter-of-fact, as if they were discussing a misplaced spoon rather than standing in a hallway where she now held him by the throat. “Say sorry.”

His grip on her arms tightened slightly, not from anger, but from the confusion tightening around his ribs. “I’m... Lovegood, let go of my throat.”

She blinked slowly, eyes clear and steady, her fingers not budging. “You first.”

The silence between them cracked open, heavy and breathless. His mind spun for a beat longer than it should have before he gave in, breath leaving him in a low, frustrated exhale as his hands dropped away from her arms, fingers curling into fists at his sides like he needed to remind himself what they were for.

“Sorry,” he muttered, the word barely making it past his lips.

She released him the instant the word landed, smooth and precise, as if she had never doubted he would say it. The air rushed back into his lungs, cool and sharp and too thin, and yet somehow he felt no freer than before.

But then something worse happened, something that made his skin crawl with the realization of it. In that strange, charged stillness, his body betrayed him. The feel of her fingers at his throat, her calm control, her utterly steady gaze—it lit a fuse deep in his gut, low and hot and undeniable. A discovery he absolutely did not want to think about.

He stepped back quickly, jaw tight, trying to breathe evenly. He worked hard to layer ice into his voice when he spoke again.

“When are they going to attack you?” he asked, desperate to put distance between himself and that moment, to feel like a professional again, like a man who still knew what he was doing.

She was already moving past him, bare feet silent on the stone floor, her voice as casual and calm as ever. “I don’t know,” she said. “I only saw a vision.”

The hallway was filled with a silence so complete it felt almost alive. Not peaceful, not gentle, but something dense and heavy, pressing in around him like a held breath that stretched too long. It was the kind of silence that warned of a break, fragile and tight, the air itself straining under its weight. The wards along the walls pulsed faintly at the edges of his vision, flickering like frightened things, stretched thin. And beneath everything was a feeling that made the hairs on his arms lift, a sensation that something was coming, pressing hard against the very skin of the world, ready to tear through.

Theo felt it before he heard a sound. It climbed through him slowly, inevitable, starting as a tightness in his jaw, the grind of his teeth, the slow heat crawling up the back of his neck. His wand felt heavier in his grip, familiar and foreign all at once, its weight shifting as if it too could sense what was rising in the air. His fingers tightened around it without thinking, bracing himself.

“Where?” His voice was rough and low, cutting through the stillness like a blade, raw with urgency.

But Luna was already moving. Without hesitation, without rush. Her hair had fallen loose, the pale strands catching the dim light, shifting like a veil as she walked. Barefoot and steady, she crossed the stone floor as though there was no danger at all, as though she was simply walking toward the window to let in fresh air. No fear. No hesitation.

“They’re already inside,” she said, soft and almost calm, the words somehow heavier for their quietness.

A sharp curse slipped from between Theo’s teeth, not loud but rough and raw, the kind of sound made when control snaps just enough to show what lies beneath. And then he moved, fast and sure, no more hesitation left in him.

He moved fast, so fast his body blurred at the edges of the room, not because he lacked control but because sometimes the body simply knew before the mind could catch up, and his body had known since sunrise that something was coming.

He shoved past her without a word, a flicker of apology in his eyes but never spoken aloud, every instinct snapping into place beneath his skin, wrapping around old scars like armor he no longer questioned. The corridor stretched ahead, a quiet passage now warped by the erratic flicker of the wards, their usual steady hum shattered into jittering pulses of green and amber that blinked too fast, like a heartbeat out of rhythm. Everything felt wrong. The kind of wrong that turned breath shallow and sharp. The kind that told him something sacred had been violated.

His feet moved automatically, muscle memory guiding him. Eleven steps to the front door, eight to the first window, the one with the cracked pane Luna refused to repair because she swore it let spirits breathe. Three more strides to the side passage that wound toward the study. And just beyond that, the sound.

Not a spell. Not a scream.

A footfall. Heavy. Sure. The kind of step that did not belong in a place like this.

Then, almost too faint to catch, the sharp breath of someone who didn’t expect to be heard. Panic exhaled into a silence they didn’t understand. That was when Theo knew. Not just that they were here, but that they were amateurs. Someone truly dangerous would not have made a sound.

And then came the crash. A window breaking. A spell misfiring. Someone tripping over something they didn’t understand. The noise cracked through the corridor like a curse given shape, shattering the brittle tension into splinters, and before it had finished echoing against the stone walls, Theo was moving again. No pause. No hesitation. No breath wasted on thought or doubt.

His mind narrowed to instinct, his body sharpening to a single purpose. The world had already shrunk down to this: the next step, the next breath, the next strike.

He rounded the corner with the kind of precision that could only come from years of training, wand raised, body low and angled, eyes cutting through the dim like a blade. Then he saw him — the first intruder, tall, too tall, wrapped in fabric meant to obscure rather than truly conceal, hood pulled low but not enough to disguise the arrogance in his stance. His wand was already lifted, lips curling around the start of a curse.

But it was too late.

Theo had already seen everything he needed to.

The man’s height, his quick, clipped movements, his false confidence, the way he prioritized speed over silence. This was no professional. This was the kind of operative who believed brute force could replace elegance. The wand in his hand glowed faintly green, curse forming but not yet loosed.

Theo moved first.

Not with raw speed but with precision, instinct tightening inside him like a coil snapping into place. The spell left his wand soundlessly, no warning, a pulse of pressure that did not burn or flash but crushed, brutal and unseen, aimed right at the man’s chest. The impact rang down the hall, deep and final, like a bell tolling in some distant ruin.

The intruder flew backward, hit the wall hard enough to leave a dent, a splintered crater cracking the plaster. He staggered, feet skidding, ribs heaving. He did not fall completely.

Good.

Theo wanted him awake for what would come next.

But there was no time to finish it now.

The second one was already here.

Glass exploded inward, a bloom of shattering sound, shards catching the low light and spinning like fractured stars. Theo dropped low and spun, rolling into the next room as a curse sliced through the air behind him. The wall cracked where the spell struck. He did not feel it but he heard the sharp crack and knew how close it had come.

He rose behind the second intruder in one smooth motion, emerging from his crouch as if the shadows themselves had gathered and reformed into him. His hand shot forward, caught the attacker’s wrist before the man even registered he was no longer alone. He twisted, sharp and merciless.

The snap was loud, bone giving way, and the scream that followed was ragged and short.

The wand clattered to the floor.

Theo did not wait.

He used the momentum to pivot, dragging the man forward and driving him face-first into the nearest wall. His other arm came up fast, elbow braced against the attacker’s throat, his knee pressing into the man’s spine, pinning him with precise, ruthless pressure. The man thrashed against him, but it was the panic of someone untrained, a scramble without focus, drowning in pain.

Theo leaned in, voice low and rough, breath grazing the man’s ear. “Who sent you?”

The sound the man made wasn’t an answer. It wasn’t even coherent. Just fear, leaking out through his teeth.

Theo didn’t loosen his grip. He shifted his weight again, driving his knee harder into the small of the man’s back, tightening his forearm around his throat, enough to stop blood but not breath. He didn’t want him unconscious. Not yet. He wanted him to feel this. To understand exactly how close he was to ending.

“Who sent you?” he asked again, quieter now, quieter and worse for it.

Still nothing. No name, no plea, no bargain. Just ragged breath and the sharp, bitter stink of fear turning sour.

Theo didn’t ask a third time.

He moved fast. Hooked one arm under the man’s chin, the other behind the base of his skull, and wrenched. The sound was clean and final.

The silence that followed was brief, heavy. There were more. He could feel it. The house could feel it too, its walls humming low around him, as if recognizing him for what he was now. Not a guest. Not a guardian.

A weapon.

The broken body slid down the wall, leaving a smear of blood against the stone, a grim signature on the morning. Theo stepped back, breath steady but sharp, gaze already scanning, already searching. The house seemed to exhale around him, wards flickering with an awareness that hadn’t been there before.

He knew they would come again.

But now the house knew what he was capable of.

And so did the floor beneath him, warm now with blood, catching the light in uneven streaks among the scattered glass.

The grunt that tore from the attacker’s throat was sharp and choked, the startled sound of a man realizing too late that he might not walk out of this alive. It echoed for just a heartbeat, almost enough for Theo to think it was done, almost enough for him to believe that this moment was about to end cleanly. But then, woven beneath that dying sound, quiet and deliberate, came something else. A shift of weight on wood. A footfall that didn’t belong.

Not rushed. Not careless. Intentional.

Theo turned fast, fast enough to catch the gleam of a wand, the ripple in the air as a spell left it, silent, deadly. The third intruder hadn’t stumbled in like the others. He had waited, patient and clever, a predator crouched in shadows. When he struck, he struck clean.

The spell hit Theo’s shoulder like a lash of fire, not forceful but searing, immediate, slicing down his right side and setting his nerves alight. His wand arm faltered. His balance wavered.

But he didn’t fall.

He dropped, fast and low, controlled, his body flattening to the floor, moving on instinct more than thought, pulling himself out of the direct line of fire even as pain clawed through him. His breath hissed between his teeth but his training held. His mind narrowed to the essential.

His wand snapped up and he fired a curse without aiming, sending it into the space where the caster should be, low and fast, nonverbal, sharp with fury. He heard it hit.

The sound was immediate. A body meeting a wall too quickly. The crunch of bone. The thud of flesh. A grunt that was louder than anything the others had managed. Then a fall. Something cracked. Something splintered.

But the silence that followed wasn’t true silence. Not yet.

There was a whistle, high and shrill, absurdly domestic. The kettle. From the kitchen. Theo rose slowly, pushing himself upright with his good arm, his breath ragged, his shoulder a blaze of agony with every movement.

His wand stayed tight in his grip, slick with sweat and blood. The sleeve of his shirt was dark now, soaked through with a patch of crimson that dripped steadily from his elbow. He didn’t bother looking at it. He didn’t need to. His focus stayed on the wreckage around him.

The first intruder, the one he had slammed into the wall, sat slumped and unconscious against splintered wood. Blood trailed from his mouth, one arm twisted beneath him at an angle that promised he wouldn’t be casting anything for a long time.

The second man, the one who had come through the window, still clung to life, barely. He lay curled on the floor of the next room, wheezing with every breath, his ribs clearly broken. His hand was pressed tightly to his wrist like pressure alone could mend the damage Theo had done.

And the third, sprawled half in shadow, was the worst of them. He twitched, limbs shaking as he tried and failed to crawl away. His groans were thick with pain, with panic. One leg dragged uselessly behind him. His wand was gone. His hood had slipped, revealing a pale face streaked with blood running from his nose and mouth in twin, wet lines.

Theo moved toward him, slowly now, each step deliberate. Not because he was savoring it. Not because it pleased him. But because there was no urgency anymore. And because pain, when accepted, slowed everything down and made time itself feel heavy and pliable.

The man lifted his face and met Theo’s gaze, eyes wide, rimmed with disbelief and terror, as if he had thought this job would be simple, profitable, quick. As if he had never imagined he would face someone like Theo.

He tried to speak. Theo didn’t give him the chance. He grabbed the man by the collar and dragged him hard across the floor. The body scraped loudly, limbs flopping behind him like something already discarded. Theo didn’t care. He pulled him through the corridor without hesitation, leaving a thin smear of blood behind them on the stone.

The man’s fingers scrabbled against the walls, against the doorframes, desperate to slow the pull. His nails scraped uselessly over warded wood, leaving only faint scratches and streaks of blood.

And then they were in the kitchen. The kettle kept whistling. Luna stood at the stove. She hadn’t moved. Theo dropped the man onto the floor like discarded rubbish, his body landing with a wet, heavy thud that cut short the cry rising in his throat.

Luna didn’t flinch. Not when the body hit the tile like a sack of broken stone, not when the blood began to spread in slow, gleaming arcs across the floor, not even when the entire room seemed to contract under the weight of violence.

She stayed exactly where she had been, hands steady as she poured boiling water into two mismatched cups, steam rising in soft curls around her face, the kettle set aside with care. Her robe still hung loose at the shoulders, a pale linen thing slipping farther out of place, one thin strap trailing halfway down her arm, baring the long line of her collarbone and the soft curve of her neck where the ends of her hair clung, damp and curling.

Her braid had come undone completely, strands falling freely in every direction. She didn’t look like a woman who had just watched a man dragged in bleeding and broken. She looked like someone who had spent the morning tending to the soil and listening to something older than time itself.

She turned her head slightly, just enough to glance toward the heap of man and sweat and magic crumpled at her feet, and her voice was so calm it softened the edges of the room. “Is that the last one?”

Theo gave a tight nod, jaw clenched so hard it ached, the blood on his knuckles dripping steadily onto the tile, the rhythm of it almost matching the slow ticking of the clock above the stove. The man on the floor shifted, slow and deliberate, testing his limbs, testing Theo, half-clinging to whatever arrogance had convinced him this would go differently.

“Do you want milk?” Luna asked softly, as if she had only just noticed the tea might need it.

Theo didn’t answer. He lowered himself slowly, knees stiff, back tight, his body humming with restraint. The man twitched suddenly, reaching toward something tucked beneath the folds of his cloak—a knife or a charm or maybe something worse—but Theo moved faster. He caught the wrist mid-reach and twisted hard, the joint breaking in his grip with a sharp, ugly snap.

The man gasped, a ragged, desperate sound, but Theo was already shifting his weight. He dragged the arm behind the man’s back, pinning it there, his knee pressing hard between the shoulder blades until the spine bowed under the strain. The man screamed then, loud and ugly, a sound that bounced off the cupboards and filled the kitchen.

Luna stirred her tea, the quiet clink of silver on porcelain delicate and absurd in the charged air.

Theo stayed silent until his hand found the man’s throat, fingers closing just tight enough to crush but not silence, the grip precise, brutal, a perfect calibration of pain and restraint. He leaned in, close enough that his breath brushed the man’s ear, his voice low, smooth, cold. “Why are you here?”

The man choked, flailed, fingers scraping uselessly across the blood-slick tile. His broken hand twitched at nothing, hunting for purchase. Theo didn’t ease up. His thumb shifted, pressing into the windpipe, pinning him exactly at the edge of collapse. The man’s legs kicked weakly behind him, spasms without control.

“I asked you a question,” Theo murmured again, softer, almost gentle, the words curling slow and heavy into the air between them.

Still no answer. Just gasps and fear and the unmistakable weight of defeat.

Theo’s grip tightened.

He felt the cartilage start to buckle, the man’s throat softening beneath his palm. The man’s hands clawed at his wrist, nails dragging shallow, burning lines into his skin, but Theo didn’t flinch. He would stop when he chose, and not a second before.

Luna set a teacup beside him, the ceramic touching down with a faint click that somehow seemed louder than the man’s gasping. “Careful,” she said lightly, voice calm as still water. “You’ll bruise your knuckles.”

Theo looked up at her, just for a moment, and something shifted in the air. The whole room seemed to hold its breath. Her gaze was distant but deep, watching him with that unsettling way she had, as if she wasn’t seeing just this moment, but all the moments tangled together. He felt raw under it, scraped open and exposed, as though she saw not only what he was doing, but every reason behind it, all the things he’d never admit even to himself.

He dropped his gaze before the feeling could take root. Looked down at the man beneath him, this intruder who had brought blood into a house that mattered, who had stepped into this space thinking it could be taken. The man’s breath hitched, catching hard in his throat, rattling like wind through broken glass.

And Theo squeezed, measured and final, a movement made not in rage but in certainty. The man’s body jolted once, a sharp sound rising in the back of his throat and then fading completely. Just stillness after that. The kind of stillness that sat heavy in the air, thicker than steam, thick enough to feel.

And he ended it. 

Theo stood slowly, rising as if from a grave, his muscles aching from the strain, blood slicking his hands and soaking the torn edge of his sleeve, his whole body thrumming with the aftershocks of violence and the distant, familiar echo of guilt that never arrived fast enough to stop him.

Luna handed him the tea with a gentleness that felt like sacrilege, her fingers brushing his with a calm so complete it felt orchestrated, like a ritual, like something ceremonial rather than casual.

 She didn’t look at the corpse on the floor, didn’t even glance down, as if death in her kitchen was just another variable in the alchemical equation of their lives, as if the blood pooling near her bare feet was less important than the warmth of the cup she placed in his palm.

"You smell even more like iron now," she said, her voice soft but laced with something more pointed, a glimmer of amusement or maybe reverence or maybe something older than either, and then she smiled, not wide, not bright, but full of knowledge, the kind of smile that came from seeing things no one else would dare claim.

Theo took the cup because there was nothing else to do, because his fingers had already closed around the handle before he realized he was moving, because the weight of the porcelain was suddenly the only thing anchoring him to the moment, and though he held it tightly, with both hands wrapped around its smooth surface, his hands still trembled, the tremor small but steady, as if something inside him had finally cracked open and let the shaking begin.

She moved with the same quiet precision she brought to everything else, her presence a hush rather than a disruption, and when she returned to him it was not with distance or hesitance but with a cloth in her hand, damp and warm and faintly scented with rosemary and salt, the kind of cloth one might use to ease a fever or wash the sweat from a fevered child, and without a word she knelt beside him and began to clean the blood from his fingers, each movement slow and deliberate, wrapping the cloth around each joint with a tenderness that had no place in the aftermath of violence, but which he allowed anyway, without resistance, because somehow it didn’t feel like softness, it felt like truth. 

Her fingers were cool where his were hot, and he watched in a strange silence as the water lifted the red from his skin, the cloth darkening with it, the water smearing before it cleaned. He didn’t look at her face. Not yet. He only spoke when the trembling had stilled enough to form words.

“Are you alright?” he asked, his voice low, roughened at the edges by what had passed, by what still buzzed beneath his skin like static.

She looked up then, her eyes catching the light in a way that made them momentarily too bright, and smiled with a serenity that seemed impossible to hold after what she’d just watched him do. “Absolutely. Thank you.”

He shook his head slightly, the corner of his mouth twitching with something like disbelief. “I’m just doing my job.”

She leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his forehead. It wasn’t lingering, wasn’t ceremonial, just the soft brush of her lips against his sweat-damp skin. But it landed like a blow, more jarring than the pain in his arm, more disarming than the blood drying on his clothes. When she pulled back she was already moving, already turning toward the shelf where she kept her potions. Her voice followed, quiet and steady. "I’ll bring the calming draught."

He didn’t answer. He stayed where he was, back pressed to the cabinet, hand resting heavy on his thigh, tea cooling beside him and forgotten. The adrenaline still hummed hot and irrational through his veins. His pulse pounded everywhere — in his throat, at his temple, in his wrist, behind his eyes. Then deeper, lower, spreading into heat that twisted low in his gut and made him clench his jaw, made him shift against the cold tile because, inexplicably, horrifyingly, he was hard.

It made no sense. This had never happened before, not after combat, not after clean kills, not even after the messiest nights. And it wasn’t about the blood, not really. He didn’t think it was the control either, though that always carried its own dark satisfaction. It might have been the kiss. Or maybe the way she had thanked him. Or the way she touched him like he wasn’t dangerous. Or maybe it was all of it tangled together, too much, too fast, too close.

He couldn’t think about it. Not now. Not with her steps retreating softly across the tile. Not with his breath still coming too fast and shallow. Not with the kitchen still heavy with the scent of citrus and iron and her.

~

He had just begun to settle into something resembling rest, the sheets pulled across his chest, the room dim and warm with the quiet hum of protective wards pulsing along the baseboards, when the door burst open in that infuriatingly casual way that had become far too common in recent weeks. No knock, no hesitation, just Luna stepping over the threshold like it belonged to her, which it did, technically, with Sol cradled in her arms like a diplomatic offering. The tiny creature blinked at him with round, accusing eyes.

Theo sat up with a sigh, already regretting the fragile illusion of quiet he had tried to build for himself. His shoulder still ached, his nerves still raw from the day’s violence, and he rubbed a hand down his face as she crossed to the foot of his bed with the confidence of someone who had never once been told no.

“You should knock,” he muttered, voice low, the words sliding out on a breath too tired to carry the bite he wanted.

She looked at him, completely unbothered, adjusting Sol in her arms like a mother presenting a child for introduction. “They need to bond, remember?” she said, as if that were not only a valid reason to invade his room but also the most pressing issue they faced.

Theo stared at her, frustration rising behind his ribs like smoke. When he finally spoke, his words were sharp. “Lovegood. Someone tried to kill you today. Actually, several people tried to kill you. There’s blood on the kitchen floor, I have bruises on my spine, and you’re walking around carrying guinea pigs like this house isn’t still echoing with the sound of breaking bones. How can you be so calm? How can you be thinking about the fucking guinea pigs?”

She blinked at him, undisturbed, and lowered Sol into the little cloth-lined basket beside Artemis, who gave a single approving squeak before curling protectively around the newcomer.

“They are social creatures,” Luna said, her tone light and matter-of-fact, as if explaining a basic law of nature to a stubborn student. “They need to be friends.”

He rubbed both hands down his face this time, groaning into his palms. Then he looked at her again, jaw tight, pulse still uneven. “Are you intentionally ignoring my question?”

She turned to the door, entirely serene, and gave him one of those strange, soft smiles that always seemed to hold half the universe.

“Absolutely,” she said, and left him sitting there with a throbbing shoulder, a head full of questions, and two increasingly co-dependent guinea pigs now cohabiting at the foot of his bed.

He stared down at the tiny creature curled in the woven nest at the foot of his bed, her whiskers twitching, her small body pressed close against Artemis like they had known each other forever, as if this moment had always been inevitable. Theo exhaled slowly, the sound heavy with resignation, the long-suffering patience of a man who knew he had lost control of his life a while ago and was now merely along for the ride.

He jabbed a finger toward Sol, as solemn as a man delivering a verdict, his voice flat and dry with disbelief. “That one,” he muttered, tone dripping with deadpan venom, “is completely mental.”

Sol blinked up at him, unbothered.

He gestured again, slower this time, as if making sure the accusation landed properly. “Your mum,” he continued, his words carrying the weight of someone revealing a terrible secret, “is absolutely insane. You live in a madhouse and she’s the queen of it.”

For a moment, the cottage felt like it might be listening, holding its breath.

And then from somewhere deep in the house, distant but unmistakably clear, Luna’s voice rang out, full of bright amusement rather than any real offense. “I heard that!” she called, her words drifting through the walls like a breeze carrying laughter and mischief in equal measure.

Theo groaned, dropping his head back onto the pillows, rubbing a hand over his face. “Of course you did,” he muttered, barely loud enough for himself to hear.

Sol let out a tiny, squeaky sound, a noise that might have been agreement or judgment, and Theo sighed again, closing his eyes, utterly defeated.

~

The first body was heavier than he expected, not just in weight but in that strange way the dead became heavier when stripped of breath and resistance, when motion was gone and all that remained was absence. Theo, who had moved bodies before, who understood the difference between stunned and emptied, still felt something about this particular weight gnaw at him in a way he couldn’t explain.

He dragged it by the shoulders, not gently and not with haste, his boots rasping against the warped old floorboards with every pull. The friction was loud, too loud in the hush that had settled over the house, the scrape of wood and leather mixing with the wet drag of blood tracing behind him in thin, broken lines, like a name signed over and over by an unsteady hand.

The hood had slipped somewhere between the struggle and the fall. The face now stared upward, pale and open-mouthed, lips parted as if trying to speak one last word that would never arrive. The eyes were wide too, blank and glassy, but Theo didn’t look away. He didn’t reach to close them. He didn’t give this man even that final mercy.

He kept going, step by measured step, shallow breaths pulling tight in his chest, as the house watched in silence and the floor remembered.

Outside, the garden sat steeped in a quiet that didn’t belong to twilight or dawn, not a pause between breezes or the hush before birdsong, but something deeper, older, a silence that felt pressed into the soil itself. It clung to every blade of grass and heavy leaf like a warning, like a spell waiting to be spoken, like the hush that falls in ancient woods before something sharp and hungry begins to move.

Mist curled low along the ground in long, deliberate coils, heavy with the scent of rot waiting to bloom. It wrapped itself around hedgerows and tangled herbs like smoke from a fire that hadn’t started. The air hung dense, damp with copper and salt, charged with magic that waited in the soil, heavy and patient, unwilling yet to rise.

Luna stood at the center of it all, barefoot in the tall grass that licked at her ankles. She looked as though she had always belonged there, her sleeves rolled to her elbows, forearms streaked with something darker than soil, fingers painted with patterns that made Theo’s teeth ache when he tried too hard to understand them. She didn’t turn when he arrived. She didn’t have to.

She raised one hand instead, her gesture small and precise, toward the wide circle she had begun tracing into the wet ground. Salt lined its edges in a careful ring too fine to scatter, sprigs of clover marking its compass points, and some gray powder dusted between them that shimmered faintly in the mist. Theo could not name it but felt it settle against his skin with a pull that went all the way down to his bones.

“It won’t work here,” she said, her voice quiet but absolute. It cut through the thick air like a bell’s echo heard underwater. She didn’t glance up from the salt line, didn’t pause her work. “The house doesn’t like smoke.”

Theo stopped at the edge of the garden path where the stone gave way to grass. One boot rested on either side, his breath misting faintly in front of his face as he looked down at the body in his grasp. The weight of it suddenly felt heavier, more intrusive. Blood had dried in the creases of his gloved fingers where they clenched the collar. He blinked slowly and asked, voice low and sharp, every word edged with tension, “What do you mean, it doesn’t like smoke?”

She leaned forward, smoothing the salt with her fingers, the movement gentle, reverent, like she was correcting a prayer. “Smoke is too loud,” she replied, calm as if reciting a natural law. “Too final. It pushes things into the air that don’t want to leave. Pain. Memory. Flame opens doors better left closed. The house prefers offerings.”

“Offerings,” he echoed, flat and brittle, the word sharp against his tongue. He felt it all the way down his spine, something dense and old stirring in its sound. “Offerings to what?”

Still, she did not look up. Her voice stayed steady, quiet but steady enough to sink deep. “To itself. To whatever lets us stay.”

Theo watched her for a long moment, saying nothing. The cold wind pressed softly against the back of his neck, carrying with it a warning he couldn’t articulate. Beneath his boots, the ground pulsed faintly, alive but holding its breath, as if the garden itself had paused to listen. The air seemed to thicken around him. Nothing moved but her fingers smoothing the salt. He didn’t question again. He turned, the body dragging limply behind him, and walked back toward the house.

The second body waited in the hall, crumpled at the base of the stairs. His eyes were still open, his face slack, as though the question he had tried to ask was still caught in his throat, unfinished, silenced before Theo’s work was done. Theo bent and gathered the corpse by the arms, dragging it across the floor without looking back at the dark streak left behind. The house stayed silent. The wards did not stir. Not a single floorboard gave a whisper of complaint. No blood rose in protest.

When Theo stepped into the garden again, Luna had finished the circle. It was larger now, sprawling in a shape that looked almost alive, its etched lines glowing in a slow, amber rhythm. The symbols breathed with a quiet intelligence, ancient and watchful.

At the center of it all sat a stone bowl, old enough to look timeless. The surface was rough and cracked, like a dry riverbed that had not known water in an age, but inside, it was worn smooth, polished by time and countless rituals. The hollow of the basin cradled something that gleamed darkly. Whatever rested there was too fluid to be blood, too heavy to be water, glimmering beneath the moonlight with a strange, oily sheen that caught both the mist and the shadows. It seemed to drink in the night sky itself.

And it pulsed. Softly, steadily, like a breath drawn in and out, or the memory of a heartbeat that refused to die.

Theo looked at it for only a moment. The sight stirred something deep in the back of his mind, something he didn’t want to name, didn’t want to let surface. He tore his gaze away, jaw clenched, heart pounding harder than it had during the fight. He didn’t ask what it was. He didn’t want to know.

Luna turned toward him then. She brushed her hands down the front of her robes, streaks of earth and bone dust smearing across the fabric as if it didn’t matter. Her expression was unreadable, as always, but something in her stillness carried a quiet purpose.

"Can I help you bury them?" she asked. Her voice was soft, but not fragile. It felt like she was offering to lay a table or pour a kettle, not speak over death.

Theo snorted, the sound bitter as it scraped his throat. He shifted the shovel against his shoulder, blood crusted under his nails and sweat cooling at the back of his neck.

"You’ll get hurt," he muttered. "I’ll do it myself."

She didn’t flinch. She didn’t soften or retreat or even seem the least bit moved by the warning.

"I've done this before, Theodore," she said, calm as stone. "I’ll be fine."

His mouth tightened, his jaw aching as he stared at her, the words spilling out before he could catch them.

"How many corpses are buried in this fucked-up garden?"

She turned her head, gaze drifting toward the hedgerow where the mist curled thick around the tallest herbs. Her voice stayed steady.

"Too many to count."

Theo dragged a hand down his face, an exhale sharp between his teeth.

"Lovely," he muttered. "What is wrong with you, honestly?"

She smiled then.The kind of smile given in confession rather than pride.

"Too many things," she murmured. "At least that’s what the healer says."

He rolled his eyes, tension heavy in his shoulders.

"The healer is correct."

She gave a serene nod.

"You are welcome to leave."

But he didn’t move. Not because he wanted to stay, not really. Something in the earth still felt like it was breathing, slow and ancient and patient. And somehow, she was the only thing here that made any sense at all.

~

The smell reached him first. Cinnamon drifting through the air, soft and warm, curling around the briny sharpness of sea salt. Sweetness layered over something strange. It felt like two seasons colliding in the same pot.

Theo hesitated in the doorway, shoulders tight, one hand resting near his wand. He watched her as she moved barefoot across the tiled floor. The hem of her skirt skimmed her ankles. Her hair was pinned loosely, held by a single ink-stained quill that bobbed as she stepped. She didn’t look at him. She never needed to.

She stirred the pot with careful, deliberate movements. Steam rose and caught the light, curling upward in pale, shifting spirals. The table was already set. Two mismatched plates. A beeswax candle burning low in the center. A small bowl of herbs beside a ceramic dish that looked old enough to have been stolen from a cathedral long ago.

She hummed as she worked. Not a song. Just a soft, tuneless murmur, the sound of someone not concerned with being heard.

Theo stayed where he was, unsure what this was meant to be. A peace offering or a test. The house had been quiet for hours, a silence that had weight, that settled into the walls.

At last he sat, because he had nowhere else to go. The chair creaked under him, and he hated that it did.

Luna moved with the same quiet certainty she always carried. It felt as though even the floor recognized her footsteps, as if the cupboards themselves breathed along with her. She ladled something thick and golden into a bowl, set it before him without a word, then turned back to the stove.

That was when he saw it.

Above the fireplace, etched into the black stone mantle, a rune began to glow. Thin and delicate, it pulsed slowly with amber light.

It flickered once. Then again.

Theo’s whole body went still, breath caught tight in his chest.

A moment later, a dark stain began to bloom across the far wall. Slow and certain. Red seeping through cracked plaster like ivy curling toward the sun.

Behind him, in the corner of the room, a mirror cracked. The sound was sharp, sudden, and deliberate.

His wand was in his hand before the echo of the crack had even faded.

Luna didn’t flinch. She didn’t glance at the mirror. She didn’t hesitate as she plated the final spoonful of something dark and fragrant onto her dish. Then she turned toward the table, her movements unhurried.

"Ignore it," she said, as if she were mentioning the weather. "The house likes to sulk."

Theo didn’t lower his wand right away. His eyes swept the room, taking in the glowing sigil, the stain on the wall, the mirror cracked clean through. Nothing moved. Nothing shifted. Even the pulse of light had gone still.

At last, he set the wand on the table, close to his right hand, and drew in a careful breath. The food smelled almost intoxicating, warm and rich, curling around the tension that sat heavy in his chest.

They ate without speaking for several minutes. The only sounds were the soft clink of cutlery against ceramic, the quiet hiss of something caramelizing in the kitchen, and the slow drip of blood still winding its way down the cracked plaster. Theo chewed carefully, every muscle in his jaw tight, every bite measured and deliberate, as if speaking would break something fragile in the room.

Halfway through the meal, Luna rested her chin in her palm and watched him over the rim of her glass. Her expression was impossible to read.

"You chew like someone who’s been interrogated for dinner," she said finally, voice light, amusement threading through her tone.

He didn’t look at her right away. When he did, his eyes were cool, guarded.

"You cook like someone who learned from a ghost."

Her smile at that was slow, secretive, almost soft.

"I did."

The candle between them flared suddenly, not with grace but with a violent hiss. Its flame snapped high and jagged for an instant, casting a sharp, slashing shadow across the table before it settled again. From the far corner of the room came another sharp crack. The mirror splintered further, another fracture spreading like a slow wound through the glass.

Theo’s grip on his fork tightened, his jaw locking as he forced himself to stay still.

"Why is the house sulking?" he asked, voice low, sharpened to a point, his gaze fixed on her as if he were interrogating her across an invisible line. "I protected its queen."

Luna did not blink. She lifted her glass and took a slow sip, her calm almost maddening. When she set the glass down, her voice was steady.

"It doesn’t like blood. And it especially doesn’t like disrespect."

Theo’s fist came down hard on the table, rattling the plates and sending the candle rocking violently in its holder.

"I saved your fucking life," he snapped, his words crashing against the stone walls, loud enough to feel like a curse.

A mug flew at him without warning, spinning fast and sharp, and he barely ducked in time. It shattered against the wall behind him, shards scattering across the floor like angry little teeth.

Luna didn’t rise. She didn’t even flinch. She just sat there, staring at him with a gaze so cold, so quietly pointed, it hit harder than any spell he had ever felt. If looks could kill, he’d already be buried under the garden with the rest of them.

"Apologize," she said, the word low and flat, not a request but a command. There was something ancient curled into the edges of it.

Theo let out a bitter laugh, dragging a hand roughly through his hair, fingers catching, like that gesture was the only thing keeping him grounded.

"You must be a fucking Dom in your private life, Lovegood," he snapped, his voice sharp and mean, full of venom he barely had the energy to spit. "It’s not my style."

She leaned back slightly. The candlelight caught her face, a flicker dancing in her eyes.

"Your style?" she repeated, soft, almost gentle, but laced with something that felt like pity. "You mean raw-dogging whores in Knockturn Alley? Or getting your cock sucked behind a pub for fifty galleons?"

His entire body went still.

"Don’t test your luck," he warned. But it was hollow. Weak. The words fell flat the second they left his mouth.

She tilted her head. "Am I not correct?"

He couldn’t answer. He didn’t even try. He just stood there, jaw clenched so tight it ached, shoulders locked, while shame burned hot under his skin because every word she had said was true. And they both knew it.

The mirror cracked again. A new fracture, sharp and deliberate, splitting its reflection even further.

The candle guttered. Its flame trembled before finding balance again.

~

She entered his room without knocking, as always. Her bare feet made a soft whisper against the wood as the door swung open, easy and careless, with all the breezy entitlement of someone who had never been taught boundaries and wouldn’t have cared for them even if she had.

Theo sat up in bed, a book open across his lap. He was already scowling by the time she reached the center of the room, her silhouette framed in dim light like a shadow that had come alive, utterly unaware of personal space.

"Lovegood," he said, voice clipped, patience worn thin. "Privacy."

She tilted her head, as if the word itself was foreign, as if it didn’t quite translate into her language. Her expression was wide-eyed and innocent, maddeningly unaffected.

"You masturbate in the shower," she said, matter-of-fact, like she was commenting on the weather. "So I think I’m entitled to enter your room occasionally. That seems like a fair exchange."

Theo nearly dropped the book. His whole body snapped upright, spine rigid, a flush rushing to his face so fast it burned.

"No," he said, his voice strained and sharp, tight as a hex he was struggling to hold back. "That is enough. Get out."

She blinked at him, unbothered. She seemed to take the escalation in his tone as nothing more than another sound the house might make on a quiet night.

"But they need to say goodnight to each other," she said calmly, lifting a small woven basket into view.

Inside, Artemis and Sol, the two guinea pigs, nestled together, tiny and serene, like twin gods waiting for their nightly ritual.

Theo ran a hand down his face, breathing in deeply like he was trying to keep from exploding. “No,” he said again, each syllable carved with disbelief. “They do not. They will manage one bloody night without saying goodnight. Get. Out.”

She turned on her heel with the theatrical flair of a stage actress exiting after a monologue, her long braid swinging behind her like punctuation, and swept out of the room with a huff so exaggerated it might have knocked over the candle beside his bed.

He exhaled into the silence, teeth gritted, and muttered under his breath, “Fucking lunatic.”

But the house was always on her side. He couldn’t deny it anymore. It wasn’t just suspicion, wasn’t paranoia creeping at the edges. It was fact. The house had chosen her, maybe long before Theo ever crossed the threshold. Maybe before he had even agreed to this ridiculous assignment. Before he understood what it meant to live among things that breathed without lungs and watched without eyes.

And just as his body had finally begun to give in, just as he had almost drifted off, as his breath had settled and the tightness in his shoulders had started to loosen, the house whispered.

"Apologize."

It wasn’t a voice like Luna’s, soft and lilting, nor like anything he had ever heard in waking hours. It came from everywhere. From the walls, from the grain of the bedframe, from the space between the floorboards and the silence itself. Not a sound, exactly. It pressed straight into the center of his spine.

Theo shot upright. His pulse thundered in his chest as he stared out into the dark, suddenly sure the shadows had grown teeth. He dragged both hands down his face, twice, rubbing hard, telling himself he was dreaming, hallucinating, slipping into one of those delusions Luna always insisted were simply doors opening.

But then it came again.

"Apologize."

It didn’t sound angry. It didn’t even sound disappointed. But it carried weight. Consequence. Inevitability.

Theo got up slowly, muttering under his breath, pulling on a jumper as if armor would help, and scooped Artemis into his arms. The little guinea pig wriggled against his chest, soft and warm, as though even she understood the quiet gravity of this reluctant midnight pilgrimage.

The hallway felt cold. The wards pulsed faintly along the walls, like veins beneath skin, alive and steady. As he reached her door, he paused. Just for a moment. His hand lifted to knock.

But he never got the chance.

The door creaked open by itself, just wide enough to let him in, as though the house had grown tired of waiting.

She was already sitting up in bed. Legs crossed under her. Her nightdress rumpled, sleeves pushed high on her arms. Sol was tucked into the crook of one elbow, and her free hand stroked his fur in slow, absentminded motions.

She was crying.

These weren’t loud, wracking sobs, not the kind that demanded to be seen. They were quiet. The kind that slid silently down cheeks and gathered in the hollow of a throat. The kind that belonged to long hours spent pretending you didn’t need anything at all.

She didn’t look at him. Not when the door creaked open. Not when his footsteps crossed the threshold. Not even when he stopped in front of her like a man arriving at an altar.

He knelt beside the bed. Gently, carefully, he set Artemis in her lap.

"I... I’m sorry," he said. His voice was rough, low, unused to softness. It cracked around the edges. "I understand that they’re important to you."

She sniffed. Her hand kept stroking Sol’s back, steady and automatic, but she didn’t loosen her hold.

"They need to be friends," she whispered. Her voice broke and sharpened all at once. "They must be friends. And you are ruining it every fucking day."

Theo blinked. The ferocity surprised him, but more than that, the desperation underneath caught him off guard. And then it clicked, all at once.

It had never really been about Artemis or Sol. Not exactly.

This whole strange routine,  all of it was scaffolding. Her way of trying. Her way of reaching out with those soft, strange hands of hers, building something fragile and precious that might last. She was doing her best. In her loony, beautiful, infuriating way, she was doing her best to belong.

He sat on the edge of the bed, careful not to come too close, and cleared his throat quietly.

"How old is Sol?" he asked. "How did you get him?"

She rubbed at her face with the back of her sleeve and glanced down at the two guinea pigs curled together like a yin and yang drawn in fur.

"I think it’s a him," she murmured. "I’m not sure. I got him because I thought Artemis had no friends. She was lonely. Miserable. She stopped eating her hay cubes and refused the dandelion leaves. I thought... maybe she needed a companion."

Theo nodded slowly. "She did. She needed someone." He paused, then added gently, "That was kind of you. Thank you for that. I think... I think they enjoy each other’s company, don’t they?"

Luna watched as Sol nudged his head under Artemis’ chin, the two of them breathing together in perfect rhythm.

"Sol definitely does," she murmured.

Theo hesitated. His hand hovered near her shoulder for a moment before he pulled it back, but his voice softened even more.

"Artemis too, darling. Don’t worry. They’re friends. Yeah?"

Luna wiped another tear from her cheek and smiled, small and tired. The kind of smile that lived in the quiet after storms.

"I think so," she whispered.

And then there was only silence, soft and shared.

Just the four of them in the room.

Artemis and Sol. Sun and Moon . Theo and Luna.

Chapter Text

Time moved strangely here. Or maybe it didn’t move at all. It felt suspended between breath and tide, caught in the stillness the house seemed to gather and hold like something precious.

It was impossible to tell how long they had been sitting like that. Side by side in the hush, their thoughts louder than their voices, the wind the only thing that felt brave enough to speak freely on the roof.

Then, so quietly it might have been a thought she hadn’t meant to say aloud, she asked, "What would you be doing, if you hadn’t been sent to me?"

He didn’t answer right away. The question settled in him like dust, soft but persistent, coating places inside him where he usually let nothing touch. It didn’t feel like a trap. Not exactly. But it pressed close to something that could become one if he wasn’t careful.

He let out a slow breath, steadying himself before saying, "Probably dying somewhere far less interesting."

She laughed, but the sound was short and delicate, like it had cracked on its way out.

"That’s not an answer," she said. There was no accusation in her tone. Just quiet sadness, like she had heard too many not-answers before.

Theo tilted his head slightly, still watching the sea.

"I don’t know," he admitted. "Does anyone really know? I was made for this. For things like this. For violence and orders and silence. Not for dreaming."

She didn’t reply right away. She just kept her gaze on the tide, watching it pull itself against the rocks again and again. Her body was so still, her breath even and patient, as though she were waiting for the sea itself to give her the right words.

And then, softly, but with a clarity that left no space for deflection, she asked, "If you could dream something. Anything. What would it be?"

He swallowed hard. The impulse to lie rose fast, familiar. To say something careless. To mock the question and slip away like he always did.

But she was looking at him now. Her gaze was steady and quiet and impossibly calm. And for once, he couldn’t look away.

"I think," he said slowly, each word careful, deliberate, "I would want a house. Not this kind. Not one that breathes when I’m not looking. Not one that whispers or watches or weighs me every time I cross the door. Just... a house. With walls that stay put."

She tilted her head, just a little. "Alone?"

He hesitated. His eyes narrowed, searching for something in the darkness beyond the cliff’s edge.

"I don’t know," he admitted, his voice quieter now. "Maybe not."

She didn’t ask again. She didn’t press or prod or try to tease meaning from his maybe. She just nodded, slow and gentle, her expression soft, unreadable, like she had heard something deeper than what he’d said.

And in the hush that followed, the moon kept shining. The sea kept breathing. Neither of them moved.

They stayed there, side by side on the roof, their shoulders near enough that the same wind touched both of them, but not quite close enough for their skin to meet. Even at the edges, where warmth might have passed quietly between them, they held that small space intact — that narrow space between closeness and caution.

It felt like they were suspended there, caught in something that wasn’t silence exactly, but observance. A kind of quiet that made the house itself feel more awake, more aware, as if its breath had slowed to listen.

Above them, the moon hung heavy and round, its light pale and expectant, not illuminating so much as watching, holding them gently in place. Under that gaze, neither of them dared move, as though even the smallest shift might tip them into something they couldn’t return from.

Then she spoke. Her voice was soft and unexpected, like the breeze catching at the edge of a thought.

"You watch me when you think I’m not looking."

She didn’t say it with accusation. There was no teasing, no amusement, no seduction curled around her words. She said it simply, like a truth that had waited quietly for its time to be named. A truth she had allowed to ripen in the silence. A truth she already knew.

And Theo, sitting beside her in the salt-cool night with his pulse steady but loud in his wrists, didn’t deny it. He didn’t pretend he didn’t understand. He didn’t lie.

She turned her face back toward the sea, her profile touched with silver, and her eyes shone not with softness or triumph but with something older. Something that felt like memory itself. It was the kind of gaze that carried cost and history, that spoke of lives remembered by places rather than people.

"Just don’t forget to look at yourself sometimes, too," she whispered. The words didn’t scold. They felt more like a reminder, quiet and knowing, like she understood what it was to disappear behind your own gaze.

The wind stirred then, soft but certain, lifting the edges of her shawl, and somewhere below them the house answered. A long, low creak moved through its bones, more like breath than sound, as if the walls themselves had inhaled and were waiting to see what came next.

And it was in that moment — somewhere between inhale and exhale, between moonlight and mist — that something shifted. Not between them exactly, but around them. The air felt different, as though the world itself had leaned in, listening.

Theo stayed perfectly still beside her. The chill worked its way beneath his collar, threading through the seams of his coat, brushing cold fingers along his ribs. He didn’t want to speak, but the question rose up anyway, quiet and steady from somewhere deep, somewhere behind his ribs where he kept everything he never said.

His voice, when it finally broke the quiet, was low and even, pulled tight like string across a bow.

"Why do you live here alone?"

She didn’t startle. She didn’t even blink. She just adjusted the shawl around her shoulders with a simple, practiced motion, her gaze never leaving the moon, as if she thought it might answer for her if she waited long enough.

But her voice came eventually, soft but clear. There was no pity in it. No self-pity either. Only truth.

"My parents died. I have no friends. I have no love interests. My only friend is this house."

The words fell between them like stones dropped into deep water. No splash. Just weight, sinking fast, too heavy for the surface to hold.

Then she turned to him slightly, enough for her gaze to catch on the edge of his shoulder, and asked, “Why do you live alone?”

He exhaled, but it wasn’t the kind of breath that let anything go. It was the kind that settled something heavier, something deeper, in a place inside him that never really moved.

"For the same reasons as you," he said at last, the words rough, as if they’d been chewed and swallowed a few times before finally leaving his mouth.

She blinked slowly, as though letting that answer sink into her.

"But your parents are alive," she murmured.

His jaw tightened. His gaze dropped for a beat, then lifted again, fixing on some faraway point beyond the cliffs, beyond the dark itself.

His voice was flatter now, harder, like a door locked so long the key had broken off inside the lock.

"They’re dead… to me."

She didn’t speak right away. She only watched him, not with curiosity, not even with kindness exactly, but with a quiet that people reserve for altars, graves, and small broken birds.

Then she asked, her tone soft and steady, as if the question had already existed in the tilt of her head: "Did you get the mark?"

His fingers twitched once. The same twitch that came before a duel. His jaw moved as though the truth had to be pried out, scraped raw before it could be spoken. And when it came, it didn’t come fast. It wasn’t loud.

"Lovegood," he said, every syllable shaped carefully, carved clean. "Stop asking questions you already know the answer to."

She didn’t press. She didn’t have to. The night was already too full of answers.

But before she could speak again, before the next quiet question could rise between them, he kept talking. The words came heavy, unpracticed, too fast to catch but too old to hold back, the kind of weight that settled in the chest and made every breath feel like work.

It wasn’t a confession. It wasn’t anger either. It was something rougher. Something that had scabbed over and split open just enough to bleed.

"Before you ask more questions," he said, the pause between each phrase not hesitation but precision, "yes, it hurts. Yes, it always did. No, I didn’t want it. None of us did. Yes, I got it covered up. And no, you can’t see it."

His voice never rose. He didn’t snap or spit the words out. They landed quietly, with the kind of force that didn’t need volume to carry weight. Each sentence placed exactly where it belonged, like he had repeated them to himself a hundred times but never once out loud.

His voice was steady because he had learned to make it sound like nothing, even when the ache inside him wanted to scream.

The words weren’t meant to wound her. They weren’t meant to provoke anything at all.

He looked down at his hands, palms resting slack on his knees, fingers slightly curled, as if afraid to grip too tightly. His thumbs brushed absently across his skin, searching without thinking, as though the answers might somehow be written there in the creases of his palms. As if a spell might be hidden in the shape of his knuckles that could explain everything without him needing to speak again.

Luna turned her face back toward the moon, quiet and steady, not to retreat, not to look away, but to give him a space that didn’t feel like absence. Her profile glowed silver in the pale light. Her breath stayed slow and even.

Her expression, as always, was impossible to read, but the silence that followed was unmistakably gentle. It didn’t erase what he had said. It simply made room for it.

That quiet wrapped around him like the air when the sea shifts. Cool and vast. Real and certain. It felt big enough to hold whatever grief he had just laid bare.

It wasn’t pity. It wasn’t sympathy. It was just presence.

And somehow, that was worse. Somehow, it was better.

~

It was nearly midnight when Theo stepped into the east corridor. The one with the warped floorboards and that cold patch near the windowsill that never seemed to warm, no matter how many wards he layered beneath it.

The house was quiet, but not in a resting way. It was the kind of quiet living things made when they were paying attention. Every creak felt too deliberate. Every faint breath of air seemed laced with the weight of something unseen.

He wasn’t really looking for anything. Just walking. Walking to shake off the insomnia that clung to him, walking to ease that strange, heavy pressure that had settled in his chest since the night on the roof.

The corridor was dim, lit only by the unsteady flicker of enchanted sconces. The light felt thin, the shadows thicker than they should have been.

He was almost past the tall antique mirror before he noticed it.

His reflection.

Or what should have been his reflection.

At first it was subtle. The kind of thing you could blame on tired eyes or the way the light bent along the old glass.

He turned his head toward a soft sound — a scratch beneath the floorboards, low and distant. In the mirror, his reflection followed.

But it was off.

The blood in his veins seemed to drop a degree.

It wasn’t a smile like his. It was too broad. Too hungry. Familiar in shape but wrong in weight, wrong in intention.

He blinked.

The mirror blinked back — just a fraction too late.

He stepped back before he even realized he had moved, his heart beginning to race with something colder than fear. Not terror exactly. Recognition.

There was something behind the glass. Not a spell. Not a trick of light.

Something wearing his face.

By the time he lifted his wand, the reflection had corrected itself. As if nothing had ever happened. As if it had never done anything out of place at all.

His own face gazed back at him, calm and blank-eyed. Weary, yes , but nothing more. No trace of the grin he hadn’t made. No hesitation in its movements. No unnatural gleam hidden in the depths of his gaze.

Just the ordinary signs of fatigue. The tightness in his shoulders. The beginnings of lines around his mouth that hadn’t been there a year ago. Lines carved deeper now by too many half-spoken truths and too much silence.

He stared for a long time, trying to convince himself it had only been the light. A flaw in the old glass. A shadow. Something small. Something harmless.

Anything but what he feared it might mean.

But the mirror held steady.

Held his shape.

And eventually, slowly, he lowered his wand. The chill pressed against the back of his neck lingered — a breath that wasn’t his.

That night, he lay in bed for hours, unmoving beneath the blanket, listening to the low groan of the house settling into its bones.

Sleep never came.

Just the endless drag of thought, and the memory of that smile.

Waiting in the mirror long after he had walked away.

Morning arrived wrapped in that same soft gray light, the kind that made the house feel slightly out of time, as if it could not quite decide whether it belonged to morning or dusk.

The tea she handed him was hot and fragrant. Steam curled between them as they sat at opposite ends of the kitchen table.

He tasted cardamom first. Warm, rich. But beneath it was something darker, sharper, a bitter undertone he could not name. It settled on his tongue quietly, like a warning that refused to be ignored.

Luna did not speak at first. She sipped her tea slowly, hands wrapped around a chipped mug with a painted star near the handle.

Her hair was still damp from her bath, braided loosely over one shoulder. The sleeves of her jumper were pushed up to her elbows, and along her forearms were faint ink stains he had not noticed the night before.

When she looked at him, it was not with suspicion or concern. Her gaze held that strange steadiness she always carried, as if she was already in the middle of a conversation he had yet to begin.

"You looked into the mirror in the east corridor, didn’t you?" she said. Her voice was low, even, placing the truth quietly between them. There was no accusation in it. No curiosity. Just certainty.

Theo did not answer. Not right away.

He did not pretend. Did not deflect. Did not try to explain it away as imagination.

He simply held her gaze across the table, fingers curled around his mug, the heat warming his hands while the memory of that almost-smile remained deep under his skin.

His silence stretched long enough to feel like confession.

She nodded, as if that was all she needed, and looked down into her cup. She swirled the last of the leaves slowly, as though they might rearrange themselves into something softer if she waited long enough.

"Some of the mirrors keep pieces," she said gently. Her voice held the kind of calm that felt almost like comfort, the kind that belonged to someone who had lived too long with things that should not exist. "They are old. And curious. Just don’t give them yours."

His mouth opened. He wanted to say something. To ask what that meant, how he was supposed to stop something that had already happened. But nothing came. No words. No breath. Only that same thin thread of cold winding its way down his spine.

So he closed his mouth again. Held his mug a little tighter. And stayed silent.

She reached across the table and brushed a tiny fleck of ash from his sleeve.

"Don’t look too long, Theodore," she murmured. "They don’t like to be noticed."

From somewhere deep in the house, far beyond the reach of any torchlight or rune, the east corridor sighed. A long, low exhale moved through the walls. It felt too ancient to be just air and too intimate to be anything but alive.

The sound carried like a memory that did not belong to him, and Theo turned his head without thinking.

The skin at the back of his neck prickled as that familiar, unsettling awareness returned, the one the house never failed to deliver when he least wanted it.

"What happened there?" he asked. His voice wasn’t loud or demanding, only steady enough to reach her across the room, where she stood smoothing the curling edge of a tapestry that had begun to peel from the wall like old parchment forgetting its place.

His tone wasn’t confrontational, but it cut through the quiet with enough weight to ask more than it said.

Luna paused for just a moment, the muscles in her shoulders stilling beneath the loose drape of her shawl.

"Nothing that might interest you," she replied, her voice thinner than usual, the words shaped too quickly and too neatly. It sounded less like an answer and more like stones laid down to block a path.

He didn’t retreat. He tilted his head slightly, the way someone might when they start to sense a thread beginning to loosen under their fingers.

"Now it does," he said, simply and honestly. Because it did. Anything she wanted hidden had already carved itself into his mind.

She turned then, not slowly and not with grace, but with a suddenness that felt more like defense than conversation.

Her mouth had flattened into a line that did not invite speech. Her eyes had gone cold. Not sharp, not angry in the way he might have expected, but cold like frost on glass in the dark hours before dawn.

"That is none of your business, Theodore," she said. Each syllable honed with a quiet fury that struck the space between them as cleanly as a blade. Her voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. It carried the precision of something long-kept, something carefully contained and now ready to break.

For a long moment, he said nothing.

Then she turned again, her body twisting with finality as she stepped toward the hallway. Her shawl caught in the motion, fluttering behind her like a banner snapping in a sudden gust. Her stride was clipped and certain, a movement meant to end the conversation before it could take root.

But he didn’t let it.

He moved quickly, his boots brushing softly against the old wood floor as he closed the distance between them, catching up before she could disappear fully around the corner.

He didn’t grab her. He didn’t even touch her directly. He only reached out, his hand hovering near her shoulder, letting its nearness speak the words he couldn’t quite shape.

A pause. A question still unspoken.

"Did you get hurt there?" he asked. The sharpness had left his voice now, replaced with something quieter, more careful.

"What happened? Tell me."

She stopped. Her back remained to him, her figure still framed by the dim light. But she went very still. The kind of stillness that comes not when someone is deciding whether to speak, but when they are deciding whether they can endure what speaking will cost.

Her voice came a moment later. It had lost its earlier edge. What remained was smaller, more intimate, and in its own way, more dangerous.

"Why would I?" she said. Her words were thin, quiet, and they felt spoken not to him but to the corridor itself.

"We are not friends, Theodore. We are nothing to each other."

It should not have hurt.

It wasn’t cruel.

But it was final. And it landed hard.

He didn’t answer right away. The hallway remained silent around them, the quiet heavy, as though even the house was waiting to see what he would do next. The moment stretched, uncomfortable and taut, humming just beneath his skin.

He felt it rising in him, that old instinct to retreat, to shut himself off as he always had. But he stayed. Rooted. Listening.

Because her words, despite their coldness, had left something open behind them. And whatever that opening was, it mattered more than he wanted to admit.

He stepped around her, moving gently, until he was standing in front of her. He blocked her path without aggression, only a quiet stillness that asked her to stop.

And she did. Not out of surrender, but instinct. Her breath caught, just slightly, as the space between them narrowed into something fragile.

He did not hesitate. His hands lifted to her face, slow and certain. When he cupped her cheeks, it wasn’t to claim her. It was simply to feel. To understand the shape of her resistance and whatever it was that lived beneath it.

His thumbs brushed the soft ridges of her cheekbones, reverent in their touch. As if he could gather all the weight of her defiance in the hollows of his palms and hold it there, just long enough to memorize it.

"We are friends, Lovegood," he said. His words carried something rough and aching, the name catching on his tongue like an old bruise he had never admitted to pressing. His voice was not raised, but it carried easily through the quiet. Urgency wrapped in something steady and true.

"Even if you won’t call it that. I just want to make your soul lighter."

She met his gaze then, lifting her face into the space he was holding. Her eyes were wide, but not with shock or anger alone. There was something more tangled there, a storm of disbelief woven with fury and something else she hadn’t yet named. It sat heavy in her chest, like a song without melody, waiting to be either released or buried.

And then she spoke. Her voice was low but unwavering, threaded with something more intimate than defiance.

"Start using my first name then."

A breath passed between them, one of those impossibly long moments where the world seemed to pause, where the quiet itself felt sacred. He opened his mouth, ready to say it. Ready to shape her name carefully, tenderly, though he had not admitted to himself how much he needed that.

But she moved first.

Her hands pressed flat to his chest. The gesture was not harsh, but unyielding. She pushed him back with a kind of quiet finality that said not now, not like this. Her touch was firm, her decision absolute.

Without another word, she turned and walked away. Her footsteps faded into the corridor until they disappeared completely, as if the house itself had swallowed them whole.

The air settled around him again. Quiet, but not gentle.

~

The morning air was heavy with fog, so thick it softened the shape of everything it touched. The windows blurred with a silvery sheen. The sharp cries of gulls faded somewhere beyond the cliffs, swallowed whole by the mist until even sound felt like a memory left behind.

The kitchen held a hush that was not restful but tense, watchful, the kind of silence that clung to the corners and tucked itself into shadowed spaces. It felt as though the walls themselves were waiting. Waiting for something to happen. Waiting for someone to break first.

Luna stood at the stove, her weight shifted slightly to one side, bare feet resting against the cool stone floor. The hem of her cardigan brushed her calves with every breath she took. One side had slipped from her shoulder, revealing the pale curve of skin and the thin strap of whatever she had worn to sleep. The neckline remained modest, but the air between them felt anything but.

Her braid, long and loose, was unraveling in places. It looked as though it had been tied hurriedly in the dark by hands too tired to care, too full of other thoughts to do more than twist it into place.

Steam rose from the spout of the teapot in slow spirals, curling upward like something testing the air, brushing against the low beams above before fading into nothing.

Theo sat at the far end of the table. His elbows rested on the scarred wood, arms crossed tight over his chest. His gaze did not reach her face but lingered on the small details of her presence. The way her fingers hovered just above the kettle before closing around the handle. The way her braid swayed slightly when she shifted her weight. The way the fog behind her pressed pale light into the kitchen and made her look almost like a reflection, not quite a person he could reach out and touch.

He said nothing.

He had not spoken since sitting down.

She poured the tea slowly, with a kind of patience that felt worn-in, as though the act itself was a tether. Something to keep her here. Something to keep her real.

The sound of liquid meeting porcelain was soft and careful, rhythmic enough to feel almost sacred in the hush around them. Like a bell tolling through the mist.

One cup.

Then another.

She didn’t glance at him. She didn’t ask how he liked it or offer explanation or invitation. She never did.

Instead, she slid the cup toward him, her fingers grazing the wood for a breath too long before she drew back and moved to her own seat. Her movements were smooth and measured, heavy with a calm that unsettled him, a quiet that pressed against his ribs like a question neither of them had spoken aloud.

She did not drink right away.

Instead, she held her cup between both hands, letting the warmth seep into her skin. Her gaze stayed fixed somewhere in the middle of the steam rising from its surface, like breath on a winter morning.

Time passed, or maybe it just bent itself around them. Slow. Stretched. Heavy.

She turned the cup gently in her hands, her fingers tracing the rim with a familiarity that made it seem less like a vessel and more like a charm. Something old. Something tender.

Once.

Then again.

Then a third time.

The leaves inside shifted with each turn, as though stirring themselves into a story only she could read. A slow, secret language he knew he would never understand.

And still, she did not look at him.

And still, he could not stop watching her.

The silence between them thinned with every breath he took, every heartbeat measured against the careful rhythm of her tea.

When she finally stopped turning the cup, the quiet did not break. Instead, it deepened, drawing itself longer and tighter, like thread pulled taut through fabric. The tension did not snap but held steady, just shy of the point of rupture.

Even the house seemed to still, as if its usual creaks and sighs had paused. As if its walls, too, were leaning in to listen.

She lifted the cup slowly, not hurried, not dramatic, simply with the same eerie patience she brought to everything. Both hands wrapped firmly around the porcelain, holding it at eye level as though the warmth alone might offer her some kind of truth.

Her gaze settled into the swirl of steeped leaves with a stillness so complete it seemed she had found what she was looking for.

Not revelation.

Not shock.

But confirmation.

The shape of inevitability.

The quiet echo of something she had long suspected, now curling itself into clearer form.

Her face barely changed, but it wasn’t untouched.

There was no sharp intake of breath, no gasp or tremor, no widening of her eyes to give her away. But there were smaller betrayals. The kind that only revealed themselves when you had spent enough time watching a person quietly.

The muscles at the corners of her mouth drew a little tighter, as if bracing against words she would not let herself speak.

Her eyes did not widen. They narrowed, slightly and deliberately, not from confusion but from recognition. She understood something in the patterns. She knew what the leaves meant, and likely had known for longer than she would ever admit.

Her fingers, steady a moment before, curled a little more tightly around the rim of the cup. Not enough for most to notice, but enough to reveal that something inside her had flinched and needed to ground itself.

It wasn’t the reaction of someone startled by disaster.

It was the reaction of someone who had seen it coming and was preparing for the weight of finally having to name it.

Theo caught the shift in her the way an animal senses the change in air before a storm, the way a soldier notices when something is missing from the usual noise and knows that absence can be more dangerous than sound.

He had been watching her closely. Not just with his eyes but with that quiet, practiced alertness born from years of reading people before they struck or ran or unraveled.

It wasn’t only her hands or her face he had learned to study. It was the shape of her stillness. The tempo of her breath. The way her presence filled a room not loudly but distinctly, like smoke curling beneath a door.

So when it changed, when the invisible current around her shifted, he felt it in his own body. As if the floor beneath him had cracked slightly. Not wide enough to fall through, but growing.

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. His voice was low now, edged with something he didn’t bother to soften.

"What is it?"

She did not lift her eyes.

She did not blink.

Her fingers stayed curled around the rim of the cup with a tension that had nothing to do with nerves and everything to do with resistance. As if she believed that if she held still long enough, if she kept her voice quiet and her breath slow, the truth inside those leaves might change its mind.

When she finally answered, her words came so softly that he almost missed them, nearly swallowed by the steam rising between them.

"It isn’t for me."

His brow tightened, the shadow of it deepening the lines around his eyes as something heavy stirred low in his chest. It wasn’t fear, not exactly. It was older than that but more urgent.

His hands did not move, but his entire frame had gone taut. The kind of stillness that came when a man remembered the battlefield, even in a quiet room.

"What did you see?" he asked again.

This time the question came slower, deliberate, his voice stripped of everything but honesty. No sarcasm. No defense. Nothing to give her space to look away.

She turned toward him at last. Not quickly, not with any rush, but with that slow, deliberate grace that always seemed to carry more weight than it should.

Her eyes found his, and for a breath, the silence between them felt so full it could almost be mistaken for understanding.

In the dim morning light, her face looked too soft to hold anything sharp. Yet something vast lived there, just beneath the surface, something ancient and personal and unspoken.

Her lips parted slightly, letting out a quiet breath that carried the words she had been holding, words that came barely louder than a thought and yet landed with the force of something that had been waiting in the walls.

"You won’t survive this place if you keep pretending not to care."

She didn’t stay for his reply.

She didn’t look to see how her words landed.

She simply stood with a quiet finality that left no room for argument. Her cardigan had slipped a little farther down one shoulder. The cup remained in her hand, untouched, the tea inside cooling, the leaves settled like a prophecy that had already done its work.

She walked out without hurry but with purpose, the fabric of her sleeves brushing softly at her sides. And when she was gone, the room felt colder. The kind of cold that had nothing to do with temperature. The kind that had everything to do with what she had just taken with her.

Theo didn’t move.

Not right away.

Not even when the sound of her footsteps had faded completely. Not even when the last trace of her presence seemed to lift from the air, like steam dispersing into the beams above.

He stayed exactly where she had left him, caught in a heavy quiet that did not feel like solitude. It felt like the house itself had paused, watching, listening, waiting to see what he would do with the silence she had left behind. A silence that felt like a blade without a handle.

The stillness pressed in from every side. It filled the spaces between his ribs, settled deep into the hollows behind his eyes.

Slowly, as though every movement had to be negotiated with the ache blooming quietly in his chest, he reached for his cup. His fingers curled too tightly at first, stiff and unsteady, as if from holding on too long to things he could not name.

When he finally closed his hand around the porcelain, it felt lighter than it should have.

Delicate in a way that made him afraid to tip it too quickly.

As if the surface might break.

As if it might reveal something he wasn’t ready to see.

He lifted the cup just enough to peer into it, and what met him there was not the usual muddle of leaves and stems, not a shapeless mess he could ignore or forget.

The surface of the tea was perfectly still. Unnervingly still.

The kind of stillness that felt deliberate, as if even the liquid itself understood that something had shifted and would not move forward without acknowledgment.

Beneath that glassy surface, resting at the bottom like the sediment of some old truth, the leaves had formed a shape that pulled the breath straight from his lungs.

Two figures.

Dark and unmistakable.

Mirror images of one another, curved into a formation too precise to feel accidental. They reached for each other, not in a clear embrace but in something older, heavier.

It felt less like love and more like fate holding its breath.

Their forms intertwined in a way that suggested both longing and warning, their closeness not tender but inevitable.

The Lovers.

His throat closed around the words before he could speak them.

He did not drink.

He could not move.

He only stared. And in that stillness, it felt as though the house was staring back. The quiet felt alive with attention. The walls seemed to listen. The windows watched. The floor held the tension between him and the symbol in his cup, like a heartbeat just below the surface of something fragile.

He stayed frozen. His breath shallow. His spine locked in place as if the wrong movement might shatter whatever spell had woven itself into the bottom of that porcelain.

His eyes did not blink.

He didn’t dare look away.

It felt too much like if he broke the gaze, the image would vanish, or worse, shift into something else.

So he just sat there.

Motionless.

The silence wrapped around his shoulders like a second skin he had never agreed to wear, his pulse loud in his ears, his mind echoing with a single, undeniable truth he could not explain away.

Lovers.

The pattern had not simply appeared.

It had formed with a certainty that defied coincidence.

The arrangement of tea leaves was too deliberate, too impossibly precise. To dismiss it would have felt like denial in the truest sense.

The symmetry was exact, as though drawn from some old, bone-deep memory rather than stirred by accident. The symbolism was ancient and primal and unmistakable.

It did not ask to be interpreted.

It did not invite speculation.

It simply was, plain and impossible at the same time, like a name you do not remember choosing but have always answered to.

Lovers, it had whispered.

Not a question.

Not a metaphor.

A truth.

A truth that spoke with the quiet arrogance of prophecy.

Lovers, it had said, as though it had slipped behind the fragile scaffolding of his most carefully contained thoughts and found the thing he had not dared to name.

Lovers.

Yeah. No.

Absolutely fucking not.

He shoved the word back hard, tried to bury it under reason and ridicule, like it was some curse muttered by mistake that could still be undone if he just refused to believe in it.

Fuck that.

He was not that man.

He had spent too many years building himself into something harder than want, sharper than hope, colder than softness.

And this was not that story.

This was not some fairytale about connection or redemption or whatever sentimental rot the universe liked to sell to people too soft to know better.

Yet even as he tried to push it aside, even as cynicism rose like armor around him, his thoughts betrayed him.

They slipped right through the cracks he had never properly sealed, dragging in questions he did not want to admit were forming.

Lovers, how?

What the fuck did it mean here, in this place, in this house, with this woman?

Lovers, why?

What the hell did the house see that he couldn’t  see in himself?

His mind churned, circling around that image like a wolf pacing a fire it could not decide whether to fear or worship.

He searched for logic. For loopholes. For any crack in the omen where he could crawl out clean, untouched by meaning.

But the longer he sat there, the harder it became to dismiss.

It wasn’t coincidence.

It wasn’t metaphor.

It was something smarter than that. Trickier.

It had to be the house.

Of course it was the fucking house.

The house with its hunger and its patience, its endless ways of knowing exactly where to press.

The house that listened without ears and spoke without voice. The house that crept into his spine, rifled through his memories, folding time and unspooling feeling until everything bled into everything else.

It had to be the house.

Because if it wasn’t, if this shape at the bottom of his cup came from somewhere deeper, from something truer, then it meant the thought was his.

And he was not ready for that.

Not now.

Maybe not ever.

But then her face appeared in his mind.

Not gently.

Not in passing.

It arrived all at once, so clear and sudden it felt like someone had struck a match behind his eyes.

Luna.

Her name alone was enough to fucking unravel him if he let it.

But it wasn’t just her face.

It was something stranger. Something he couldn’t name but felt anyway.

It was the way her mouth curved when she laughed at things no one else understood, like the world had whispered her a private joke and she hadn’t yet decided whether she would share it.

It was the grace in her hands, the slow, deliberate choreography of her fingers when she brewed her strange, fragrant teas, as though every motion was part of a spell she didn’t need to say aloud.

It was the way she fed Sol with a tenderness that looked almost like reverence, as if getting it wrong might fracture the day into pieces.

It was the way her hair caught the moonlight and shimmered as it fell around her shoulders, something woven from the sky itself. Not quite human. Not quite divine. Just something caught forever between one breath and the next.

And if he let himself be honest, the kind of honesty that only surfaced when it hurt, if he peeled back all the layers of denial that had kept him upright for years, he’d admit it.

She was beautiful.

Not the way other people were. Not in a way that could be styled or dulled or diminished.

She was beautiful in a way that refused to be named. In a way that didn’t ask for attention but took it anyway.

She was beautiful like the sound of leaves shifting before a storm. That charged, holy hush that hangs in the air just before lightning splits the sky.

She was beautiful like forgotten mythology. Too sacred to remember properly. Too dangerous to speak of in full.

There was something ancient about her, something unmoored from clocks or calendars. She moved like she answered to a different set of stars. She looked like a painting pulled from a wall that had been sealed behind stone, untouched by dust or time. Haunting. Holy. Too striking to display and too disquieting to hide.

So yeah. If he was going to be an idiot about it, if he was going to admit that his chest fucking clenched every time she entered a room, if he was going to admit that her absence felt like a loose thread he couldn’t stop worrying at, then he’d say it.

She was alright.

More than alright.

She was the kind of beautiful that stuck. The kind that rewrote the rhythm of your thinking without asking permission.

He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, slow and tired and frustrated, like maybe the gesture could erase the thought. Scrub it clean, wipe it away like a smudge on glass.

But the thought didn’t move.

It stayed exactly where it had rooted itself.

And the cup in front of him, untouched and slowly cooling, still held the leaves in that same unshaken shape.

That curve. That mirror. That sacred, impossible geometry.

The Lovers.

He let the word sit in his mind like a weight. Not heavy enough to crush him, but sharp enough to pierce. Like the point of a blade tracing quiet circles just beneath the surface of his thoughts.

The word stayed.

It didn’t fade.

It curled around the inside of his skull, slick and smoky, a suggestion he couldn’t quite laugh off no matter how badly he wanted to.

And outside the window, beyond the cooling tea and the mutiny in his chest, the house gave a long, soft exhale.

As if it had been listening.

As if it had already known exactly what he was thinking.

And somehow, infuriatingly, it felt like it approved.

~

The morning broke slow and grey, the sky draped in fog that clung to the trees and rolled in gentle coils across the cliffs, like breath still dreaming.

The world outside the cottage was quiet in that taut, expectant way that meant the house was listening again.

Theo stood just beyond the threshold, one hand on the doorframe, watching her.

Luna had risen before the light had fully reached the horizon, her silhouette already drifting across the wet grass. Barefoot, of course. Her shawl dragged behind her like a worn banner, trailing through dew.

She carried a small woven basket. Delicate in design, but stained in places, the kind of object that had seen too much to be beautiful but was still treated as something that mattered.

Inside the basket were bones.

Tiny. Almost weightless. No longer than a matchstick. Bleached pale by time and magic. Hummingbird bones that clicked softly together like fragile wind chimes when she moved.

She didn’t look at him.

She knelt at the first stone marker half-buried in the moss at the garden’s edge. Her hands moved with a slow certainty, brushing away dew and soil with a gentleness that made his throat tighten for reasons he could not explain.

She was humming to herself. A strange little tune without words. Too old for melody, but threaded with rhythm, something that made the hair on his arms rise. It felt alive, curling around the bones she laid in a perfect crescent at the base of the stone.

Theo didn’t speak.

He just crossed his arms and leaned against the frame, watching the line of her back as she bent low over the earth. Watching the care with which she placed each fragment, as if every one told a story only she could read.

It wasn’t the kind of magic he was used to.

There were no wands here. No incantations. No sigils carved in flame or chalk.

Just breath. Just hands. Just memory.

She moved to the next post.

Then the next.

Her fingers were stained with dirt and something darker. Something that smelled faintly of salt and copper.

The fog shifted with her.

The air felt different.

When she crouched by the eastern edge of the garden, the wind picked up for a heartbeat, and he could have sworn he heard it — a faint rustle of wings.

Not birds.

Not real ones.

But the echo of something too small and too old to be anything but magic.

Luna straightened slowly.

Her hair clung damp at the back of her neck, her skin pale and shining in the half-light.

She lifted one of the bones, holding it up to the sun, turning it between her fingers as if it might give her an answer.

Then she set it down with the others, lining it up with careful precision.

And she whispered something so softly that not even the house caught it.

Theo stepped outside finally, his boots sinking into the wet grass, and said nothing. There were questions in him, too many, loud and clanging and sharp with disbelief. But they died in his throat when he looked at her, when he saw the way the bones shimmered faintly once the line was complete, when he felt the hum rise beneath the soil like the house was pleased.

She turned to him then, dirt on her cheeks, rain in her lashes, and said simply, “It keeps us safe. If we let it.”

And Theo, who had never believed in offerings, nodded like he understood.

There was a weight to the stillness, not the suffocating kind that hung over battlefields or graves, but the kind that asked not to be disturbed. A stillness made sacred by something older than language.

Luna lay curled on her side in the center of it, the blankets knotted around her like waves, her form small and soft and unguarded in the way that only came with absolute trust. 

One arm draped protectively across Sol, whose round little body rose and fell with sleep, nestled into the curve of her as if carved from comfort itself. Her hair was a luminous spill across the pillow, threads of gold and silver catching every stray flicker of light, tumbling in a wild halo that made her look less like a woman and more like something consecrated. The kind of being bards used to weep over, the kind of presence that didn’t belong to this world but lingered anyway, just to make the air a little sweeter.

Her face was turned slightly toward the door. Not enough to suggest she was waking, but just enough to make him feel, with unsettling certainty, that she had known he would come. That even in sleep, she had been waiting.

He wanted to memorize everything. The delicate curve of her neck, the way her fingers curled into the fold of the blanket, the faint rise and fall of her breath. He wanted to carve it into memory, press it into the marrow of his bones. It felt wrong to look. It felt more wrong to look away. Something twisted tight in his chest, a tension he didn’t have the words for, an ache braided from longing and regret and awe, all tangled up in the shape of her name. She was unreal. She was ridiculous. She was magnificent. 

And she was right there, within reach, her body rising and falling with a peace he did not know how to believe in.

He didn’t know how long he stood there, only that the world felt quieter than it had in years. All he could hear was her breathing, and the soft, traitorous thrum of his own heart answering it.

He couldn’t even explain what had pulled him here. Not in the neat, clinical way he usually understood things, with categories and tactics and necessary responses. This was something else entirely. Something simpler. Something almost shameful.

He could lie to himself and blame the house, because the house had a habit of leading him exactly where it wanted him. Doors opened at odd moments. Floors creaked in just the right way to steer him somewhere. Sometimes it whispered into the back of his mind, suggestions he could not quite ignore.

Or he could tell himself it was just the weight of the day. A day spent too near her strange, unpredictable magic, that hum that clung to her skin like static, bending the air around her, making him feel as if something inside him was out of place.

But the truth, the one he didn’t want to name, the one he had swallowed down so many times it had begun to live in his throat, was smaller and far more humiliating.

He came because he missed her.

He missed her in the way a fool stares at a wound and wonders how deep it goes. He missed the cadence of her voice, that sideways little smile she gave when she knew she was unnerving him, the absolute chaos of her presence and how it somehow always managed to quiet the noise in his own mind. 

She had gotten under his skin with alarming precision, threading herself through the quiet spaces of his thoughts until she was no longer just someone he tolerated or protected. She was someone he sought out, even when there was no reason to, even when he knew better.

He approached slowly, each breath the only sound he could hear. The floorboards beneath his boots stayed mercifully silent, as if even the house understood that this moment was not meant to be broken. 

His gaze traced every line of her face, the gentle slope of her cheek pressed into the pillow, the lashes that rested like paint strokes against skin too soft for the world they lived in. There was a crease between her brows, faint and barely there but present, a mark of worry that seemed to linger even in sleep, and something about it made his chest ache. She carried her tenderness like a secret. She wore her strength like silk. And he had no idea how to hold either.

Before he knew what he was doing, before his mind could catch up to the pathetic, helpless longing that had him rooted there like some idiot caught in his first slow-blooming crush, he reached out. His hand hovered over her, pausing in the space between them as if the very air had turned sacred. His fingers brushed a strand of hair from her temple, delicate and unsure, the touch so light it barely disturbed her breath.

He told himself it was nothing, just a practical gesture, just a movement to make her more comfortable.

But it wasn’t.

It was selfish, and he knew it.

And still he lingered, hand trembling slightly as he pulled it back, heart thudding in that slow, helpless way that meant he was in trouble. That meant he was already too far gone to walk away.

He leaned down slowly, every breath caught halfway in his chest like something fragile he was afraid to disturb. The air between them felt too loud, too alive, every inch charged, and he could feel the tremor in his hands even as he moved closer. He wasn’t sure when the decision had been made, whether it was conscious or simply inevitable, pulled from the quiet gravity of the room itself, but his lips found her forehead. Soft. Brief. Painfully reverent.

It wasn’t meant to wake her.

And yet somehow, that whisper of contact, that bare brush of warmth against warmth, reached beneath the skin of the moment and left something behind. It stayed with him, etched into the silence between them like a word unspoken, like a promise he didn’t yet understand.

He pulled back then, just as gently, retreating like the coward he didn’t want to admit he was, and sat on the edge of the bed. His back too straight, his hands braced against his knees, every muscle tight with the weight of not knowing whether he had crossed a line or stepped toward something sacred.

Then, as if summoned by the gravity of his uncertainty, her voice drifted out of the dark. Low and delicate and utterly clear, it wrapped itself around his nerves like silk tightening by slow degrees.

“What is it that you need, Theodore?”

His name on her tongue undid him a little.

He looked down at his hands as if the answer might be hiding there, as if not meeting her gaze might protect him from how stupidly, achingly honest the truth was.

He swallowed, throat dry, heart doing something idiotic beneath his ribs.

“Company,” he said.

The word came out smaller than he had intended, as though it had shrunk on its way out, and sat between them with too much weight for something so simple.

There was a pause then. Not long, but long enough to stretch around the ache he could not quite name.

And then, without a sound, without drama or ceremony, she lifted the blanket beside her. The motion was smooth and quiet, like the turn of a page in a book he wasn’t ready to read.

It was so simple it hit him like a curse, like a spell too old and too kind to be resisted.

There was no seduction in it. No expectation. Only space made deliberately, offered without condition.

The act of making room.

The act of saying, in silence, you may stay. You may rest. You are not alone .

And he didn’t know how to breathe around that kind of grace.

He climbed into the bed with a hesitance that felt almost reverent. Each movement slow and careful, as though he might disturb the fragile balance of this moment simply by existing too loudly within it.

The mattress gave a soft, whispering sigh beneath his weight, the worn springs and velvet quilt adjusting around the unfamiliar shape of his body, and still he moved gently, as if the very air between them might tear if he wasn’t careful.

Every nerve in him felt taut, every inch of skin alive with the awareness that he was close to her now. Close in a way he hadn’t let himself imagine seriously, close enough to feel the heat of her even before they touched.

She didn’t speak. She didn’t shift. She didn’t even lift her head, and for a brief second he wondered if she might have already drifted back into sleep. But then, just as he settled behind her, careful and trying not to let his thoughts spiral, she moved. Not much. Not dramatically. Just enough.

She leaned back into him, her body aligning with his as if it belonged there, her spine fitting perfectly along the line of his chest, her presence folding into his as though it had always been waiting for this.

Her warmth hit him all at once, a wash of quiet heat that sank through his skin and straight into the marrow of his bones, anchoring him in a way that felt both soothing and unbearable. There had been no warning for it, no preparation. She was soft and solid and impossibly real, and all he could think about, in that instant, was how wrong he had been to ever believe he could remain unaffected by her.

His arm lifted before he could second-guess himself, fingers trembling slightly as he wrapped it around her waist, careful and almost timid, as if expecting her to recoil or disappear. But she didn’t. She stayed perfectly still, allowing it, letting him hold her like that closeness was not just allowed but expected.

Without thinking, acting on nothing but instinct and that quiet pull that had been drawing him toward her for months, he leaned forward and kissed her cheek. 

Once, then again. Barely there. The lightest brush of lips against skin that tasted faintly of salt and sleep and whatever flowers she had warded the room with that evening. It hadn’t been planned. It wasn’t even something he meant to do. It just happened, like breathing, like an exhale.

And then she turned.

She turned to face him, her eyes finding his in the dark, steady and unreadable, and before he could speak, before he could even think to move, she kissed him.

It wasn’t deep. It wasn’t drawn-out. But it was real. Unmistakably, irrevocably real. The soft press of her mouth to his shattered something inside him, something he hadn’t even known was waiting to break. There was no question in the kiss, no hesitation, just presence, just contact, just the unbearable honesty of her lips meeting his in a moment that cracked open the silence and set something ancient alight beneath his skin.

Heat rushed up his spine like lightning, sharp and breathless and all-consuming, and he froze. Every muscle in his body locked tight, his mind gone white with sensation, his heart beating a frantic rhythm against his ribs, his breath caught somewhere in his throat, his skin flushed hot and wanting.

And then, as simply as she had turned to him, she turned back again, curling into his body like it was the most natural thing in the world. As though she hadn’t just undone him with a single kiss, as though she hadn’t just quietly, irrevocably, rewired the shape of his breath.

He lay there blinking into the dark, too stunned to speak, too overwhelmed to sleep, the ghost of her kiss still burning on his mouth and his thoughts spinning wildly in circles he could no longer control.

She fell asleep minutes later, her body softening in his arms, the steady rhythm of her breath melting into the quiet around them like candle wax pooling against cold stone. 

One moment she was there, warm and strange and impossible, and the next she was adrift, floating somewhere far away in a place he couldn’t reach, not yet. Her fingers curled slightly beneath the blanket, her shoulders loosened beneath the weight of sleep, and the air shifted, stilled, as if the house itself had acknowledged her surrender to rest. It should have been comforting. It should have made it easier for him to close his eyes, to let the tension seep from his muscles and his mind to quiet.

But it didn’t.

He lay there, unmoving, eyes open to the ceiling he could barely see, every nerve in his body still drawn tight, like the kiss had sparked something inside him that refused to fade. 

He wasn’t just awake. He was on fire. And it wasn’t the kind of fire he could extinguish with reason or will. It was slow and deep, a heat that had settled into his ribs and begun to coil outward, inch by inch, minute by minute, with the terrible inevitability of something that could no longer be denied. His breath stayed shallow, quiet, measured not because he was calm but because he was trying not to fall apart. He could still feel the shape of her mouth on his. Not just the sensation of her lips, but the meaning behind it. The choice. The power.

And worse than the kiss itself was the ache it left behind. She had kissed him and then turned her back to him, curled against him like she trusted him, like she had always trusted him, and it was that trust that undid him more than anything. That blind, unthinking closeness. That willingness to let him be near.

She had let him in, and something old and terrible in him now saw her as marked, seen, tethered. He was claimed.

And the worst part, the part that made his hands shake beneath the blanket, was that it didn’t frighten him.

It comforted him.

He lay there with her tucked against his chest, her breathing even, her body warm, and stared into the dark with wide eyes, knowing he would not sleep for a very long time. Not because he couldn’t. But because he didn’t want to miss a second of her belonging to him, even if it was only in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

Chapter Text

The room smelled like metal and jasmine. A strange pairing, but it worked somehow. Sharp and sweet, like a truth whispered with too much honesty. The scent didn’t just hang in the air. It lingered. Clung to the walls. Wove itself into the folds of the curtains and the corners of memory. This place didn’t forget. Not anything. The air here didn’t simply exist. It listened. It waited. It knew.

Luna stood in the middle of it, still as a statue but full of intent, like the moment before a spell breaks. Her expression gave nothing away. Every movement she made was slow, careful, exact. Not because she doubted. Because she remembered.

She wasn’t doing the ritual like someone who had learned it last week. She moved like she had invented it, or at least lived through it long enough for the steps to carve grooves into her bones. Her fingers traced the silver thread across the stone altar with the kind of familiarity that didn’t need explanation. It looked like reverence. It felt like loss. The thread shimmered under the candlelight, catching the flame in a way that made it look alive. It didn’t fall so much as stretch, slow and liquid, like it had forgotten gravity. Like it remembered starlight.

Across from her, Theo sat, tense but slouched, the kind of posture that comes from exhaustion layered over discomfort. One elbow rested on his knee. His thumb pressed to the edge of his jaw like he was thinking too hard and trying not to show it. His eyes stayed fixed on her hands.

He told himself he needed to understand what she was doing. Needed to track every movement, every breath, just in case. Just in case this was the moment something went wrong. But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t all of it.

The truth was simpler, and more annoying. He couldn’t stop watching her.

There was something pulling at him. It wasn’t the ritual. It wasn’t the thread. It was her.

And he was already in far too deep to pretend otherwise.

Her voice cut through the quiet, not loudly, but with weight. Soft. Certain. Like it had been waiting on the tip of her tongue all morning. “Give me your hand,” she said, still focused on the thread in her lap, her fingers working with the kind of calm that didn’t come from confidence but memory. She didn’t glance at him. Didn’t need to. The words slid into the space between them like the beginning of something neither of them could take back.

Theo hesitated.

It wasn’t fear, not exactly. It was something sharper and smaller, something that lodged behind his ribs and pushed up into his throat. The kind of resistance that came not from danger but from the knowledge that this meant something. Maybe more than he was ready to admit. The pause that followed wasn’t long, but it felt heavy. Like it mattered. Like it might be remembered. And then, finally, he moved. Slowly. Deliberately. As if that motion alone held meaning. He held out his hand, palm open, fingers slightly curled in like he didn’t quite trust them to behave.

She reached without looking, her hands cool and dry as they wrapped around his wrist. The touch was light. Should have been forgettable. It wasn’t. The second her skin met his, something inside him pulled tight. Not magic, not yet. Just a shift. A flicker of something low and electric. Awareness. She held him like she knew what it meant to have power over someone, and even worse, how to be careful with it. Her touch lingered for a beat too long. It wasn’t clinical. It wasn’t ritual. It felt like a question. Or maybe an answer.

And then she began.

The thread slipped around his wrist like water. Her fingers moved with the ease of someone who had done this hundreds of times before but never let it become routine. Once. Again. A third time. Each loop lay flat and quiet against his skin, deliberate and sure, not too tight but tight enough to be felt. The silver caught the candlelight with every turn, drinking it in and giving back just a little less each time. It shimmered in a way that didn’t seem decorative. It looked like it had purpose.

The pressure of the thread wasn’t painful. It wasn’t even uncomfortable. But it felt deeply specific, like it was being sewn into something deeper than skin. Like each loop threaded through the parts of himself he didn’t talk about. Her touch was barely there, but it sparked something down his arm anyway. A quiet current. A kind of truth.

He didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Just watched the thread tighten around his wrist, felt it settle over his pulse like something old and sentient that had chosen him on purpose.

“This is a tether,” Luna said quietly. Her voice didn’t rise. It sank. Into the stone. Into his chest. Into the parts of him that still believed he was untouchable. The words moved through the air with the same slow finality as her fingers tying the last knot. “Not just to the house. Or the perimeter. To me. You’ll come back to me.”

His breath caught. Not enough to be noticed by anyone else, but enough that he felt it. Enough that it left something crawling beneath his skin. His gaze snapped to her face, searching, desperate to see whether she understood the weight of what she’d just said.

She didn’t meet his eyes. She was still focused on the knot, adjusting it like she hadn’t just cracked open his ribs and slipped something sacred beneath them.

“You’ll come back to me,” he said, slower this time. He tasted the words before speaking them, like they might turn to ash the moment they left his mouth. “That sounds a lot like an order.”

“It isn’t,” she said.

He scoffed. “Could’ve fooled me.”

Her hands paused.

He watched her closely now. “You mean it’ll warn me if the wards get breached,” he said, his voice rougher than before. “That’s what this is. Just an alarm.”

“It does that,” she replied, calm and maddeningly unbothered. “But that’s not all it does.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Then explain it.”

“It reacts to truth,” she said. “And distance. And abandonment.”

That last word hit like a punch. Not sudden. Slow and brutal, like something sharp pressing into bruised flesh. He laughed under his breath, bitter and breathless, the sound splintering at the edges. “Abandonment,” he repeated. “You don’t pull punches, do you?”

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t soften. Didn’t even blink.

That was what made it worse.

“You want to explain what the fuck that means,” he asked, his voice low but sharp, “or are we just throwing emotional landmines for sport now?”

“It means if you leave when you shouldn’t, it will pull,” she said. No shift in tone. No hesitation. Just steady, maddening calm. “If you lie to me, it will tighten. If you disappear, I will know.”

His throat worked around a reply that didn’t come. “And if I stay?” he asked finally. Softer. Almost cautious. “What happens then?”

There was the faintest flicker at the edge of her mouth. Not a smile. Something older than that. “Then nothing happens at all. It simply rests. Like any other living thing.”

He looked down. The thread lay quiet and silver and real against his wrist, its pulse slow and cool, echoing his own. It didn’t flash. Didn’t spark. But it breathed. It waited. And it made the line of his body feel less like his own.

He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Bitterness slid up his throat like smoke. “You could’ve just asked me to stay.”

“I did,” she said, her voice soft now. Almost gentle. “You didn’t listen.”

The silence that followed wasn’t cruel. It just sat between them, dense and unfinished.

Theo didn’t answer. Not because he didn’t have one, but because speaking it would cost something he wasn’t ready to give. So he sat still. Let the thread warm against his skin. Let the silence do what it wanted.

This wasn’t ritual. It wasn’t protection. It wasn’t some clever trap in disguise.

It was her.

And now it was his.

He exhaled slowly, let the silence hang longer than it should have. His voice came out dry, edged with something sharper than he meant. “Is this your way of telling me you want me to live here?”

She didn’t glance up. Just kept smoothing the thread, her fingers steady, her focus on the knot. Her mouth twitched—barely. Not a smile. Not something you could name.

“None of us wants to live here, Theodore.”

No warmth in her tone. No metaphor. Just the truth laid bare. “It’s a binding ritual. That’s all.”

He scoffed. Not from amusement. From the same tight thing that had been winding itself around his ribs since the moment he crossed the threshold of this cursed place. “Then why the fuck am I part of it?”

She looked at him.

Really looked at him.

Her voice didn’t waver. “Because you were the unlucky bastard they sent.”

The words landed like stone. Not cruel. Not careless. Just true. Like the house had chosen him. Like the outcome had never been his to change.

The thread pulsed once against his wrist, a slow, deliberate thud that felt far too in sync with the beat in his chest.

And he couldn’t tell if he wanted to rip it off and burn it or ask what would happen if he didn’t leave at all.

Later, when the flicker of candlelight had settled and the shadows in the corners of the house had resumed their usual slow-breathing sway, the silence crept back into the halls with the heavy-footed grace of something that had never truly left. It wasn’t the kind of silence that brought calm, that soothed or settled. It was the charged, uncanny quiet that always followed magic in this place, a hush dense with the residue of intention, like the walls had absorbed everything that had passed between them and were now holding their breath. The house did not sleep. It listened.

Theo found himself wandering without realizing he had moved, his fingers trailing idly along the groove of the doorframe as though the worn wood could tell him what he had forgotten. The corridor near the study was dim, lit only by the occasional flickering rune embedded in the floorboards. The air was cooler here, the kind of chill that clung to old memories. He wasn’t looking for her, not consciously. But when he turned the corner, there she was, exactly as if she had been waiting, or perhaps simply existed there whenever he arrived.

She was seated cross-legged on the floor, spine straight and eyes soft, a chipped teacup resting at her side with steam still rising from it. Her gaze was tilted upward, not to the ceiling, not to any one thing, but to a patch of space as if something invisible hovered there, and she was listening to it breathe. She didn’t react to his approach. She didn’t need to.

He paused a few feet from her and leaned a shoulder against the wall, the thread around his wrist humming so faintly it felt like a phantom heartbeat.

"Did you mean it?" he asked, his voice lower than usual, roughened by something he hadn’t yet named. "That it reacts to lies?"

She tilted her head, finally letting her gaze drop to him. There was a slowness to her movements, not hesitation, but something almost ceremonial. Her lips curled into a faint, unreadable smile. "Ask something you don’t want to answer."

He gave her a look that was somewhere between tired and amused, the kind of expression that usually preceded a mask slipping, and let out a dry, half-laughed breath. "Do I have my Azkaban sentence lifted because I'm extremely handsome?"

She didn’t even blink. "No."

He held her gaze a second longer, the smile faltering. "No," he said again, this time quieter.

And then it hit.

The thread coiled against his skin with a chill so sudden it felt like a breath drawn in reverse, like winter exhaled directly into his blood. It wasn’t sharp or jagged. It didn’t bite or burn. But it was cold—pure, clean, inescapable cold that crept from the silver band on his wrist and spilled upward into the hollow of his elbow, his shoulder, his throat. He hissed through his teeth, the reaction not dramatic but instinctual, his arm snapping back as if struck, muscles locking briefly in protest.

There was no spell. No flash. No curse or incantation. Just the quiet, brutal reminder that the thread knew.

It knew his voice when it lied. It knew his body when it flinched away from truth. And now it lived against his pulse like a second conscience, colder than any cell he'd been locked in.

He looked down at it, still glowing faintly, and for a second, the world narrowed to that single thread, and the woman watching him with eyes that were not unkind—but entirely unwilling to lie back.

She watched him in the way only she could, that unbearable softness threaded through her features like something carved from moonlight and breath, the kind of softness that wasn’t innocence but a deeper, older clarity. Her eyes, pale and sharp and too clear to ever be truly kind, fixed on him with a quiet certainty that made it hard to breathe. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t gloat. She simply saw. And what she said next was not cruel, not comforting, but some strange shape between the two—the kind of truth that landed softly and still managed to echo.

“It’s not pain,” she said, her voice gentle but anchored with something vast. “It’s memory.”

He stared at her as if she had spoken a curse, not because her words were sharp but because they rang too close to something he had buried. He didn’t know what she meant, not exactly, but the part of him that recoiled told him that maybe he did. Somewhere beneath reason, beneath training, beneath every layer he’d crafted to keep the world from touching him, there was something that recognized what she meant, something that flinched like a wound remembering its own shape. And he hated it. Hated the way it felt not just like knowledge, but recognition.

So he didn’t respond. He didn’t ask. He didn’t want to know.

He turned away, more sharply than necessary, retreating down the hall with his shoulders tight and his jaw clenched, and left her there—seated, cross-legged, with her teacup cooling beside her and the echo of his own lie still hanging in the charged air between them. The thread around his wrist stayed cool, not painfully so, but with the kind of persistent chill that reminded him it hadn’t gone dormant. It pulsed faintly, almost thoughtfully, like it was still deciding how much of him it wanted to hold.

He shut himself in his room and closed the door with a force just shy of a slam. Inside, the space was still, the shadows layered thick across the walls like folded cloth, and for once, the house didn’t creak or sigh or whisper. It simply waited. But even in the quiet, he felt the house watching, not through sound or sight, but through presence. Through the thread.

When he finally undressed, dragging the day off his body piece by piece, the silver thread shimmered faintly in the low light, almost invisible until it caught the curve of a candle's dying flame. It didn’t glow with magic. It pulsed with something deeper, something stranger—not warning, not power. Just awareness. It felt as though it had absorbed more than the physical shape of his wrist, more than heat or blood. It had taken something unspoken. Something shameful. Something true.

And in that moment, standing there half-clothed and too exhausted to name what twisted in his chest, Theo realized with sick clarity that the thread knew more about him than it should. And worse, it had chosen not to let go.

Sleep came slowly, dragging its feet like a guilty thing, reluctant and resentful, and even when he closed his eyes, Theo could feel the weight of his thoughts pressing against the dark like fingers trying to claw their way back to the surface. He turned beneath the blankets, restless, his limbs heavy but unwilling to surrender, his body aching in the dull, familiar way that came after too much vigilance and too little peace. The room was still, the kind of stillness that felt intentional, like the house was giving him space not out of mercy, but to watch more closely. And still, despite the quiet, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

Her voice. That peculiar, floating softness that didn’t suit most things but somehow suited his name when she said it, like it wasn’t a name at all but a tether, a spell, a kind of soft undoing that curled under the skin. Her hands. The light, infuriating grace of them. The way they touched things like the world was always offering up something sacred. The way they had touched him. The way they had moved over the thread like weaving wasn’t a skill but a language he didn’t know how to speak. She had said his name like it wasn’t a burden. Like it wasn’t something cracked.

And then, beneath the covers, against the pulse-point of his wrist, the thread responded.

At first, it was nothing more than a whisper against the skin, a slow, subtle shift in temperature that might have gone unnoticed if he hadn’t been so acutely aware of everything since the moment she tied it. The silver cord, once cool and detached, began to hum with warmth, not heat, not discomfort, but something softer, more insidious. It moved in time with his breath, with the rhythm of his chest as it rose and fell, syncing itself to the quiet pattern of his body as if it were learning him.

The change was gentle, so slow it felt like a dream creeping in around the edges of waking, but the warmth began to spread, blooming outward from the thin band like breath exhaled against bare skin. It wasn’t magic in the way he was trained to recognize—not structured, not intentional, not built from spells and runes and commands. It was ambient. Instinctive. Present.

And somehow that was worse.

He turned over slowly, shifting beneath the weight of the blankets like a man trying to climb out of his own skin, the rustle of fabric sounding louder than it should in the too-still quiet of the room. His body ached in strange places, not from exhaustion but from something more insidious—a tension he couldn’t explain, the kind that lived not in muscle or bone but in memory. He curled inward, his hand moving of its own accord to press the banded wrist tight against the curve of his chest, as if pressure might smother the warmth, might mute the pulse now blooming up his arm in slow, insistent waves.

But it didn’t fade.

The warmth spread, inch by inch, an almost imperceptible crawl of sensation that unfurled like steam rising through still water. It moved past his forearm, crept into the hollow of his elbow, then climbed higher, whispering into his shoulder like something with breath. It wasn’t just warmth anymore. It was awareness. A creeping, disquieting sense that something inside him had begun to watch. Not from the outside, not through the eyes of another, but from within. A second heartbeat. A second knowing. Something that had tied itself to the rhythm of his body and was now tracing it, mapping it, memorizing it.

And then the dreams came.

They didn’t arrive like nightmares. There was no crashing fear, no violence waiting in the wings. They drifted in like smoke under a door—quiet, slow, soft at the edges. But undeniable. And deeply invasive.

He saw her hands first. Not her face, not her voice, not even her shape in full. Just her fingers, suspended in darkness like they belonged to the dream more than to her, illuminated faintly by a light that didn’t come from any visible source. The thread was there too, gleaming silver in her grasp, coiled like memory around her wrists. And she was tying it to him. Over and over, again and again, the same movement repeating in a loop that didn’t tire or fade. Her thumb brushed against the soft skin beneath his wrist. Her knuckles traced the lines of his palm with the kind of care that belonged to prayers. It wasn’t rushed. It wasn’t ritualistic. It was tender. It was careful. It was heartbreakingly intimate.

Her hands glowed with a quiet silver light, like they’d been dipped in moonlight or sanctified by time, and every time the thread tightened, it felt less like a dream and more like memory being rewritten. He tried to speak, to pull away, to force his mind back into control, but the thread held fast. It didn’t pull. It didn’t restrain. It simply existed. And in its presence, he felt himself yield.

Because in the dream, no matter how deeply the thread wrapped itself into the lines of his skin, no matter how close her hands moved to the places he tried hardest to keep untouched, he didn’t want to leave.

He woke slowly, not with the jolt of nightmare or the startled gasp of terror, but with the kind of slow, reluctant consciousness that seeped in like fog—damp, unwelcome, inescapable. Sweat clung to the length of his spine, beads of it pooling at the base of his neck and soaking into the collar of his shirt, though the room was cool and still and silent as a tomb. He didn’t move at first. He couldn’t. His body felt weighted, not with exhaustion but with something deeper, something coiled tight and heavy beneath the skin.

The thread still pressed warm against his wrist, not hot, not burning, but with the same subtle heat as skin touched for too long—the kind of warmth that lingered after intimacy, after proximity, after hands had been laid where they had no right to be. It pulsed quietly, like it had dreams of its own, like it had become more than a conduit, more than a charm. As if it had learned him.

His eyes flicked to the ceiling, to the pale and uneven plaster that bore the faint shadows of passing candlelight and the memory of rituals performed too late at night. And he stared. For what felt like hours. He stared at the cracks and the curves and the way light shifted around the rafters like breath. But he wasn’t seeing the ceiling. He was seeing her. Or rather, feeling her still—not beside him, not in body, but in sensation. Her hands. Her breath. The echo of her presence like perfume left on his skin.

And it wouldn’t leave him.

He didn’t know if it had been a dream or something stranger, something more real than waking. He didn’t know if the thread had pulled him back into the past or forward into some twisted echo of the future. All he knew was that the feeling hadn’t faded. Her touch still lived beneath the surface of his skin, in the hollow of his palm, in the curve of his wrist, in the heat that hadn’t dissipated since his eyes opened.

And as the sky began to pale beyond the window, as the first light of dawn spilled in muted silver across the floorboards, Theo lay still, jaw clenched, breath shallow, heart dragging against his ribs like a drumbeat half a step out of time, and wondered if this was what she meant when she tied the thread and whispered that he’d come back to her—not because he ever truly left, but because maybe, just maybe, she had marked a part of him that never got the chance to go.

~

The morning spilled into the kitchen in a slow, deliberate hush, descending not with the cheer of warmth or the promise of peace but with the cold, watchful weight of something ancient pressing down in soft, silver-tinted shafts of light filtered through sea-misted panes. It was the kind of light that didn’t brighten so much as quiet, that made the walls seem older, the corners darker, and the very air heavier. The slats of pale sunlight cut across the warped floorboards and uneven stone countertops like blades laid out for ritual use, and the air, already thick with silence, carried only the faintest traces of toasted bread and bergamot, a fragrance too soft to fight the tension crouched between the walls. 

Nothing in the room moved except for the slow curl of steam rising from a cup and the occasional, unpredictable flicker of a wall candle, its flame swaying as if breathed on by something no longer visible.

Theo stood just inside the threshold, still and unreadable, but the tightness in his shoulders betrayed the strain. There was no sound save the minute crackle of a rune warming under the hearth and the whisper of fabric when Luna shifted in her seat. The house wasn’t whispering today, and somehow that made it worse. It wasn’t humming, wasn’t sighing. It had gone still, but not from sleep. Not from rest. From anticipation. From listening.

The quiet did not comfort. It studied.

And around his wrist, the thread continued its low, vibrating hum. It pulsed with a rhythm not quite his own, almost as if syncing with the house instead of him, a borrowed heartbeat that lived beneath the skin like a secret spell still whispering its intention. He didn’t need to glance down to know it glowed faintly, the silver woven tight against the fragile bones of his wrist, binding him not just to her or the space, but to something much more layered, much more sentient.

The thread didn’t tug. It didn’t bite. But it existed. And in its quiet insistence, it reminded him again that he was being watched by the very bones of the house that had opened its doors to him not with welcome but with a slow, deliberate narrowing of thresholds.

He stepped fully into the room, and every board beneath his boots gave just enough to make the silence lean in closer.

Luna was already there when he entered, tucked into the far end of the long wooden bench like she had grown there overnight, an immovable part of the house’s strange anatomy. Her feet were bare, drawn up beneath her in a posture of impossible ease, toes curled against the worn wood like she’d never once needed shoes in her life, as though the floor itself had always been warmed for her comfort. 

The shawl she wore slipped down one shoulder, baring a pale strip of collarbone that caught the early light in a way that seemed unintentional and ancient all at once, like marble left too long in a temple open to the sea. Her hair, still damp from washing, hung in loose, half-dried coils down her back, some strands curling along the edge of her jaw and sticking faintly to her skin, the scent of lavender and river mint clinging to her like memory.

She moved with that maddening, silken grace that had nothing to do with effort and everything to do with belonging, her spine straight, her gestures unhurried, deliberate without being practiced. One hand reached for a small clay jar of jam and with a knife that looked older than the table it rested on, she began spreading it over a piece of toast with the quiet rhythm of someone who had done this exact motion countless times, in countless mornings, regardless of whether the world outside was ending. Her other hand rested lightly on her lap, fingers curled inwards as if cradling something invisible, a prayer or a spell or a thought too sacred to name.

She didn’t look at him when he stepped into the room. Her posture remained unchanged, her attention seemingly tethered to nothing but the fragile surface of her breakfast. She didn’t flinch or greet him, didn’t acknowledge the subtle chill that followed him in from the hall, or the way the thread at his wrist tightened slightly as it sensed her presence. She simply continued the motion of knife to toast, jam to bread, like she was painting a charm across its surface, like the act of breakfast itself was another form of warding.

And in that silence, her presence wrapped around the space like another layer of enchantment, warm and unyielding, leaving him to wonder if she had always known he would come, or if she had never expected him to leave.

Theo lowered himself onto the bench across from her with the careful posture of someone stepping into a space that might collapse beneath them at any moment, every line of his body drawn tight with restraint, his shoulders locked, his spine held in a rigid line of discomfort he couldn't quite shake. His jaw was clenched too hard, not in anger exactly, but in something more brittle, more desperate—like silence was the only thing he could hold onto without shattering. The tension rippled through him in fine, invisible threads, curling beneath his skin, a quiet vibration of resistance against the stillness she inhabited so easily.

His eyes drifted to the cup already set near his place, steam curling from the surface in a thin, lazy ribbon, and for a long second he stared at it like it was a trap. It had already been poured, pale amber with a shimmer of bergamot, the faintest wisp of jasmine leaf drifting just beneath the surface. He hadn’t heard the kettle. He hadn’t seen her pour it. Whether she had done it before he entered or the house had moved to accommodate him in that quiet, unnerving way it sometimes did, he couldn’t tell. But it was there. Waiting.

He reached out, fingers closing around the porcelain like he was picking up something sacred or cursed, the glaze warm against his palm—and beneath that warmth, something else entirely. The thread. Still wrapped tight against his wrist, nearly invisible now in the soft morning light, it pulsed once as he lifted the cup, a subtle thrum of energy that rolled down through the bones of his arm and settled like a heartbeat beneath his skin. Not sharp. Not searing. But undeniably alive.

It didn’t demand his attention. It didn’t scream for notice. It simply pulsed, again and again, as though breathing in time with him, as though mapping his pulse and his breath and the slow, growing tension in his chest with a patience that felt unearned. It didn’t feel like magic in the traditional sense. No spell he’d ever known had worked like this. There was no incantation, no charm, no structure to its rhythm. It felt like intention without explanation. Like a memory living just beneath the surface of the moment.

The sensation crawled through him with a strange kind of gentleness, but it wasn’t comforting. It was familiar. Intimate in a way that was almost worse than pain. The thread moved like it knew him. Like it had read something in him he hadn’t meant to show. And more than anything, it felt like being watched—not from across the room, not from above, not by eyes or mirrors or ghosts, but from inside. From just beneath the skin. As though some part of him had already been claimed and was now under quiet surveillance, waiting for the next crack to show.

They ate in silence, a silence thick with the weight of what hadn’t been said, what couldn’t yet be said, and what both of them seemed to carry just beneath their skin like bruises waiting to bloom. It wasn’t hostile, not entirely, but it wasn’t easy either. It felt suspended, like the room itself had drawn a circle around their shared breath and was waiting to see which one of them would be the first to break the pattern. Every sound felt louder against it—the soft scrape of silver against porcelain, the dull clink of Theo’s spoon against the rim of his teacup, the low rustle of linen as Luna reached for the butter knife.

The overhead lights, fed by old magic and strange wiring, flickered once in that twitchy, uncomfortable way they sometimes did when the house was shifting its mood. The flicker wasn’t dramatic, just enough to make the room’s corners jump, to make the shadows stretch unnaturally for a single breath before receding, like something had stirred and looked at them before deciding to wait. The air moved differently for a moment. Not colder, not warmer—just aware. A presence rather than a temperature. A warning without a voice.

From above the hearth, a sigil lit up with a sharp, silent burst, a brief spark of blue-white light that flared and vanished before Theo had fully registered it. The sound it made was too quiet to be a crack and too clean to be static—a soft sizzle that came and went like breath against glass, leaving behind nothing but the ghost of ozone and a faint shimmer in the corner of his eye.

Luna didn’t move.

She didn’t flinch.

She didn’t even glance toward it.

With the same calm, unbothered rhythm she had used all morning, she dragged the edge of the knife across her toast, the butter melting as it spread, the motion slow and even, precise in a way that looked more like ritual than routine. She didn’t acknowledge the flicker or the sigil or the shift in the air, and something about that—the way she stayed so entirely focused on her task, the way she treated the strange like it was ordinary—unsettled him more than the magic ever could. It was as if she had lived with the house’s moods for so long that they no longer registered as abnormal, as if omens were just another part of breakfast.

And somehow, Theo couldn’t look away.

He chewed too fast, too hard, the muscles in his jaw tightening with each mechanical bite, not out of hunger or rhythm but out of the deep, gnawing need to keep from unraveling in front of her. Every mouthful turned to ash the moment it touched his tongue, the flavor of toast and citrus lost to the slow, tightening burn that curled around his wrist and crawled up his arm like ivy made of pulse and memory. The thread throbbed with every heartbeat, not painfully, not even sharply, but with that unbearable constancy that made it impossible to forget—a rhythm not quite his own. Every swallow lodged in his throat like a secret he couldn’t get rid of, and somewhere beneath the familiar clatter of forks and cups, he could still feel the ghost of her hands from the night before, the echo of her fingers as they bound him in silence, her breath against his skin. He could still see her, not as she was now, but as she had been in his dreams—unreachable, glowing, her magic pressed into the thread like a signature he hadn’t yet deciphered.

And then, with that eerie, unbothered serenity that she always wore like a second skin, she spoke.

"Do you think it’s pulling you closer, or pulling you apart?"

Her voice was soft, languid, and dangerously casual, each syllable dropped into the air like a pebble into deep water, sending ripples that would outlive the moment. There was no tension in her posture, no demand in her tone. Just inquiry. Just inevitability. Her fingers curled around her mug in a lazy circle, the chipped rim pressing lightly against her lower lip as she waited without looking at him. Her gaze stayed distant, unfocused, like she was watching something unfold behind her own eyes that he wasn’t allowed to see.

He stared at her for a second too long, his own hands frozen around his half-eaten breakfast, and tried to will himself into answering, into forming any kind of deflection or denial. But nothing came. No lie, no laugh, no sarcasm. The words lodged somewhere between his teeth and chest and never found their way out.

He didn’t answer.

He couldn’t.

And somehow, she knew that.

She smiled then. Not with teeth, not with warmth, but with the subtle, unreadable shift of someone who had already seen the last page of the story and was just waiting for him to catch up. Her smile held no cruelty and no comfort. It held only truth.

"It’ll find out either way."

As if on cue, the lights flickered again—a slow, deliberate pulse that felt less like an electrical glitch and more like breath hitching in the lungs of the house. The walls seemed to inhale around them, and then exhale just as slowly.

Theo didn’t move.

The thread stayed quiet.

But he could feel it watching.

And somehow, she knew that.

~

The room had gone still again, not the kind of stillness that offered peace or quietude, but the sort that made every shadow feel like it was listening, every line of the floorboards feel like it had curled into itself in expectation, and even the air tasted subdued, reverent, as though the house had folded its breath and tucked it between the walls just to observe him without interference. Theo sat hunched at the edge of his bed, spine rigid, shoulders squared with that restless tension he never fully shed, his elbows on his knees and fingers curled into fists at the edge of his thighs, unmoving, barely breathing, as though any shift in weight might pull some delicate thread too tight. The lamplight from the corner of the room was faint and warm, casting long amber shadows that cut sharp along his cheekbones and jaw, carving his expression into something hard and unreadable, but it caught the thread around his wrist—always that thread—with an almost deliberate gleam, a sliver of shimmer that winked like a secret, silver and quiet and small enough to be overlooked by someone who didn’t know better. He knew better.

He stared at it, at the way it sat against his skin like it had been sewn there, like it had grown into him, like it was no longer a foreign object but a living thing that had found purchase and settled. The knot was still where she’d tied it, fingers nimble and gentle, her voice calm and soft when she’d said the words that were still echoing somewhere in the back of his mind, something about coming back to her, about it reacting to truth and distance and something worse. 

In the soft lamplight, the thread looked deceptively fragile, like something salvaged from the lining of a forgotten wedding gown or pulled loose from an old handkerchief pressed in lavender, its pale silver fibers too thin to endure any real pressure, the loop barely strong enough to hold shape, the knot no bigger than a raindrop. It looked like something a child might braid and forget. And yet, as it rested there—quiet, humming faintly against his pulse—it anchored him with a kind of weight that didn’t belong to its appearance.

It wasn’t just magic. He could have handled that. It wasn’t just some clever charm or living ward. It wasn’t even the bond itself that unsteadied him, but the way it had changed the shape of his silence, the way it had carved its presence into the soft underside of his awareness until it no longer felt separate from his body. It wasn’t just bound to him. It had begun to feel like it was part of him. And he hated that. He hated how easy it had become to forget it was there when she wasn’t looking at him, and how impossible it was to ignore when she was.

He lifted his arm slowly, deliberately, as though the movement itself required negotiation, as though some part of him was already bracing for resistance, and tilted his wrist until the thread caught the lamplight at just the right angle, a soft, slanted shimmer skating along the silver loop with the patience of moonlight slipping over glass. There was no hum this time, no responding flicker of magic or heat or cold, no pulse beneath the skin to betray that it was anything more than what it appeared to be, no sign that it was alive or watching or waiting. It simply lay there, thin and inert and impossibly quiet, resting against the bones of his wrist like an innocent thing, like it hadn’t tied itself into the architecture of his days, hadn’t embedded itself into the shape of his sleep, hadn’t crept into his body like a second heartbeat. It was still. It was soft. It was waiting, and that was somehow worse.

He brought up his other hand, fingers slower than they should have been, the tips rough with old scars and fresh earth, and reached carefully for the knot—her knot, the one she had tied in that ritual voice that slipped beneath skin and bone like oil through cracks in old stone, the one she had cinched with a gesture so gentle it had felt almost like a promise. He pressed his thumb into the center of it, into the small twist where thread met thread and folded into permanence, and even though it didn’t react, even though the silver remained cool and pliant and still, his pulse jumped in his throat. His hands, hands that had broken bones and wielded blades and poured salt into circles and blood into stone, hands that had steadied the dying and ripped open the living, hands that did not falter when pressed to the edge of anything, now moved with a hesitance that bordered on reverence, the fingers that reached for the thread stuttering as though the memory of her touch had not yet left them.

He couldn’t pull it free. Not because it was physically bound too tight, but because something in him recoiled at the thought, some unspoken line in the center of his chest drawing itself taut in warning. And still he tried. Clumsily. Slowly. Like someone afraid to wake a sleeping creature that had already seen his face.

He pulled at the first pass of the thread with the kind of gentleness that betrayed just how badly he wanted it gone, not with violence or frustration or force, but with the calculated precision of someone used to disarming things that could explode—like the first tug at the wires of a warded door, like brushing salt away from the edge of a protection circle, like speaking a name that might answer back. And at first, it moved. Not much. But enough. 

The thread shifted slightly, sliding beneath the pads of his fingers with a softness that made his breath catch, a delicate give that sent a flicker of hope shivering up his spine. 

For a moment, he thought it might simply come undone in his hands, might allow itself to fall away like a ritual completed, like something that had served its purpose and was ready to dissolve into memory. He felt it loosen. Just barely. A whisper of slackness between skin and silver, like a door left ajar.

But then he pressed his thumb into the knot again, tried to coax it open, to peel back the twist of silver with the same care he’d use dismantling a curse or unbraiding her hair in a dream he wouldn’t admit to having, and in that breath between intent and outcome, the thread responded.

It snapped back into place with an eerie smoothness, an almost tender certainty that sent a chill down his spine. It slithered. That was the only word for it. The thread moved like it had bones, like it had thoughts, like it had made a decision without consulting him first. It didn’t burn, didn’t bruise, didn’t bite. 

But it re-wrapped itself with the calm confidence of something that knew it belonged where it was. It curled into its knot again with slow, precise grace, cinching the space around his wrist tighter than before, tighter than was strictly necessary, as though to remind him not only that it was still there, but that it had allowed him the illusion of control only long enough to revoke it.

It was not just enchanted thread. Not just a symbol. It was alive. Not with heartbeat or breath, but with purpose. With awareness. With a low, patient possessiveness that now lived beneath his skin.

He hissed, more out of frustration than pain, and stood abruptly, pacing to the small dresser where he kept the blade he used for fine rune carving. He held it up to the thread. Pressed the edge against it. Nothing. No give. No mark. The blade slid harmlessly off the silver like it had been repelled by something unseen. He tried again, pressing harder, angling it differently. Still nothing.

The next move came not from conscious thought but from instinct, the kind honed by years of training, of blood on stone, of desperate seconds where hesitation cost lives. His hand moved without asking permission from his better judgment, wand already in his grip before the rest of him had caught up, and the spell left his lips low and fast, almost a whisper, the kind of whisper that cut deeper than screams. 

It was one of the older severing spells, the kind designed not for rope or cloth but for more intimate separations—scalp from skull, tendon from joint, leather from flesh—spells forged in the necessity of war, the kind that did not discriminate between the living and the dead, the willing and the bound.

But the thread pulsed.

Just once, a flicker like breath caught in a throat, like something half-asleep deciding to open one eye.

Then it pulsed again, slower this time, deeper, as if the silver itself had inhaled and was waiting to exhale its judgment.

And then, not from the room, not from the doorway or the floor or even the wind outside, but from inside him, from beneath his ribs, behind his teeth, curled like smoke inside the bowl of his skull, came her voice. Not a word meant for the world, not a sound carried through air, but a resonance, a single syllable braided into the marrow of the magic she had woven.

No.

That was all she said, and yet it unmade him. His wand froze mid-air, hand still raised, the spell held like a clenched fist just behind his teeth, and the silence that followed was not silence at all but something deeper, thicker, the quiet of a creature far older than language deciding to take notice. His heart climbed into his throat and refused to move, and every inch of his body locked down in slow, creeping horror, not because the voice had been cruel or commanding or wrathful, but because it hadn’t needed to be. It had simply been hers and it had answered him not with fury, but with certainty.

Her voice moved through him like a blade pulled through water, soft and sharp at once, not spoken in defiance or anger but in absolute clarity, an echo carried through the silver thread like breath passed through a reed flute, shaped not by volume but by the intention beneath it. And in that moment, Theodore Nott, who had survived torture, who had buried friends, who had killed without blinking, felt something he had not allowed himself to feel in years.

Powerless.

He dropped the wand. Not in surrender. Not in fear. But because it no longer felt like it belonged in his hand. The thread did not burn or tighten. It did not retaliate. It only settled against his wrist again, the pressure even, familiar, not threatening but present in a way that felt almost affectionate, as though it had never meant to punish him, only to remind him.

And it did.

In that stillness, in that low magic that hummed just beneath his skin, it reminded him that he was no longer entirely his own.

He sat back down more carefully than before, not in the way someone would return to a place of comfort, but with the deliberate, cautious tension of someone lowering himself into a room that might still be burning beneath the floorboards, the mattress dipping gently under his weight as he let himself ease onto its edge, hands settling onto his thighs in a controlled stillness that did not come naturally but had been practiced, drilled into him by necessity over years of needing to make his body obey when his mind was fractured. 

His wrists turned subtly under the low gold wash of lamplight, catching the gleam of the silver thread in a way that made it look softer than it should have, almost benign, its delicate shimmer betraying none of what had just transpired, no pulse of defiance or memory or resistance left behind, just a loop of metal-pale silk hugging the skin above his bones with quiet authority. 

It hadn’t changed. It hadn’t grown tighter or looser, hadn’t burned a mark into his flesh, hadn’t flared again with her voice or the heat of magic, but everything else had shifted, irreversibly, undeniably, in a way that felt like tectonic plates groaning miles below the surface.

He leaned back slowly, letting his spine press into the cool wood of the headboard, the sharp angles of his shoulders catching slightly against it as he adjusted his position without thought, eyes fixed not on the ceiling or the lamp or the room around him, but on the loop around his wrist, his gaze unmoving, hard and wary and drawn not by wonder but by the need to understand, to anticipate, to guard. 

He watched it like it might whisper again, like it might twitch or unravel or slip tight around his wrist in one last declaration of power. But it did none of those things. It simply stayed, serene and constant, humming with a silence so patient it felt sentient, as though it knew there was no reason to act again, not yet, not now. It offered no explanation. No comfort. Just presence. And that was worse.

Because he didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t know if it was meant to hold him or to call him. If it was a leash or a tether or a shield disguised as something gentler. He didn’t know if it was magic bound to her will or something older still, something that used her voice the way wind used trees to speak. He didn’t know if he belonged to it now. Or if he always had.

And so he didn’t sleep.

Not because of fear, not even because of the echo of her voice curled beneath his ribs like a sleeping animal, but because rest would have required forgetting, and he couldn’t. Not with the silver loop cool against his pulse, not with the air too still and the shadows too quiet, not with the memory of the knot tightening on its own replaying in his head like a spell unspooling one word at a time. 

He stayed awake through the slow crawl of night, through the aching hush that blanketed the house when it decided to listen instead of whisper, through the occasional creak of the walls exhaling, through the wind brushing gentle hands across the windows as if trying to feel what waited inside. And still he lay there, unmoving, staring at the thread as though it might decide to tell him more.

And it never did. But it didn’t let him go either.

Chapter Text

Sleep didn’t take him gently. It wasn’t soft or quiet or kind. It felt more like being hunted by something patient, something that waited until his thoughts slowed just enough to strike. It didn’t arrive all at once. It pulled him down piece by piece, dragging him under with fingers that didn’t care if he was ready.

There was no comfort in it.

No warmth.

Just the steady closing-in of the world, his mind folding inward until nothing made sense anymore.

He shifted beneath the blanket, restless and tense, the bed too yielding beneath him, like it meant to swallow him whole. Every time he tried to settle, another part of him twitched or locked up, like his body had forgotten how to rest. The air felt wrong. The dark felt alive. His lungs wouldn’t fill properly. His legs ached from holding tension they wouldn’t release.

And still, sleep came anyway.

Not as relief. Not as escape.

It came like pressure.

Like something he couldn’t stop.

No dreams met him there, or if they did, they stayed too deep to reach. There were no images, no whispers, no story to trace.

Just her.

Not her face. Not her voice. Not even the scent she always carried when she moved past him in the hallway.

Just her hand.

He felt it. Right there, in the center of his chest. It wasn’t heavy. It wasn’t warm. It didn’t radiate anything at all. It just existed, steady and pale, a hand placed flat over his heart like it had always been meant to rest there. Not for comfort. Not for closeness. There was no tenderness in the touch. Only the quiet weight of something sure.

She didn’t speak.

She didn’t need to.

That single touch carried more truth than words could ever manage. It didn’t ask. It didn’t console. It didn’t burn or soothe. It claimed. Not with force. Not with cruelty. Just presence. A silent, unshakable presence that made itself known in the most ordinary way.

The hand never moved.

It didn’t caress. It didn’t curl or tense. It just held.

Again and again, the same gentle pressure repeated itself like breath, so measured and unwavering that it stopped feeling like a gesture and began to feel like something older. Something instinctive. Something almost ceremonial.

He couldn’t say how long it went on. Time wasn’t right in that place. The edges of it had dissolved. What remained was the weight of her palm and the place it found inside him, the quiet corner that still resisted sleep, still resisted safety, still refused to be seen.

She found it.

And she didn’t leave.

Her touch didn’t soften it. Didn’t try to fix it. It just stayed, calm and unwavering, as if she only wanted to witness it, to know it, to hold it in place long enough to understand what had always lived there.

There was no sweetness in it. No comfort. But there was clarity.

And when the rest of the world finally slipped away, when the dark thickened and the house stilled, that feeling remained. Not like a memory. Not like a dream. But like something carved into him, sitting in the hollow of his chest, pulsing with the quiet truth that someone had reached the part of him he never meant to share.

And stayed.

Her movements were slow and deliberate, neither gentle nor cruel. There was no kindness in the way her palm kept returning to that same place over his heart, but there was no malice either. It wasn’t comfort. It wasn’t affection. It was something else entirely. A presence, quiet and unshakable, that returned again and again with the same calm pressure, as though it had always known where it belonged.

The repetition settled into a rhythm. Not quite a heartbeat, not quite a prayer, but something between. And his body, helpless to resist it, began to follow. His pulse adjusted to the tempo she set. His breath matched its pace. The silence grew thick around them, and the weight of her touch deepened. Not in force. In meaning. In the way it began to hollow him out from the inside.

It was worse than pain.

It was certainty.

The kind that lives in the bones and rewrites what you thought you owned. The kind that doesn’t ask who you are before deciding what you’ll become. He could feel himself giving way to it. Piece by piece. Slowly and without resistance.

Whatever had started the moment she tied that thread around his wrist was still unfolding here. Not with words. Not with magic. But with something older. Something quieter. Something that didn’t need permission.

It dragged him deeper, not into sleep but into her. Into the shape of her will. Into the space she had carved inside him without speaking a single word. It didn’t explain itself. It didn’t wait for understanding. It simply arrived. And stayed. And he could feel it settling, could feel her presence taking root in the place where no one else had ever dared to reach.

He woke as if torn from a depth too far beneath the surface to leave cleanly. No soft drift into consciousness. No warmth of morning. Just a violent jolt that snapped his body upright, his chest heaving like someone had punched the air out of his lungs. His breath came fast and ragged, throat tight, head spinning. It felt like being pulled too quickly from cold water, like some part of him hadn’t made it back.

The room around him was still, but the air felt thin, too sharp against his skin. The sheets were twisted at his waist, damp with sweat. His fingers trembled when he raised them. His skin didn’t ache. It didn’t burn. But it felt wrong. Off. Like it no longer belonged entirely to him.

Like something had been taken.

Or worse, like something had been left behind.

The silver thread burned gently against the inside of his wrist. Not the heat of fire. Something worse. The kind of warmth that lingered. The kind that moved. It slid through his nerves with deliberate precision, not painful, but aware. It pulsed. Once. Then again. And with each pulse, he could feel it syncing not with his own heartbeat, but with something outside him. Something beyond. Something that knew her name.

He stared at it for a long moment, chest rising and falling in uneven bursts, muscles tight like they were bracing for an impact that hadn’t come yet. The thread didn’t glow. It didn’t shift. But he could feel it watching him, embedded in the skin like a second rhythm, faint but unrelenting. A presence he could not shake.

The room was still. Not quiet in the way of peace, but in the way of places that are listening. Shadows had gathered in the corners. The air held its breath. The lamplight by the door had gone out, not long ago by the look of the wick. Nothing moved.

He pressed his hand to his chest, to the place where her palm had rested in the dream. The spot was cool beneath his fingers, but the feeling lingered. Not imagined. Not ghostly. Real.

He had not slept alone.

And the worst part was that some part of him didn’t want to.

But the moment his fingers closed around the thread, the warmth surged again. It moved upward, sliding through his veins with an eerie sort of calm, not cruel or hostile, but terrifying in its confidence. It didn’t fight him. It didn’t resist. It simply insisted. It knew where it belonged. And it refused to be shaken loose by panic or shame or whatever brittle edge of willpower he had left to offer.

He clenched his jaw and squeezed harder, hoping to cut off the feeling, to sever the sensation before it could root deeper. But the thread only stirred beneath his grip, not glowing, not shifting, just… waking. The feeling of it sharpened like the focus of a dream too vivid to fade. It burned, not with heat, but with recognition.

He knew, then. Not guessed, not suspected, but knew, with the kind of clarity that made the breath in his lungs turn heavy and wrong. Whatever had happened in the dream—her hand, the quiet command it carried, the rhythmic weight of it pressed over his heart—had not ended with sleep. It had not broken when he opened his eyes. It had followed him back.

It lived inside him now, threaded through breath and pulse, tucked somewhere behind the cage of his ribs, too deep to claw out.

He rose from the bed without thinking, slow and strange, each muscle dragging as if the dream had left behind a film he couldn’t shake off. His limbs didn’t obey the way they should have. They moved with the thick, drugged resistance of someone wading through water, or memory, or something worse.

The air hit his skin in a cold sweep. He shivered, but not from the chill. It was awareness. It was memory echoing in the shape of a touch. Something inside him had been tethered, and now every shift, every breath, every movement came with the knowledge that he was not entirely alone in his body anymore.

His steps began with precision. Measured, practiced, calm. Like a soldier trying to walk off adrenaline. The sharp angles of each stride tried to mimic control. His back was straight. His gaze focused. But underneath it all, the truth trembled. He wasn’t walking to calm himself. He was pacing to stay upright.

Thoughts circled. The same image, over and over—her hand on his chest. The slow, deliberate way it pressed down. The silence it carried. The weight of it was unbearable. He couldn’t stop feeling it. Couldn’t stop tracing the imprint with his mind, even as he moved across the room in tight, purposeful lines.

The silver thread against his wrist pulsed faintly. Not enough to hurt. Just enough to be felt. Just enough to say I am still here. Still hers.

His bare feet made no sound on the floorboards, but the room did not feel quiet. It felt crowded. Not with sound. With attention. With presence. The walls didn’t creak. The shadows didn’t stretch. But he could feel it all watching. The house. The thread. The weight of the dream still humming in his bones.

Everything was still. Too still. The lamplight near the door had gone out, and yet the dark didn’t feel empty.

It felt full.

But something in the room seemed to breathe with him. It inhaled when he did. It exhaled when he didn’t. And every time he passed the tall standing mirror near the corner wall, the thread at his wrist shimmered. It didn’t glow with enchantment or hum with visible power, but it caught the low lamplight in a way that made it seem alive. Not vibrant, not flashing, but steady and knowing, like it had seen something he had not. Like it understood more than it should.

Still, he didn’t look at his reflection.

He didn’t avoid it out of fear. It wasn’t superstition either. It was something colder than that. Something sharper. The deliberate choice of a man who knew that if he turned, if he shifted his gaze even slightly to the left, if he saw the version of himself that existed now—barefoot, drenched in sweat, eyes wide and dark with some growing, gnawing hunger—he would not look away. He wouldn’t be able to. And once he saw it, he knew, he wouldn’t be able to pretend he hadn’t.

So he didn’t. He kept moving. Heel to toe. Across the same floorboards. Back again. And every time he passed the mirror, the thread caught the light like it wanted him to notice. Like it had something to show him. Like it knew.

Like it was waiting.

He didn’t stop with clarity or purpose. He stopped because his body gave out before his mind could tell it to keep going. The rhythm broke down. His legs stiffened. The illusion of control wore thin. The silence pressed in, too close, too dense, until the simple act of breathing felt like an intrusion into something ancient and sacred. That was when he knew, with a weight that settled low in his gut, that the dream had not ended when he opened his eyes.

It had followed him. It curled now beneath his ribs, clinging to the lowest part of his spine. It whispered in the coil of thread wrapped warm and tight around his wrist. It lived in the memory of her hand on his chest, steady and still, like she had left part of herself inside him while he slept.

He didn’t remember leaving the room. Not really. One minute he had been standing in place, the next he was in the corridor just outside her door. The air was colder there, heavy with a stillness that didn’t feel like rest. It felt ceremonial, like he had crossed a threshold he wasn’t meant to name.

The wood was old. Dark. The edges of it softened by years of being near her. And though there was no glow beneath the door, no flicker of candlelight or sound to mark her presence, he knew she was inside. He could feel it. Not just in his wrist. Not just in his pulse. But in the way the hallway seemed to lean toward her, in the hush that deepened the longer he stood there.

His heart thudded once. Then again. Each beat a little slower, a little heavier, like it had lost interest in keeping proper time. He didn’t knock. He didn’t move. He simply stared at the door as if something might reach through it and pull him in.

It didn’t. Nothing moved. Nothing opened.

But the silence told him she already knew he was there.

The knot at his wrist stayed still. No pulse. No glow. The silver thread curled against his skin with the same quiet weight it had carried all day, silent now, unmoving. The house didn’t creak. It didn’t whisper. It didn’t offer any sign that it noticed him standing there.

He didn’t knock. He didn’t speak her name.

He didn’t even shift his weight, as if even the smallest movement might break whatever fragile thread had brought him to this hallway in the first place. He stood pressed against the wallpaper, spine grazing the cool surface, arms folded—not to close himself off, not in defense, but in some faint attempt at containment. As though if he allowed them to fall, even just a little, his hands might move on their own. Might reach for the door without asking him first.

His breath stayed shallow, tight in his ribs, the way someone might breathe in a cathedral, afraid of being heard by whatever lived on the other side of reverence. He wasn’t sure what would be worse—if she answered, or if she didn’t.

The silence wasn’t peaceful. It had shape. It had weight. It wrapped itself around his shoulders and settled into his bones, a pressure that grew with every second the door remained shut. The walls felt too close. The corridor too narrow. Time stopped behaving the way it should.

Still, he didn’t move. He didn’t look away. He stared at the wood in front of him like it might respond to the intensity of his gaze. As if sheer focus could wear down the barrier between them. As if want alone could undo whatever boundary she had chosen to keep in place.

But she didn’t come.

The door didn’t shift. The hinges didn’t groan. No wind moved through the seam beneath the frame. Nothing greeted him but the soft ache of knowing she was just beyond his reach.

And still he stayed.

The hours bled together. His feet numbed. The house let out the occasional sigh, the kind old wood makes when it remembers how to stretch. And even then, he didn’t go. He let his head tilt gently back, resting against the wall. His eyes stayed forward. Not waiting for her face. Not waiting for a sound. Just remembering the press of her palm from the dream. Just feeling the soft, steady warmth of the thread at his wrist. Not reacting. Not alive.

Simply there.

He didn’t return to bed. The door stayed shut. The house held its breath. And her silence, heavier than any spell, curled against the inside of his chest like something bruising from the inside out. Not sharp. Not sudden. Just slow. Just sure.

And he let it bloom.

~

The garden had thickened under the weight of late-afternoon humidity, not with the familiar heaviness of summer heat, but with something closer, something more suffocating. It felt as if the house itself had exhaled and left its breath hanging low over the land, damp and unyielding, hovering just above the soil until every inhalation carried the taste of storm residue and salt-drenched roots.

The air clung to Theo’s skin with a slow, unwelcome persistence, curling beneath the collar of his shirt and creeping along the back of his neck. Each movement felt labored, each shift of weight resisted by the stillness pressing in around him, as if even standing upright required an effort the garden no longer wanted to allow.

The sea breeze, once a reliable cut of sharpness against his skin, barely stirred. It drifted in short, reluctant wisps that barely reached the hedgerows, avoiding the western edge where the clover grew thick and the rune-dust had been freshly laid. It felt like even the wind knew not to cross that boundary. Like something in the air had changed, and whatever lived in the garden now wasn’t meant to be disturbed.

They had stopped speaking long before they reached this patch of ground, and the silence had only deepened since. Luna stood a few paces ahead, barefoot again, her weight balanced with ease on the wet soil, already murmuring soft phrases to the ground that Theo couldn’t catch. The sound of her voice didn’t reach him in words, only in texture. Like water over stone. Like something meant for the earth and not for him.

The space between them had grown wide in all the ways that mattered. And though neither of them moved to close it, it lived thick in the air between every breath.

The earth itself was good soil. Dark and full, dense with storm-wrought nutrients, the kind of ground that made spells sink deep and stay. The kind that remembered what was written in it. It gave back what it took. It made magic hold. And still, despite its richness, despite the way it yielded easily to his touch, Theo felt the tension rising. Not in the soil. Not in the sigils. But in the magic that wove through the space between them like thread stretched too tight.

He had been working without a word for over an hour. But it was not a companionable silence. It was sharp and bristling, gnawing at the edge of thought with a quiet kind of insistence that refused to be ignored.

His shirt clung to him in patches, sweat blooming across his back and beneath his arms, damp cotton pressing against his ribs with each movement. The weight of the heat refused to lift. It filled his lungs, coated the inside of his throat, and sat heavy behind his eyes. Every breath came with the smell of overturned soil and something older, something bitter.

His boots were no longer boots. They were instruments of labor caked in ribbons of wet earth, every step thick with resistance, the ground sucking at his heels like it wanted to keep him there, slow him down, pull him inward. The mud was thick and rich and still full of storm magic. It moved like it remembered. And it didn’t seem to care that he was tired. Or angry. Or afraid.

And neither, it seemed, did she.

He knelt at the edge of the perimeter, where the sigils had begun to glow faintly beneath the dirt, their light pulsing low and slow like breath held too long. With steady fingers, he pressed the fourth anchor stone into the groove he had carved earlier, the line cut with aching precision. His skin was slick with sweat and grit, and his knuckles stung where the soil had fought him. The stone clicked into place with a resistance that felt almost personal.

Dirt had climbed to his wrists, hiding the scars there, burying them like secrets better left unseen. His jaw had locked somewhere near the half-hour mark, and it hadn’t loosened since. The tightness had settled into his shoulders and across the back of his neck, not quite pain, but not far from it either. A weight that felt like apology. Like punishment. Like armor he didn’t remember putting on.

Her silence had lived too long in the space between them. It had taken root. Grown teeth.

And then she spoke.

Her voice reached him not with anger, not even with judgment, but with that impossible stillness she always wielded when she intended to ruin him without raising her voice. It was calm. Cool. No tension in the delivery. No emphasis to soften the blow. Just a simple truth, one that had clearly existed before she spoke it, one that would continue existing long after.

The sound carried easily across the garden. It slipped between the threads of wardlight and through the runes half-hidden by grass, threading itself into the moment like it had been waiting to arrive. She didn’t look at him. She didn’t say his name. She didn’t even raise her voice. Her attention remained on the far line of trees, where the outermost ward flickered unevenly in the fading light, a weak, uncertain glow that threatened to vanish with the next gust of sea mist.

“That’s too shallow.”

She said it as if it were fact. As if the earth had told her. And maybe it had. The angle of her body leaned just slightly forward, her feet bare, her hands loosely at her sides, as though she were listening to something Theo could not hear.

He didn’t answer right away. His teeth pressed together with such force he thought his molars might crack. He exhaled through his nose, slow and rough, like that alone could push the feeling back down where it belonged. And for a moment, he stayed exactly where he was, crouched low, hands buried in the dirt, letting the weight of her words pass over him like weather.

He had walked this ground a hundred times. Measured every angle. Carved the runes himself. Chalk and blood, both. His palms were still raw from the work. He had earned this perimeter. Every inch of it. Every breath of it.

The sigils should have held.

“It’s fine,” he muttered, the words rough at the edges, low enough to sound like a warning even if it wasn’t meant to be one. The spade in his hand moved before he thought it through. He drove it into the soil harder than necessary, and the metal caught on something buried—a stone, or maybe just the resistance of magic itself—and the jolt climbed through his wrist and into his shoulder like a curse biting back.

He didn’t lift his gaze. His grip stayed tight on the handle, the knuckles white where his hand flexed, too rigid now for reason. “Not everything has to be done your way.”

That was when the shift happened. Barely perceptible, but there. The light of the ward paused in its flickering. The air stilled just enough to be noticed. Not cooler. Not warmer. Just quiet. Deep quiet. The kind that pressed into your ribs and waited.

Even the house seemed to notice.

And it was not on his side.

Luna turned slowly, the hem of her robe dragging through the wet grass, dampening the pale edge where the stitching had already begun to fray. Her sleeves were still rolled up past her elbows, and on the inside of her left forearm, the dark curve of a protective sigil glimmered faintly where the runes met sweat. A smear of ash streaked across her cheekbone, sharp and angled like an accidental stripe of war paint, but neither of them said anything about it. She didn’t wipe it away.

She looked at him with the kind of silence that settled into the marrow of things. Her expression wasn’t cruel, wasn’t even cold. It was something far worse than either. It was steady. And exhausted. And old in the way that grief is old. Not bitter. Just done.

“It’s not my way,” she said, voice quiet and leveled, calm in that terrifying way hers always became when she had already made peace with being misunderstood. “It’s the way that works.”

There was no pride in the sentence. No smugness. No challenge. Just a certainty that sounded older than either of them had any right to feel, the kind of truth that didn't rise like a blade, but fell like a verdict. It didn’t accuse. It didn’t blame. But it did not bend either.

That was what broke him.

He stood too fast, his legs unfolding with a kind of violence that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the way her words had found the weakest spot in him. His spine snapped straight, his shoulders drawn back like he meant to throw something, or run, or crack open completely.

He dragged his palms across his trousers, wiping dirt and rune chalk into streaks across the black fabric without care, without thought, as if marking himself could somehow restore the power she had just stripped away.

He stepped forward, not enough to invade, not enough to touch, but close enough that his body remembered hers. Close enough for the thread at his wrist to respond, heat blooming along his veins in that same terrible rhythm it had taken on the night before, that quiet hum of awareness that always knew when she was near.

The heat in his chest was not from the sun. It was rage. Not sharp, not loud, but coiled and pulsing beneath his ribs like a lit fuse.

"You treat me like a fucking pawn," he said, low and raw, his voice clipped not by restraint but by the strain of keeping it from breaking open entirely. “Like I was sent here to haul stones and mutter incantations and be grateful you even remembered to look at me. Like I haven’t bled for this place. Like I haven’t watched it try to take you.”

The words hit the air like stones skipping across still water. Not thunderous. Just precise.

His chest rose and fell, the motion unsteady now, like the fury had unmoored something deep in him that he hadn’t meant to reveal. His hands flexed at his sides, not into fists, but into something quieter. Something lost.

He had not wanted to say it. Not like this. But once it was out, the weight of it was unbearable.

Across from him, Luna did not react the way he expected.

There was no flicker of shock, no flinch, no sharp retort shaped by equal hurt. She didn’t rush to correct him, didn’t offer softness or pushback or distance. Her eyes didn’t narrow. Her mouth didn’t tighten. Her hands didn’t lift in some instinctive plea for peace.

Instead, she simply looked at him.

The breeze that had curled through the hedgerow only moments ago stilled to nothing, like the garden itself had forgotten how to breathe. The leaves stopped rustling. The air thickened. Even the light shifted, slanting inward as though drawn to her silence, softening its glare, dimming with reverence, as if the house understood something ancient about her quiet that he had never been meant to grasp.

And then she moved.

No words. No warning. No need for drama. Just the slow, inevitable turn of her shoulders, the brush of fabric against wet grass, the kind of poise that didn’t belong to this world, that made her seem less like a woman and more like the echo of a dream not yet finished, something the universe had conjured and never quite let go. She walked away with that maddening grace he hated for how much it humbled him, every footstep soft as breath, every inch of retreat its own lesson in how little noise power needed to make.

He didn’t think.

There was no plan, no decision, only the lurch of something primal and scorching rising through his chest and seizing his limbs, a hunger to be seen or stopped or remembered in the face of her leaving. His body reacted before his mind could catch it. His hand lashed out, too fast, too rough, his fingers wrapping around her wrist in a grip that wasn’t violent but wasn’t gentle either. He didn’t squeeze. Not truly. But he held her. Anchored her. Called her back with the urgency of skin against skin, with his pulse beating hard against hers like a question clawing its way out of silence.

And then the air shifted.

Not from sound. Not from breath. But from her.

Because she didn’t startle.

She didn’t stiffen or pull away or even turn.

She simply moved.

Her body flowed with the silence, no stutter, no hesitation, only grace sharpened into precision. In one seamless, breathless motion, her hand slipped into her sleeve and emerged with a blade so sudden it felt conjured, summoned from air and instinct. The metal caught the dying light and held it, a gleam of silver that flashed against the faint shimmer of the nearest wardline, drawing power from the soil like it had been forged in the bones of the house itself. It didn’t shake. It didn’t falter. It belonged to her the way storms belong to clouds.

She didn’t raise it to his throat. She didn’t drive it between his ribs. She simply held it. Low. Certain. Ready. The way some people hold grief. The way others hold god.

Her voice, when it came, was soft enough to be mistaken for mercy. “Touch me like that again,” she said, her words curling through the air like silk dipped in frost. “And the house will bury you.”

It was not a threat. Not a guess. Not a test to see if he believed her.

It was law.

She said it with the kind of terrifying calm that made weapons unnecessary, her voice slipping beneath his skin like a spell written in bone, like the ancient kind of magic that didn’t need to be cast to be obeyed. The garden heard it. The house heard it. Even the air pulled tighter.

They stayed like that, caught in a stillness so dense it might have been mistaken for silence, but it wasn’t. It was louder than that. It was the space between lightning and thunder, between the decision to run and the moment the ground gives way.

His hand was still on her wrist. Her fingers still curved around the hilt. Neither of them moved. Neither of them breathed the way humans were meant to breathe.

The garden waited.

The sky deepened toward twilight, the light neither bright nor gone, a half-lit hush that stretched too long across the hedgerows. The wards flickered along the perimeter like a heartbeat learning a new rhythm, and the soil beneath their feet pulsed, slow and certain, alive with whatever she had just called forward.

He didn’t release her right away.

He couldn’t.

Something inside him clung, not in dominance, not in desperation, but in a confusion so vast it touched reverence. His body no longer knew where it ended. Only that it wanted to remember the feel of her. Even if the memory cut. Even if the house kept it.

Even if she didn’t.

He let go with the cautious hesitation of someone withdrawing from open flame, each finger peeling back slowly, as if his hand had only just realized it was wrapped around something capable of burning straight through him. The motion was careful, quiet, like reverence masked as restraint, like surrender softened by shame. And still she didn’t move. Still she didn’t flinch. But the warmth of her skin clung to his fingertips even after the distance opened between them, not like a touch, not like forgiveness, but like a mark.

She didn’t raise her voice.

She didn’t spit his name back at him with fury sharp enough to wound.

She didn’t walk away in some dramatic sweep of robes and fury.

She simply lowered the blade.

With the same eerie, unsettling stillness she had carried since the beginning, she let the weapon slide from her hand, back into the folds of her sleeve like it had never existed at all, like it had been no more threatening than breath, no more disruptive than a shift in the wind. The air between them remained heavy, charged with everything she didn’t say, everything she didn’t need to say. She looked at him once, and in that single glance was something far more brutal than anger.

She didn’t glare. She didn’t sneer. She didn’t narrow her eyes like someone building a case to prosecute him later.

She just looked.

And what he saw there was silence turned sentient. Not forgiveness. Not fury. Just something ancient and still. The same look she had worn the first time she ever stood at his door and asked if he ever heard the sound of his own heart when the room went quiet enough. A look that knew too much. A look that would never ask him to explain.

And then she stayed.

She didn’t step back. Didn’t retreat. Didn’t vanish the way he sometimes feared she would, folded back into the house that seemed to love her more than it should. She stood exactly where she had been, the mud drying along the seam of her boots, the salt-wind tugging at her hair, her hands now empty but the weight of her blade still thick in the space between them.

She didn’t offer him absolution. She didn’t pretend it hadn’t happened.

But she didn’t leave.

And somehow that was worse.

Because it meant she had seen all of it. The impulse. The mistake. The hurt hiding inside the grip. She had let him touch her in anger and chosen to stay anyway, not out of mercy, not out of affection, but because something had shifted. Something had cracked open between them, dark and wordless and real, and neither of them had the tools to mend it or the courage to destroy it.

The silence that followed wasn’t soft. It wasn’t kind. It pressed into his ribs and sat behind his teeth like a stone, and yet still he didn’t speak. Still she didn’t leave.

They stood there with the tension still breathing around them, with the thread still wrapped around his wrist, and the house still listening.

And for once, the quiet between them did not ask for explanation. It only asked for truth.

And they both knew it had already been spoken. Without words. Without violence. Just a moment held too long, and a hand that took too much.

~

The day hadn’t started with sound or movement, but with a thick, weighty quiet that settled against the skin like damp wool, clinging in all the wrong places. It was the kind of silence that didn’t calm so much as press down, heavy and familiar, the sort that reminded him of all the things left unspoken the night before. Every rustle in the trees felt too even, too timed. The birdsong, usually scattered and aimless, now rang out with eerie precision, like someone had written the melody in advance. The whole world seemed to be pretending, playing at normal, while something deep beneath the surface waited for its moment to rupture.

Theo had found himself at the southern edge of the property before he’d even realized where he was going, drawn not by choice, not by plan, but by that quiet tension in his chest, the one that always flared when something shifted in the wards. He crouched near the boundary line, elbows bare, hands pressed into the soil with more desperation than care. The ground was cold, slick with last night’s rain, and it welcomed his fingers like it had been expecting them, curling damp earth around his knuckles with the slow gravity of something ancient.

The soil here wasn’t like the rest. It was darker, denser, heavy with that slow heartbeat of old magic, not loud or flashy but quiet and certain, humming beneath the surface like it had been watching him since the day he arrived. This wasn’t magic meant to be harnessed or bent into shape. It didn’t sparkle or flare. It didn’t belong to him. It didn’t belong to anyone. It just was. Timeless and alive in a way that made the air feel too full, as though something invisible was still breathing beneath it.

He could feel it through his palms, that slow, pulsing awareness that had nothing to do with spells and everything to do with memory. The land remembered. And it would outlast every ward, every glyph, every intention he set into its skin.

That morning, the house had asked something of him. Not in words. Not in any way he could write down or repeat or prove. It spoke in the way old places did—through pressure, through the strange shift of air at the top of the landing, through the quiet resistance of doors that used to open easily but now held just a fraction longer before giving way. It asked in the fog that collected on the inside of the windows despite a clear sky, in the shiver of warmth that lingered on the brass of the doorknobs when no one had passed that way in hours.

Luna hadn’t said anything. Not over tea. Not in that way she usually did, half-sentences and glances that felt like riddles instead of conversation.

The change was already there, subtle and sure, threaded into the shape of the morning itself. The candle flames near the east corridor had bent inward when he passed them, not once but twice. He had touched the wall just after and felt the warmth soak into his skin as if someone else had touched it seconds before. Someone who had never learned to leave a trace.

And that was how the house spoke. Not with sound. Not with signs. But with the memory of things that should not be remembered at all.

The ground had felt strange beneath his boots. Not just soft, not just disturbed, but wrong in a way that had nothing to do with weather or thaw. There was something else beneath the surface. Something deep and unsettled. As if the soil itself had grown weary of keeping secrets. As if it had begun to remember every body buried in it and was slowly, inch by inch, beginning to consider letting go. Each step landed heavier than the last, and the earth gave more than it should have. It swallowed his weight in silence, and the pull in his chest that always came near the southern boundary, the one he used to pretend was just coincidence, tightened until it felt like someone was threading a wire through his ribs.

The wards were failing again. Not loudly, not in a way anyone untrained would see. But he felt it. He felt it in the sick little tremors that ran along the skin of the spellwork. A stuttering hum that should have remained steady. A rising pitch just sharp enough to make his molars ache, like the world itself had begun to tune its magic wrong. It wasn’t collapse. Not yet. It was something worse. It was the kind of slow undoing that only the caster could feel. A decay you could taste if you listened too closely.

They had spent weeks building that lattice. Thread by thread. Glyph by glyph. A web of old and new magic braided with chalk and blood and breath. 

They had carved runes until their fingers ached, until the bones in their hands remembered the shapes even when asleep. But now, the entire structure was warping. Twisting. Turning against itself like a body rejecting what it had been given. As if the magic was sick of obedience and had begun gnawing at its own foundation. The shapes no longer held. The logic of it bent in on itself like paper soaked through. Patterns cracked like thought spiraling under pressure. It was madness disguised as protection.

He hadn’t called for her, hadn’t needed to. Luna came anyway. As she always did.

No sound announced her. She was simply there. Present the way certain truths were present. Silent and sure and so unshakably real that it made questioning her seem absurd. She stood beside him with that same quiet weight that had never required explanation. Not once had she asked if he needed her. She just knew. She showed up like gravity. Like breath. Like the answer to a question he hadn’t voiced out loud.

Her cardigan hung off her shoulders, too large and too soft, worn so thoroughly that it looked less like clothing and more like something the house had spun out of the air and draped around her as a kind of offering. The sleeves had slipped far past her wrists, her fingers curling out just enough to remind him she was made of skin and bone and not the mist she so often resembled.

She moved through the garden like the land had parted just for her. As though her steps asked for nothing, and the world gave way in response. The breeze, faint and briny, circled around her instead of touching her, like even the wind had learned to respect her stillness. It wasn’t floating, not exactly. But there was something not fully rooted about the way she walked. Something that made the trees lean ever so slightly in her direction.

He had grown used to her that way. She didn’t speak unless the quiet made space for it. She didn’t interfere unless the ground cried out for her hands. And she never startled. Not when the floorboards screamed. Not when the walls cracked. Not when the bones beneath the house shifted and groaned and called out through the wards with voices that did not belong to the living. She never flinched.

But today was not like the others.

There had been no warning. No shift in the pressure of the air. No birds taking flight in panic. No unnatural shadow sliding across the grass to announce what was coming. Just stillness. A breath held too long by the land itself. A quiet that rang hollow. A moment too calm.

And then it happened.

The ground pulsed once beneath their feet. A low, gut-deep thud that didn’t ripple like magic or echo like thunder. It moved inward, inward and down, striking the bone instead of the ear, as though it had come from beneath the roots, from whatever lay buried too deep to name. And in the next instant, the spell shattered.

It didn’t fray or collapse. It snapped. The sound was precise. Surgical. A crack of pressure so sudden it stole the breath from the garden itself. Like a femur giving under too much weight. Clean. Final. Wrong.

Something surged upward from the boundary line, unseen but searing. 

A whip of heat and force that sliced through the clearing like a blade thrown blind. It wasn’t a spell. It wasn’t anything shaped by intention. It was the magical equivalent of a scream, wild and unformed, rising out of the earth with the instinct of something that had been hurt too many times and had finally struck back. 

The energy burned as it moved, too fast to dodge, too sudden to shield against. Theo felt it arc across the top layer of his skin, not like flame but like the aftershock of one, and every nerve in his body fired in tandem with the noise.

It didn’t aim. It didn’t think. It just wanted to be free. To break. To lash out. And the magic recoiled around it like breath from a blow that couldn’t be absorbed.

He moved before the thought could form.

Not a choice. Not a plan. Just the muscle-deep memory of survival. His arm came up fast across her chest.To shield. To keep her out of reach. His other hand lifted too, instinctively forming a barrier as the flare passed over them, a streak of magic so fierce and bright it carved the air clean and left only silence in its wake.

Heat brushed past his skin. His shirt lifted slightly from the force of it. His throat caught in the moment it passed. The magic coiled and spun around them like a creature that had just remembered its teeth. And then it vanished.

Gone as quickly as it came.

But the quiet it left behind was not the gentle kind. It was too precise. Too sharp around the edges. The kind of quiet that made you think something was still listening. The kind that filled the lungs with the weight of what almost happened.

He didn’t move right away.

Still crouched, still breathing hard, still waiting for whatever came next. He knew better than to assume the danger was done just because the noise had stopped. His magic whispered warnings along the edges of his skin. The wards throbbed once, like an apology.

And then he turned.

Fast, scanning. His eyes swept over her, top to bottom, back to front. Her boots. Her legs. Her hands. Her arms. The curve of her shoulder. The fabric of her sleeve. Was she bleeding? Burned? Had he been too slow?

But there was nothing. No scorch. No mark. No tremble. Just Luna. Standing in the same place, wrapped in that familiar cardigan, her hair wild from the sudden wind, and her face turned not toward him but toward the horizon. Toward something he could not see. Her eyes were wide, but not with fear. Her mouth was still. Her brow relaxed. She didn’t look hurt.

She looked distant.

Listening. Something beneath them. Her body held the kind of stillness that didn’t come from shock but from reception, as if her bones had picked up a frequency the rest of the world couldn’t hear. The flare hadn’t frightened her. If anything, it had spoken to her. She stood as if it had not been an attack, but a message.

And she was trying to understand what it meant.

It unnerved him more than a scream ever could have.

She only looked down, her eyes shifting slowly to her hand, with that eerie, focused stillness that made the air seem thinner just from watching her. Her gaze found her palm with the certainty of someone who had already known what she’d find. And when he followed it, when he saw what she saw, something in his chest gave a sharp, involuntary pull.

It wasn’t a dramatic wound. Just a single, narrow line, barely deeper than a scratch, running clean along the base of her fingers. Precise. Pale at the edges.

The skin had parted with unnerving neatness, not jagged but smooth, like something deliberate had carved it, like the land had marked her and not by mistake. Blood gathered slowly along the line, deep red and glossy, not rushing but forming with the measured pace of something aware it was being watched. It clung to her skin rather than spilling, curved along the cut like a secret deciding whether or not to be spoken.

Her fingers twitched once, a tiny, automatic flinch. Then they stilled again, her entire hand settling into the light as if posing for it. She tilted her wrist slightly, inspecting the wound without haste, the way a botanist might turn a strange leaf in the sunlight, curious but unafraid. There was no fear in her face. No sharp breath. No signs of pain at all. Only a quiet concentration, like she was waiting to see what the injury would tell her.

He couldn’t breathe for a moment.

The morning light touched her skin gently, catching the wet curve of the blood, turning it a rich, shadowy black that looked more like ink than anything human. It didn’t trickle. It didn’t fall. It hovered. Balanced there in silence, like it had been summoned and was waiting for instruction.

Her brow furrowed, as though her body had interrupted her, and she was deciding whether it was worth the trouble to acknowledge it at all.

The quiet pressed tighter around them. The garden didn’t move. The wards didn’t hum. And still she stood there, holding her wounded hand up to the light like it was a message, not a mistake, her blood a punctuation mark that hadn’t yet decided what kind of sentence it belonged to.

And he could not stop looking at it.

And that was when he moved.

There was no weighing of choice, no internal debate to measure the risk. His body leaned into the space between them before his mind could catch up. His hand rose, unhurried but certain, and closed gently around her wrist with the familiarity of a motion already lived. 

His grip was light, nothing that sought control. It felt more like reverence than possession, as if his fingertips had recognized her skin before his eyes ever had. Her pulse pressed steadily beneath his hand, warm and alive, and still he didn’t look up. He didn’t speak. He didn’t ask.

Instead, he guided her hand closer, and with a quiet that felt sacred, he pressed his lips to the cut across her palm.

There was no softness in the gesture. No gentleness meant to soothe. 

His mouth met her skin with a kind of still desperation, like the act could draw the pain into him and leave her untouched. It was not a kiss meant to heal. It was not a kiss at all. It was something older than language, something shaped by need and fear and the helpless ache of watching someone bleed and knowing there is no real way to stop it.

It didn’t feel romantic. Not even close.Only urgency. Only instinct. 

His lips stayed there a second longer than they should have. 

Just because he didn’t know what to do once the act was done. 

The silence between them felt suspended, as if even the air had paused to take notice. The magic that lingered, thick and unsteady, began to settle again. And still, he didn’t lift his head.

He wasn’t trying to be noble. He wasn’t trying to make a point. He just didn’t want her to bleed anymore.

It was not the touch of a man in love. It was the vow of someone who had never learned how to pray, the kind of kiss made not with devotion but with blood and silence, a contract etched into flesh where no words dared go.

He felt the warmth of her skin beneath his lips, the slow rhythm of her pulse against his mouth, the taste of blood sharp against the back of his throat. Salt clung to the breath between them. And still, he did not look up. Not until something old inside him finally let go with a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

Only then did he lift his head, slowly, as though coming up from water too deep. His body followed in kind, slow to release, like stepping out of a spell not meant to be cast. Whatever line had existed before, whatever boundary might have kept him safe from what he had just done, had been crossed long before his lips had touched her skin.

“Sorry,” he said, the word small and broken at the edges, more breath than sound. It was not an apology so much as a confession, shaped from guilt and disbelief, a whispered admission that he had taken something sacred without asking. He did not let go of her immediately. His fingers lingered, just barely, holding the last of her warmth like it might tether him to something solid.

And then, with a quiet, deliberate motion, he released her. He let his hands fall to his sides, each movement careful, restrained, like he was disarming himself piece by piece. His shoulders remained tense. His breath came in shallow pulls. His fingers curled inward, the shame of them settling deep in his palms, as if they could unmake what they had done by folding into silence.

Luna did not move. 

She did not step away. She remained still. So still that the moment felt like it had been pinned in place, held aloft by something ancient and unspoken. The silence between them thickened, not with fear, not with anger, but with the weight of what had just passed between them.

She stood like something elemental, unmoved by storm or fire, unbothered by the tremble of another’s breath. Her gaze never left his face. It was not sharp. It was not soft. It was something else entirely.

She watched him the way the moon watches the tide, calm and distant and inevitable. Not with warmth, not with disdain, but with a gaze that seemed to hold the whole of him, stripped bare and trembling, and saw every fault without blinking.

And still, she did not turn away.

Then, after what felt like an entire season had passed between heartbeats, her head tilted. Just a small shift, so slight it might have gone unnoticed if the world hadn’t been holding its breath. A subtle angle, like a question had just occurred to the moon and she was waiting to see if the ocean would bother to answer. Her braid slid over her shoulder like silk unraveling. The light from the boundary caught the line of her jaw, soft and pale where her skin still glistened faintly from exertion.

And then she spoke.

“You should stop apologizing for telling the truth.”

The words didn’t demand anything. They didn’t explain themselves. They simply landed and stayed. They hung in the charged quiet between them like a stone dropped into still water, not heavy enough to sink, but dense enough to disturb.

He blinked.

Not because he didn’t hear her, but because her voice had struck something inside him that wasn’t ready to be reached. It hit the part of him that always answered without words, the part that flinched without moving, the part that kept truth buried because naming it made it real.

She didn’t elaborate.

She didn’t try to make it easier, didn’t offer a path out of the moment. She didn’t soften her words to fit neatly inside his understanding. She didn’t need to. The truth was already there, woven into the silence, stubborn and strange and unmovable, like smoke curling up from a fire that had already been put out but refused to be forgotten.

He didn’t know how to respond.He wasn’t even sure what she had meant in the full shape of it, not in the way that could be spelled out or pinned down. 

But he felt it. Felt it in the tightness beneath his sternum, in that hollow behind the ribs where unspoken things went to hide. Felt it in the wrist where the thread she had tied around him still clung with quiet insistence, its pulse barely noticeable unless he stood completely still.

He felt it in the ache that hadn’t left his shoulders since the day he crossed the threshold. He felt it in the way she never filled the silence with noise, only with presence. That was always enough. And it was also never easy.

The cut on her palm had already begun to dry. The line no longer bled. The blood had darkened into rust, quiet and unceremonious, no longer a warning, just a mark. Just another story without a narrator. Just a quiet scar waiting to be remembered in the strange and sacred ledger that forms between two people too afraid to name what they have already become.

The wind shifted slightly.

The wards beneath them hummed like breath, low and steady, curling beneath the soles of their boots. She turned, without ceremony or pause, and began walking back toward the house. Her steps were even. Her spine steady. Her injured hand still bare. Still marked. Still visible. She did not hide it.

He remained where he was.

Long after her figure had blurred into the shadow of the house, he stood there, hands at his sides, breath held too close to the top of his chest. The kiss still burned in his mouth. Not sweet. Not shattering. Just there. The taste of her blood lingered behind his teeth, not wrong, not cruel, just present in a way that made it clear nothing would be the same.

It hadn’t been affection. Not exactly.

But it had been something.

And the house, silent and watching, had already added it to the list of things it would never let them forget.

Because the house always knew.

And it never needed to ask.

~

They sat down just after sundown, the last of the light bleeding through the windows in thin, golden streaks that failed to warm the kitchen. The clink of cutlery broke the hush now and then, joined by the soft bubble of something herbal steeping in a pot near the stove. It should have been peaceful. It almost was. But peace had no room at the table that evening.

The tension wasn’t obvious. No shouting. No raised voices or sharp looks. It lived in the quiet instead, in the way the air didn’t move easily between them, in the way the steam rose straight up from their bowls and didn’t curl. It lived in the space between their chairs, in the silence between gestures, in the way neither of them reached for their food right away.

The table felt larger than usual. As though the distance between them had stretched during the walk back and refused to return to normal. They sat still, facing forward, eyes flicking toward but never landing on each other.

Theo cleared his throat once. Then again. The sound felt out of place, too real in a room pretending at quiet. His voice, when it finally came, was lower than it needed to be, as if he didn’t trust it yet. “I would like to apologize for my behaviour today.”

The words hung there for a second too long. Not rejected. Not received. Just suspended in air like dust caught in the light, unsure where to land or how to settle.

Luna didn’t look up. Her spoon stirred the broth slowly, absent circles in a rhythm that had no urgency, no purpose. Her expression was as unreadable as ever, though not cold. Just distant, in the way of someone listening to a sound far away. When she finally spoke, her voice was soft and almost dreamlike, barely stronger than the steam curling above her bowl. “Nothing special happened, Theodore.”

The sentence was too calm. Too weightless. And it struck something in him that made his back straighten just slightly, his jaw tight.

“You got hurt,” he said, slower this time, like the words were heavier in his mouth than they had been in his mind.

She set the spoon down, not with force but with a quiet precision that gave the moment more weight than it should have had. Then she met his gaze. Direct. Steady. No flinch, no avoidance, no softness to make it easier for him.

“And you healed me,” she replied, her voice firm but not unkind. As if that was the entire truth and to explain further would only cheapen it. “That’s all.”

It should have ended there.

Maybe it did.

But the silence that followed wasn’t peaceful. It held something unspoken between them, something raw and barely formed, like the first shape of a question that neither of them wanted to voice. It stretched on without becoming comfortable. It just lingered, taut and pulsing, the kind of silence that didn’t fade on its own but had to be endured.

They sat in it anyway. Two people not quite ready to speak the thing that had happened. Two people still carrying it in their bodies, pretending their hands didn’t remember, pretending their breath hadn’t changed, pretending it wasn’t already too late to go back.

He set his fork down too hard. The sharp clink of metal against ceramic cut through the quiet like a crack across glass. The sound lingered for a beat before his voice followed, brittle and tight, thick with all the heat that had been gathering in his chest since she walked into the house pretending that blood on her hand meant nothing.

“You don’t take any of this seriously,” he said, and the words came out like stones, every one jagged. “You walk barefoot through active wards like you’re picking herbs. You laugh when the house groans, like it's telling you bedtime stories instead of screaming a bloody warning. You treat danger like it’s a game. Like it’ll stop being lethal if you’re just polite enough.”

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t drop her gaze or hide behind that soft silence she used when she didn’t want to fight. Her head lifted slowly, eyes meeting his across the flickering line of candlelight. “Maybe,” she said, voice low, even, unnervingly calm, “because I’m not afraid of it the way you are.”

Something in his mouth twitched, not quite a smile, not quite anger. Disbelief cracked across his expression like lightning. “You should be,” he said. Not loudly, but with enough force that it felt like the table had tilted forward between them.

Her eyes sharpened, the softness falling away to reveal something leaner, something cut from iron. “Why?” she asked, her voice rising just enough to sting. “Because you are? Because you need everything labeled and measured and weaponized just to sleep through the night? Because if it doesn’t fit into a rule or a runic pattern, you can’t stand the thought of it touching you?”

He breathed through his nose, slow and narrow, like he was trying not to let the rest of his rage show. “Don’t ruin dinner with your bloody snark, Luna.”

She tilted her head. The sound that came from her wasn’t a laugh, not really. It was a sharp exhale laced with contempt, hollow and mean. “You ruin your own life just fine without me,” she said, lifting her spoon as if the conversation bored her. “I just sit here and watch you do it.”

The words knocked something loose in his chest, and he leaned forward, elbows braced against the edge of the table. The light caught in his eyes, and for a moment, he looked like a storm caught mid-collapse. “That’s rich,” he said, voice dropping low. “At least I still have a life. You’re just a ghost in a house that’s already rotting. You whisper to things that were never alive and pretend that counts for something.”

She stilled, and the shift in her expression was nearly imperceptible, but he saw it. Something drew back behind her eyes, something old and quiet and wounded. When she moved again, it was slow, deliberate, like a blade being unsheathed.

“What exactly is your problem, Theodore?” she asked, her voice gone smooth and dangerous. “Are you angry because you haven’t gotten your cock wet in months? Is that it? All that bottled fury and nowhere to put it? You snap at everything like some spoiled schoolboy with too many nightmares and no one left to fuck the fear out of him.”

He stood so quickly the chair shrieked across the floor. His jaw was clenched hard enough to ache. “I suggest,” he said, each word carved from his throat, “you shut your fucking mouth.”

She didn’t flinch. She pushed her chair back with infuriating grace, collected her glass, and rose without breaking eye contact. “You’d like that,” she said. “Someone quiet. Someone sweet. Someone who never says what she’s thinking and smiles while you unravel.”

He said nothing. The heat in his chest had tipped into something wild, and his tongue couldn’t form the words fast enough to contain it. He just stood there, fists loose at his sides, heart pounding loud enough to drown the candle’s flicker.

And she didn’t give him so much as a second glance.

She didn’t wait for him to answer. With a kind of poised fury that only she could pull off, she stepped away from the table, lifted her glass, and in one fluid motion, threw the full contents of red wine across his face. The liquid caught the light as it flew, a dark arc through the air, staining the collar of his shirt, the sharp line of his cheek, the hollow just beneath his throat.

He was after her in an instant. His boots struck the floorboards with hard, echoing steps, breath locked tight in his chest. It wasn’t calculated. It wasn’t measured. What moved him forward was something ragged and furious, something boiling so hot it refused to stay buried. He caught up to her in the hall, his voice coming low and tight, brittle around the edges, like it might snap if he gave it too much air.

“Are you finished?” The words weren’t really a question. They sounded more like a threat disguised as restraint, or maybe a plea wrapped in anger he couldn’t quite swallow.

She didn’t even look back. “Not quite,” she said, her voice smooth as glass, cool as a blade, her back still to him, her stance infuriatingly calm.

His fists curled at his sides. “You’re feral. Completely fucking unhinged. You should be locked up. You need a fucking hospital, Luna. A padded room with no sharp corners.”

The sound came before he realized what was happening. A sharp crack, quick and hot with fury, echoed off the walls like a shot. 

His head jerked to the side, not from the pain but from the shock of it. He stood there for a second, blinking, then gave a bitter little laugh, his lips twisting like something sour had settled on his tongue.

“Oh, that’s what gets you going?” he snapped. “Being called—”

The second slap came faster, and this time he felt it. The sting bloomed across his cheek like fire, and his ears rang from the impact.

She was shaking now, only slightly, but her voice stayed calm. It came out cold and quiet, like venom through silk. “We’re already the same person, Theodore. Don’t pretend we’re not. We are stitched together baby and that’s not going anywhere. Ever.”

Something in him cracked. Whatever had been holding him back broke open in that moment, some old pressure that had been building every time she looked at him like she saw what he tried so hard to hide. 

His hands found her shoulders, not to hurt, not to dominate, but to steady himself as much as to stop her. He pushed her back against the wall, not rough, not soft either, just enough to make it real.

His breath came fast, too fast, his body too close to hers. His restraint had left the room before he even realized it.

“You want me to shut you up?” he asked, voice cracked and low. “Fine.”

And then he kissed her.

It was not careful. It was teeth and heat and months of swallowed silence. His mouth crashed into hers like it meant to leave a mark. It was a question and a threat and a scream, all at once. And for one breathless second, she kissed him back.

Her hands grabbed at his shirt, knuckles white with tension. Her lips parted like they had always been waiting for him, like they had been holding that space open for this very moment.

But then she pulled away.

She shoved him back with a force neither of them expected, and he stumbled a half step, blinking. Her eyes met his with a kind of cold fire, furious and bright, like stormlight trapped beneath glass that might crack at any second.

“Don’t ever use me like that again.”

Her voice wasn’t loud, but it landed like a breaking bone. The words split something open in him, deeper than even her hand across his face had managed to reach. Her tone made the air feel colder, like it had been scrubbed clean of warmth.

He stood frozen where she’d left him, his chest rising and falling far too quickly, the air slicing into his lungs like something sharp. It felt like he’d just been dropped into deep water, the kind that swallows sound and steals breath.

Then the house exhaled.

The floorboards creaked in a way that sounded almost thoughtful. One of the candles near the hall guttered low, and the scent of smoke curled through the room like it had been holding its breath too. The air shifted, heavier now.

“I am not using you,” he said at last, his voice so hoarse it barely reached her. “I am practically begging you. To see me. Not through me. Me.”

She blinked once. Slow. Her expression didn’t soften. Her voice didn’t rise. “You want attention from a madwoman, is that it?”

“I want attention,” he said, his steps drawing him toward her again, slower this time. His voice had lost its edge. It came out raw and quiet. “From the person I am tied to. Forever. That’s not something I can undo. And it’s not something I would undo even if I could.”

She gave a short, bitter laugh, the kind that didn’t carry any real sound, just shape. It stopped halfway through, like it had caught on something inside her. “Don’t worry. You’ll be free in the afterlife.”

“That isn’t what I want,” he whispered, now close enough that her breath stirred the air between them. “That has never been what I wanted.”

He raised a hand. Slowly. Carefully. Not to grab, not to demand, but to touch. His palm cupped her cheek, the same one she had slapped, his thumb tracing the faint sting that still lingered there. The gesture held no heat. Only reverence. Only grief. Like he needed to remember it, not as punishment, but as proof. That she had felt something. That she had struck him because he mattered.

She didn’t flinch.

“Say it,” she breathed. Her voice cracked slightly at the end, but she didn’t waver. She didn’t move. She just stood there, head tilted into his hand like the weight of her body had finally settled in her bones. “Say something real. Say it, or don’t touch me again.”

“Luna,” he said, the sound barely formed, as if her name had to tear itself out of him just to exist. “Come on. Please…”

There were a thousand things he wanted to say. Apologies that wouldn’t be enough. Promises he wasn’t sure he could keep. The truth of it, whatever it was, stuck in his chest like a splinter he couldn’t reach. He wanted her to understand. He didn’t know how to make her understand.

But she didn’t wait for him to figure it out.

She turned away. No sharp movement, no sudden exit, just a quiet, slow step back. Then another. Then her hand on the doorframe. And finally the soft click of her bedroom door closing behind her.

He stayed standing there long after she was gone, eyes fixed on the place where she’d stood, like maybe if he stared hard enough, the door might open again. His chest felt too tight. His hands hung uselessly at his sides. The hallway had gone still, the candlelight gone pale and flickering against the walls, the silence pressing in around him like a weight.

He didn’t know what exactly had broken in him. He didn’t even know when it had started. Maybe it was the sound of her voice. Maybe it was the part where she looked at him like she had already made her decision and was just waiting for him to catch up.

It took him hours to find the courage again.

Hours of walking the same short stretch of corridor, of running his hands through his hair until it stood up in strange directions, of standing in front of her door and trying to will it open just by looking. He hated how much time he spent imagining what she might be doing behind it. He hated the silence most of all, the way it didn’t offer answers or punishments, only the same maddening quiet.

When he finally raised his hand to knock, the door creaked open before he could touch it. The old magic still lived in the wood, and he had the sudden, irrational feeling that it hadn’t responded to him at all. That the room still remembered her softness and had allowed him in only because of it.

She was already asleep.

The light from the hallway stretched just far enough into the room to paint her in soft outlines. Her body was curled beneath the blanket, her knees tucked in, her face turned toward the wall. One hand rested near her chin, delicate and half-hidden by her hair.

He stepped inside quietly. The floor beneath his feet felt too old to be trusted, as though it might betray him with a single careless creak. He moved like the house might notice and change its mind.

Before he reached the bed, her voice found him. It was quiet. Barely more than a breath. Drowsy and slow, but not cold.

“What do you want, Theodore?”

He stopped. His shoulders dropped, the tension bleeding out of them one knot at a time. “To apologize,” he said, and it came out low, barely shaped.

Her reply was muffled by the pillow. “Do it in the morning.”

He might have laughed if the moment didn’t feel like glass, too easy to crack with anything sharp. She didn’t sound angry. She sounded exhausted.

Still, he didn’t leave.

He crouched down beside her bed, his knees protesting slightly against the wood, and pressed his lips to her hand. Just once. A slow, careful kiss to the back of her fingers, his breath catching as he did it. Like he was trying to speak without words. Like he didn’t trust his voice not to ruin it.

Then, with the same kind of quiet that had brought him to her door in the first place, he leaned in and kissed her forehead. The warmth of her skin beneath his mouth startled him. She was real, not some phantom made from regret and habit. Real and alive and still here.

She shifted just slightly, just enough for the blanket to rustle.

Then, without turning to look at him, without saying anything more, she lifted the corner of the blanket.

It wasn’t a gesture soaked in forgiveness. It wasn’t a surrender or a promise. It wasn’t even tender, not in the traditional sense. It was simple. Uncomplicated. Space made for him, if he wanted it. If he could be quiet.

He didn’t hesitate.

He climbed into the bed with the graceless urgency of someone who feared the moment might vanish if he took a second too long. The blanket fell over them in a slow wave, trapping their warmth together. He meant to keep some space. He told himself he would just hold her, keep things calm, let the quiet be enough. But the second his arm circled around her, she shifted toward him without hesitation.

Her eyes were still half-closed, heavy with sleep, her face soft in that particular way it always was when she let her guard down. She moved closer until her nose brushed against his collarbone, and then, without a word, she pressed a kiss into the side of his neck. Light at first. Barely there. Then another. And another. The kind of slow, determined kisses that weren’t really trying to seduce, but somehow still undid him completely.

His breath caught. His body betrayed him instantly.

“I advise you to stop that,” he muttered, voice tight, trying to sound unaffected and failing miserably.

Her lips didn’t pause. She only smiled against his skin and replied just as quietly, “Absolutely not.”

He clenched his jaw. His arm pulled her tighter against him without permission from his brain, a quick, panicked motion born of instinct. 

He didn’t want her to feel what was already happening, how hard he was beneath the sheets, how fast his heart was pounding. Everything about this felt too much. Too close. Too intimate. He hadn’t prepared for this. He hadn’t prepared for her.

And still she kissed him like she had every right to.

Like she’d already made up her mind.

Like his neck had been waiting for her mouth all along and she was just following the map of it, memorizing it in pieces.

He couldn’t take another second of it.

His hand came up to cradle her jaw, the way he might have if she were made of something fragile, something breakable and holy. But there was nothing fragile about the way he kissed her. Not this time.

He kissed her like it was the only thing he still knew how to do. Like the words had failed him too many times already and this was all he had left. Their mouths met, and then met again, deeper now, slower, until the air between them grew thick and everything outside the bed slipped into silence. His thoughts drowned beneath it. His breath hitched. He didn’t know how long it lasted. It could’ve been a minute. It could’ve been hours. He didn’t care.

All that mattered was the way she kissed him back.

Like she meant it.

Like she wanted it just as much as he did.

Like she understood exactly what she was doing to him and wasn’t planning on stopping anytime soon.

And he let her.

Not because he had no choice.

Because this—her, here, now—was the only thing that felt real enough to hold onto.

Chapter Text

The nightmare didn’t crash in. It never did. It crept back the way it always had—quiet, cruel, and far too familiar. No warning. No sound. Just a slow unspooling, like grief, like memory. One moment he was asleep. The next, he wasn’t.

He was back in it.

Time twisted. Sense unraveled. And there it was again—blood on his hands, someone screaming, the air too thick to breathe. Panic rose before he could stop it, sharp and wild, a second heartbeat under his skin.

Theo’s eyes snapped open into dark so dense it felt alive. The ceiling blurred above him, shapeless and heavy. His lungs fought to find rhythm, each breath catching like it belonged to someone else. His fingers clutched the sheets, locked tight, as though they could tear him free from wherever the dream had buried him.

He didn’t move. Couldn’t. His heart pounded so hard it made his ribs throb, and the silence around him felt poised to break. When he finally sat up, it was slow, like speed might bring the nightmare crashing back. He pressed a hand to his chest, felt the wild rhythm beneath it, and held it there, trying to ground himself in touch alone.

Sweat cooled fast on his skin. The sheets twisted around his waist. Cold threaded through the room. When he swung his legs over the edge of the bed, the floor shocked against his bare feet. The air felt like it had been waiting for him.

He rose carefully, not stiff, just cautious, like he no longer trusted the floor to stay solid. The darkness outside his door was thick, old, layered in ways the hour couldn’t explain. This wasn’t just night. It was something that watched.

He didn’t light his wand. Light felt wrong in a moment like this. Too loud. Too bright. He walked forward without it, each breath slow, each step softer than the last, as though the silence might shatter if he didn’t move carefully enough.

The kitchen was already awake in that soft, in-between way that made everything feel slowed, like the world had forgotten to turn. A single candle burned on the counter, its flame bending gently with each shift of air, the wax pooling at the base like silence left behind.

She was already there.

Luna stood at the far end of the room, quiet, barefoot, wrapped in a sweater that looked like it belonged to someone else, its sleeves too long and the fabric worn thin at the edges. Her braid had begun to unravel, and strands of hair caught the light as she reached calmly for a second cup. 

He sat slowly, body heavy with whatever the dream had left behind. It wasn’t images that lingered, just the shape of something unfinished pressing beneath his ribs. His hands were cold. His breath was shallow. The room seemed to hush itself around him, not out of reverence, but out of knowing.

She placed the cup in front of him without a word.

The steam curled between them, smelling faintly of chamomile and something metallic he couldn’t name. It tugged at something buried too deep to surface, but the ache was familiar. He stared at the tea like it might steady him. Like it might explain something.

Luna didn’t speak. Her eyes were far away, focused inward, listening for something he couldn’t hear. The silence between them wasn’t empty. It was full of memory, of truths too fragile to be spoken aloud. It held him in place. It held them both.

He almost spoke. There was something caught in his throat, something unfinished. Maybe he had wanted to thank her. Maybe to say sorry. Maybe to say her name. Or maybe to tell her the dream had brought her with it. That her face had been the only thing he could hold onto, and that it had mattered. That it still did.

But he said nothing.

And she didn’t ask. She just sat beside him, her fingers curled around her own cup, offering no questions, no comfort, no rescue. Only her presence. Steady. Quiet. Real.

And somehow, that was enough.

And somehow, that was worse.

And somehow, it was everything.

When she rose, it was not sudden. Her body moved with the same strange stillness that always seemed to live inside her, as though her bones had been waiting for this moment longer than she had. She stood slowly, the oversized sweater slipping down one shoulder to reveal a sliver of skin kissed by candlelight. That soft gleam made her seem not entirely of this world, like she was made of something lighter than flesh, something older than sleep.

She didn’t speak. Not a word. She didn’t look back.

But as she passed him, her hand moved without urgency, her fingers barely skimming the inside of his wrist. It wasn’t a gesture meant to soothe or anchor. It wasn’t seeking attention. There was no grip, no intention to be held. It felt more like instinct than choice, the kind of touch that lingered just long enough to say, I see you, without forcing anything more than that. It was quiet. A breath passed between two people who had both walked through something unnamed and come out changed. Not healed. Not broken. Just changed.

Then she was gone. The movement of her body melted into the dark, her bare feet never making a sound, the hem of her sweater catching the faint glow before it, too, slipped away. She walked down the hall without pause, and the shadows swallowed her as if they had been waiting.

He stayed where he was. The tea on the table sat untouched, the steam now barely visible, the scent of chamomile thinning into the stillness like the last breath of a dream. The candle beside him gave one soft flutter, then steadied, the flame holding steady in a room that had somehow gone quieter than before.

The house did not groan. It did not shift. It did not ask.

It only waited. And in that stillness, he found himself breathing around something he couldn’t name, something that hadn’t left with her.

Because the dream hadn’t faded.

It remained inside him like a shard of something buried too deep to dig out cleanly, a sliver of memory that throbbed behind his ribs each time he drew breath. 

He had seen a child in that dream. A child whose face he didn’t recognize and yet somehow knew. 

And he had known, with a quiet certainty that frightened him, that the child had belonged to both of them.

Her name had been Seline. Neither of them had ever spoken it aloud, not here, not while awake. And yet in the dream, it had been the only word that carried weight. The only sound that mattered.

She had Luna’s wide, watchful eyes, the kind that seemed to see the world from some far-off place and still understand it better than anyone else. She moved with his quiet steps, deliberate and light, like the floor had learned to soften beneath her. Her curls were wild, untamed, catching in the light as she ran barefoot through the overgrown halls, laughter trailing behind her like a thread of gold pulled loose from the fabric of the world.

She had belonged to the house, somehow. Not as a guest or a visitor, but as something that had always been meant to return. Her small hands grazed the walls as she passed, fingers trailing over stone like she was greeting old friends, as though the entire house had memory etched into its bones and she knew where to find it.

Then she stumbled.

He had called her name. Loudly at first, then again, the syllables breaking apart as his voice was swallowed by the house, dissolved into the walls, lost in the breathless quiet that followed. He had run to her, legs heavy, hands outstretched, everything inside him already unraveling.

She didn’t move.

Her body was small against the cold stone, too still, too quiet. Her curls spread across the floor like a halo. Her eyes were closed. Her chest did not rise. And when he touched her, his fingers shaking, the warmth was already leaving her skin.

No one screamed. Not her. Not him. Not the house.

But something had broken, loud and terrible, somewhere deep inside him. Something ancient and raw and so full of grief it had no name.

He woke with her name caught in his throat, not spoken but torn out, like it had been trapped for years. His chest was hollow. His hands were open and useless. His body shook like it had been carved out and filled with something that did not belong.

And even though she had only existed in the dark, only lived in that dream, he knew her. He knew her.

And he mourned her like he had lost the only real thing he had ever touched.

~

Luna sat on the rug with her legs tucked beneath her, quiet but alert. Her posture wasn’t tense, just practiced. The shawl around her shoulders had lost its shape years ago, and the edges were beginning to unravel. It fell around her like something remembered. Her hair had mostly come loose from its knot, soft strands drifting along her neck and cheek where the firelight caught them.

The cards had already been laid out. A crescent shape, wide and uneven. To someone else, it might have looked careless. It wasn’t. Every card sat exactly where she had placed it, not for pattern but for meaning. She didn’t need symmetry to read the shape of things.

Her hand hovered just above the spread. She didn’t touch them. Her fingers moved slowly through the air, like she was feeling for something just out of reach, like the story was already there, waiting for her to listen properly.

She closed her eyes, not to escape, but to find it more clearly.

The space around her felt held, like the air had gone still just to listen. There was weight in it, the kind that gathered in quiet corners, the kind that watched without blinking. 

And still, she moved through it with that calm of hers, unhurried and sure, like she had long since learned how to live beside things that couldn’t be named. Nothing about her was performative. She moved like someone who had made peace with carrying questions that never asked to be answered. It was reverent, but not for show. 

The cards in front of her weren’t meant for anyone else. She didn’t read for others, not often. And never for herself unless the silence got too loud, unless something in the house began to shift. This wasn’t comfort. It wasn’t habit. It was a last resort.

The question had been building for days. She hadn’t said it aloud. She hadn’t even let herself shape the words in her head. But it was there anyway, sitting just behind her collarbone, steady as a second heartbeat. The cards would understand, even if she never named it.

She reached for the deck she kept wrapped in silk and thyme, the one no one else touched. Her fingers moved slowly. Carefully. She drew three and placed them on the rug in front of her, not out of fear, but with the quiet, practiced care of someone who knew exactly how much truth could weigh.

Past. Present. Future. The old pattern. The one that still made her throat tighten if she thought too hard about what came next.

She turned the first card with a kind of quiet acceptance, not surprised by what she saw, only affirmed. The past still held her. Its grip hadn’t loosened. Whatever had come before was not finished with her yet. And maybe it never would be. That was fine. She had never expected mercy.

Her hand hovered over the second card for much longer than she meant it to. The present asked more of her than the past ever had. It was the place where decisions lived, where consequences began to take shape. Her breath caught in her chest and stayed there. It didn’t hurt. It just sat there, full and tight, as if waiting for something to shift.

And just as she began to turn it, just as the card gave way beneath her fingertips, she felt it—something else in the room.

He didn’t announce himself. She only knew he was there because the air changed. The silence folded differently around him. The room itself seemed to pause. Her fingers stilled over the card, but she didn’t look up. She didn’t need to. She already knew who had entered. She had known he would come.

Theo entered the way he always did when something weighed on him more than he was ready to name. His steps were measured, deliberate, not loud enough to startle but not quite soft enough to go unnoticed either. He carried silence the way others carried armor. Not empty. Not passive. It had shape. It had gravity. 

Still, Luna hadn’t heard him coming.

Maybe she had been too deep in it, too far beneath the surface, her mind wrapped in ritual, her breath caught between the past and whatever tried to bloom in the cards at her feet. She didn’t know. She only knew that when his voice finally broke the quiet, it landed like a pebble tossed into dark water. Not loud. Not harsh. But enough to ripple everything she had been trying to hold still.

She flinched. Barely. Just a small pull inward, like the moment you realize someone has walked through a door you were certain was locked. Her shoulder twitched. Her breath caught. And the card she had just turned over sat there between them, face-up now, waiting.

“What is it?” he asked.

His voice stayed low. Careful. He always spoke like that when something fragile hovered between them, when he sensed she was standing close to something sharp and didn’t want to startle it into breaking. It wasn’t gentleness in the usual sense. It was more like instinct. Like he had learned how to measure silence in units of pressure.

She looked up at him slowly.

It wasn’t the speed of the movement that made it heavy. It was the weight behind it. The way her gaze climbed toward him like someone emerging from deep water. Her mouth tilted, something that almost passed for a smile if you only watched the way her lips curved and ignored the rest. But her eyes gave her away. There was a flicker there, something quiet and worn, something that had no place in sweetness.

“Just curiosity,” she said.

Her voice was soft. Steady. But there was something missing from the center of it, something hollowed out like a word carved into wood too many times. She said it with the practiced ease of someone who had tried to believe it before. Not once. Not twice. Over and over, until the lie had become muscle memory.

“Nothing dangerous,” she added.

It sounded like something meant to shrink the moment down to a size that wouldn’t hurt to hold. As though saying it gently enough might make it true. As though the air wouldn’t shift, and he wouldn’t look, and they might go on pretending there was nothing between them except the ordinary dark.

But his eyes had already moved.

Not because he meant to. Not because he was trying to catch her in something. Just a quiet tilt of the head, a slow shift of his gaze toward the low table between them. Something in the room had pulled him there without asking, the same way a person looks toward the horizon when they feel rain coming.

And there it was.

The card lay flat against the rug, surrounded by its companions, but standing apart. The flicker of candlelight softened its edges, but nothing could blur the image now. It was too precise. Too known. Too loud in its silence.

He looked at it.

And something inside him went still.

A man, suspended upside down by one ankle, his arms hanging limp at his sides, as though the struggle had already been lost or abandoned long before the image was drawn. There was something ancient in the stillness of it, something that didn’t quite scream but also didn’t whisper. It simply existed. Caught. Held. Waiting. 

It should have meant nothing. It should have been just another card in the spread, a symbol among symbols, ink and myth and archetype like all the rest. 

But Theo couldn’t breathe right. His lungs caught on something sharp. His fingers didn’t move, but his pulse lurched anyway, because the face on the card wasn’t his, not exactly, and yet it might as well have been. Not a perfect match, not a portrait or a reflection, but the kind of resemblance that slid past logic and went straight to the spine. The brow. The angle of the jaw. The hollow beneath the cheekbones. The tired mouth set just slightly wrong.

And the posture. That was the worst part. The way the figure’s shoulders curled inward, protective in that way people get when they’ve stopped expecting kindness. As if he had once stood straight and bright and sharp-edged and now could do nothing but hang, all fire drained and no place left to go. It wasn’t just a picture. It was something heavier. A mirror that didn’t reflect but remembered.

Theo stood very still.

He wanted to step back, but his body betrayed him. His feet didn’t move. His chest rose too quickly. There was a tingling under his skin like something waking up that had been sleeping for a very long time, and the cold of it crept up his arms, settling into the crooks of his elbows and the back of his neck.

He didn’t speak right away. Not because the words weren’t there. They were. But each one felt like it had to be carried through some internal gate, something old and half-locked, something that creaked when opened. His voice, when it came, sounded rough. Not broken. Just... tired in the way that comes from carrying too much without ever putting it down.

“Do you think,” he asked, and paused there, almost hoping silence might fill in the rest for him, “that we were meant to meet like this?”

Luna didn’t look up.

She just sat there, still as breath before a storm, her gaze steady on the spread before her. Her lashes cast faint shadows across her cheeks, and the candlelight pulled pale gold across her skin like the echo of a thought she hadn’t spoken aloud.

And then, with a motion so quiet it barely broke the moment, she reached out and turned the next card.

Her hand didn’t shake. Not visibly. But there was a tightness in her fingers, a kind of tension she tried not to show, like the act of flipping the card required something from her that she wasn’t entirely sure she could give.

She looked at it. Only for a second.

Then she placed it back down, face-down against the rug, quick and deliberate, like sealing a wound before it could bleed, like pressing shut the cover of a book she didn’t want either of them to read. Her eyes stayed on it, not with curiosity, not even fear. Just a kind of knowing. The kind that lives in the chest long before it’s named, the kind that leaves no space for denial once it arrives.

And still, she didn’t answer.

And when she finally spoke, her voice barely stirred the air between them. Soft. Steady. And strange in its finality, like someone closing a door between one breath and the next.

“No,” she said.

It wasn’t regret that shaped the word, but it wasn’t certainty either. It lived in that in-between place where things settle after being said too many times in the quiet of one’s own mind. The kind of truth that doesn’t need to shout to cut.

“Not fate,” she continued. “Just consequence.”

The silence that followed pulled at the seams of the room, stretching long and taut, thick with all the things neither of them were ready to speak aloud. It was the kind of silence that had nothing to do with stillness. The kind that came with tension, the kind that wrapped itself around the ribs and waited, pressing in with the hush of thunder still caught behind the clouds.

He moved slowly, the bench creaking beneath him as he sat. Not close enough to touch her. But close enough to feel the heat that came off her in low, steady waves, the kind of warmth that didn’t ask to be noticed but couldn’t be ignored. That small distance between them held the shape of something unspoken. And alive.

“Consequence of what?” he asked. The words came carefully, like he was holding something fragile in his mouth, afraid it might shatter on the way out.

She didn’t turn. Her shoulder rose slightly, a ghost of a shrug beneath the shawl. “The war,” she said. “Everything that came before it. All the things that twisted us long before we were ever in the same room. Maybe it’s the consequence of you pretending not to know what you are. Or what you want. Maybe it’s me thinking I could outrun grief if I dressed it up in rituals and called it meaning.”

He made a sound low in his throat. Something between a laugh and a wound. A crack in the dark. His tone shifted when he spoke again, rougher now, touched by something sharp that had been waiting there under his voice.

“Is that what this is?” he asked. “Grief?”

Her fingers drifted toward the card again. The Hanged Man. She didn’t lift it. Just let her hand hover close, close enough to feel its edges without claiming it. “Sometimes,” she said, quiet and even. “Or guilt. Or karma, if that’s what you believe. Or maybe it’s something older than all of those. Something that’s been circling us since long before we were born. Not trying to heal us, not exactly. Just asking us to look. Just to see ourselves the way we are when we’re not pretending.”

He swallowed. The sound barely made it past his throat. Her voice, when she continued, didn’t rise. Didn’t break. It stayed steady in the way rain sometimes does when it’s been falling for hours.

“You’re right there,” she said. “In the center of my reading. Not choosing. Not acting. Just suspended. Waiting. Watching everything pass around you without moving.”

He let out a sharp breath, nothing dramatic, just air pushed hard through his nose, dry and tight like autumn leaves cracking underfoot.

“And what about you?” he asked.

This time, she looked at him.

Her eyes rose slowly. Not because of hesitation, but because she needed to gather herself to do it. To meet him without flinching. Her expression didn’t shift much, but there was something in the set of her mouth, in the stillness of her brow, that told him she already knew what she would say.

“I used to think I was the rope,” she said.

The words landed softly. But they didn’t soften. They had weight. They had years inside them.

Her voice didn’t tremble.

“But lately…” she paused, just for a breath, “lately I wonder if I’m the noose.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It filled everything.

Something pulled tight inside his chest. A knot that had been forming slowly, cinching itself in quiet places, finally closing with a pressure that stole the breath right out of him. He didn’t know what to say. Or maybe he did, but the words had already drowned beneath the feeling.

So he stayed there. Still. Breathing in a silence that felt older than either of them. Listening to the shape of her pain like it was something he had always known, something that had lived inside his own bones long before she gave it a name. 

He leaned forward, slow and unsteady, his spine folding in on itself like something too tired to stay upright. His elbows found his knees. His hands dangled between them, loose and open, not reaching for her or anything else. Just resting there. Waiting.

He didn’t look at her. So he looked past it. Into the flicker where candlelight ended and shadow began. Into that soft, golden edge where truth lives when it’s not ready to be spoken aloud.

The card on the rug gleamed where the flame caught it. Still and expectant. As if it had been listening the whole time.

And then, finally, his voice broke through the hush. Quiet. Frayed. As though it had been stripped bare on its way up from somewhere deep inside his chest.

“I don’t want this to be some cosmic punishment.”

The words didn’t echo. They didn’t need to. They dropped softly into the room, and somehow that softness made them heavier.

She smiled, but not the kind of smile that offers comfort. It was thinner than that. Worn at the edges. The kind of smile that holds too much knowledge and no pleasure in holding it. It didn’t reach her eyes. Not because she didn’t want it to, but because some truths live too close to the surface to be masked by softness.

Her voice stayed even. Not cold. Not sharp. Just clear in the way that truth often is when you stop trying to bend it into something easier.

“It’s not punishment, Theodore.”

Her gaze stayed on the cards.

“It’s recognition.”

And then, after a moment that stretched long enough to feel like a choice:

“We were always going to find each other, in one form or another. The real question is whether we’ll survive the finding.”

The words settled in the space between them. Not like a revelation. More like something they had already known but needed to hear out loud.

And that was it. That was the truth of it, plain as bone.

Not fate. Not mercy. Just inevitability.

Neither of them moved.

The candle kept burning, its light dipping and swaying, casting long, strange shadows that curled along the walls like something half-remembered. The cards stayed in place, unmoving, untouched. As if they knew the story wasn’t finished. As if they were waiting to be asked a better question.

And still, no one reached for them.

They just stayed.

Together, in the quiet. In the space where names like fate and consequence and recognition all began to sound the same.

Not healed. Not ready. But seen.

She reached for the deck and gathered it into her hands with the kind of quiet certainty that didn’t need to be spoken aloud. The decision had already lived in her, somewhere behind the ribs, long before her fingers ever moved.

Her hands closed around the deck, and then, one by one, she began to feed them into the fire.

Each card slipped between her fingers like a final confession. The flames rose gently to meet them, patient and quiet, curling at the edges before catching fully, the painted surfaces blackening and folding inward like scorched petals. No hiss, no crackle. Just the slow undoing of something sacred. The figures on the cards vanished without protest, but not without weight. It felt like each one had something to say and was choosing not to.

He said nothing. He didn’t reach for her, didn’t interrupt. He only watched her hands, watched the way they moved, steady and sure, as though she was closing a chapter he had only just begun to read. There was something final in the air, but not in the way that hurts fast. It was softer than that. The kind of ending that sits in the bones for a long time after the moment passes.

When she reached the last card, her hand stilled.

She didn’t look at him. She didn’t need to. They both knew which card remained.

The Hanged Man.

She held it for a long time, longer than the others, her fingers resting lightly along its edge. Not clinging. Just holding. Just looking. As if there was something left she hadn’t quite said. As if the image on the card still had its grip on some part of her that she was only just beginning to loosen.

The candlelight flickered across the painted face, catching on the lines in the ink and the delicate shape of the rope. For a moment, it looked alive again. Then, in a voice so soft it barely crossed the space between them, she whispered, “I’d rather not know anymore.”

And she let it go.

The card didn’t burn easily. It held on. The edges curled, but the image clung to the center like it wasn’t ready to vanish, like it was making her mean it. The rope darkened. The face warped. The paper blistered and cracked. Then, finally, it fell inward and folded into ash.

The fire kept burning.

The room stayed quiet.

The heat of the last card lingered longer than the flames, a warmth that didn’t touch the skin but stayed somewhere deeper, just under the sternum. Neither of them moved. Neither of them spoke.

There was nothing left to say.

~

Luna stood just outside the storeroom, half-shadowed by the narrow corridor behind her, arms locked around her ribs like she was holding herself together. Her mouth was tight, her posture rigid, the kind of stillness that didn’t come from peace but from pressure, from bracing. She didn’t say a word as he approached. She didn’t have to. Her silence said enough.

Theo stepped into the room and froze. The shelf in front of him sat empty where the binding powder should have been. The hollow space stared back at him like an accusation.

Something shifted in his chest, too sudden, too sharp. He didn’t even try to swallow it down. His voice came out clipped, flat, already fraying at the edges. “Where is it?”

There was no greeting. No preamble. Just that question, thrown too hard, too fast, like he was trying to hit something with it. The weight of a bad night clung to him, the kind that leaves your skin tight and your thoughts mean.

Luna didn’t answer. Not at first. She blinked, slowly, like she was coming back from a place he hadn’t been invited to. Her calm wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t even really calm. It was sharp in its own way, cool and still and infuriating.

“I moved it,” she said, her tone light, almost soft, but without warmth. “Sol kept sneezing when I opened the jar.”

He stared at her. That was it? That was the answer? His jaw tensed, a muscle ticking near the corner of his mouth. “You moved it to where?”

There was a bite in his voice now. Controlled, but only just. The kind of control that’s really a thread pulled tight, ready to snap with the wrong word.

She tilted her head slightly, as if she could already see how this would unfold and had decided not to care. “Back cabinet. Sealed. Red label. Exactly the way you like it. Nothing’s going to explode because I shifted one jar.”

“You don’t get to make that call,” he said, louder this time, the words sharper. “That powder reacts to proximity. If it’s too close to an open spell, it can destabilize the entire system. This isn’t a greenhouse or a bloody herb shelf. This is dangerous magic. We need structure. You can’t just—”

“I didn’t just,” she cut in, but her voice wasn’t raised. It didn’t need to be. It slid beneath his like a knife slipped under armor. “I followed every precaution. You act like I tossed it in the bloody fireplace.”

“You didn’t say anything,” he snapped, the heat in his voice climbing until it curled up the back of his throat. “You didn’t tell me. You didn’t write it down. You didn’t even leave a note. You just decided.”

“It is my house,” she said, and the softness that usually lived in her voice had vanished. There was nothing dreamy in the way the words came out now. No gentle lull. Just grit and fury, loud and solid. “I didn’t think I needed your permission to shift a fucking jar of powder.”

“Oh, of course not,” he spat, stepping forward without meaning to, shoulders tight, breath louder than it should have been. “You never need permission for anything. You just drift through this place like it doesn’t touch you. You float around in your little rituals, your potions, your scattered notebooks, while the rest of us are left patching up holes and praying the ceiling holds. You treat it all like a story you can rewrite. Like none of it’s real unless you say it out loud.”

Her laugh broke sharp and hollow, all edges and no light. “And you think this place is holding together because of you? You really believe the world is going to split open the second someone touches something you didn’t approve? You’re not keeping us safe, Theodore. You’re building a cage and locking the door behind you.”

“Don’t pretend you understand me,” he growled, his voice dropping low enough to carry something unsteady underneath. “You don’t.”

“I do,” she said, and her step forward was quiet but forceful, close enough that the air between them began to shift. “You wake up every day pretending you’re the reason this place hasn’t fallen apart, pretending your control is safety. But it’s not. It’s fear. You’re clinging to a version of the world where rules can save you, because the truth would break you if you looked at it too long.”

He shook his head, jaw clenched so tight it hurt. “Better fear than delusion. Better than pretending the danger isn’t real. Better than dancing barefoot through wards that could slice your skin open just because you believe good intentions are enough.”

“You think that’s bravery?” she said, her voice stripped of patience now, low and cutting. “That’s not bravery. That’s a tantrum with a purpose. You lash out at the world because you can’t bend it into something that listens. You act like being cold and careful makes you better. But it doesn’t make you strong. It makes you brittle.”

His voice cracked on the next words, too raw to hide. “You’re going to get someone killed.”

“Maybe,” she said, not backing away. Not blinking. “But so will you. You with your silence. Your secrets. Your refusal to admit that this place is already broken, and no amount of order is going to fix it.”

“And what, you think I’m supposed to just let go?” His hands opened at his sides, helpless and angry and so full of grief he couldn’t contain it anymore. “You think I’m supposed to stop caring? Stop trying?”

“I think you’re supposed to stop pretending,” she said, her voice quieter now, but no softer. “Stop pretending that you’re the only one who knows how to survive. Stop pretending that all of us aren’t trying just as hard. Stop pretending that you see me when all you ever do is look right past.”

He didn’t move. Just stood there, staring at her like maybe, just maybe, something had cracked open that he hadn’t meant to show.

They were standing far too close now, the kind of close that made the air itself feel charged, like the walls might crack if either of them spoke too loud. Every breath passed through both their lungs. Every heartbeat felt too loud in the quiet.

 The space between them didn’t feel like space at all—it felt like pressure, like static just before the storm breaks, like every particle in the room had turned toward them, waiting.

It was the kind of closeness that made stepping away feel like betrayal. Like if one of them moved, something fragile might shatter between them, something they hadn’t dared name yet. Skin hovered near skin. Heat moved without touch. Their silence stretched thin as wire, drawn tight enough to hum.

Then she moved.

Her hand reached out and caught his wrist, sudden and certain, fingers wrapping around him like they had been waiting to do it for far too long. The contact was not gentle. It wasn’t violent either. It was something else entirely—deliberate, instinctive, full of weight.

Her palm landed directly over the place where the bond pulsed under his skin, that old, enchanted thread that had bound them since the ritual, that strange magic neither of them had asked for but had never once faded. It glowed faintly now, not visibly, not to the eye, but he felt it, felt the warmth of her skin over his and the answering pulse that stirred beneath it. Like an ember waking in the ashes.

Her voice followed, low and trembling, more breath than sound, but no less powerful for it. “Why do you keep pulling away from me if you’re already tied?” The question wasn’t a weapon. It wasn’t even a demand. It was something smaller and more dangerous. A crack. A plea. “Why do you keep acting like this isn’t real?”

He stared at her, and for once, there was no mask left to wear. No shield of logic or distance. His lips parted like he meant to say something, like the words were right there on the edge of forming—but nothing came. He just stood there, eyes wide, chest tight, throat working uselessly around the shape of the truth he hadn’t been ready to admit. The truth that maybe she was right.

Her hand stayed there, pressed against the spot where the thread lived, not like a threat but like a truth. Like an accusation. Like a lifeline. Like a question that neither of them could ask out loud because the answer would cost more than they were ready to give. 

The silence between them didn’t break. It changed shape. It thickened and settled low, turned heavy in the chest and sharp at the edges, something molten and close and unspoken. Not quite anger anymore. Not quite longing either. It was older than either of those. Older than words. It was grief laced with want. It was history dressed in skin.

And then he looked at her.

And for a moment, she wasn’t Luna. She wasn’t the soft voice in the mornings or the strange girl who whispered to mooncalves and moved through the world like it was music she could hear and he couldn’t. 

She wasn’t light. She wasn’t mercy. She was the edge of something ancient and breaking. Something that had always been just out of reach but somehow knew his name. She was the cliff, and without meaning to, without even knowing it had happened, he had already stepped off.

He tore his hand from hers so suddenly it felt like a wound. The way someone might pull away from a flame too hot, not because it burned, but because it revealed something you weren’t ready to see. His breath caught. His eyes dropped. 

And then he turned away, not with calm, not with coldness, but with panic that barely stayed hidden under his skin. His movements were too quick, too sharp, too loud in a house that always felt like it was listening. He walked like he needed to put a wall between them, as if the only way to hold himself together was to get out before the rest of him came undone at her feet.

His footsteps rang out, fast and uneven, slamming into the floor like punctuation marks on something he didn’t want to finish saying. Not this time. Not to her.

Her hand hovered near her side, fingers still curled like they didn’t realize he was gone. Like they were still holding the ghost of him. Like they hadn’t yet let go.

And long after his footsteps had faded and the house had gone quiet again, the thread pulsed beneath her skin. Warmer than before. Brighter. Almost angry. Like it had taken his absence personally. Like it wasn’t done with either of them. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.

~

As the evening settled into the bones of the house, stretching the corridors long with silence and shadow, he found himself walking toward her door with a heaviness that had little to do with the weight of his steps. Regret wound tight in his chest, not sharp and sudden, but dull and suffocating, the kind that grew heavier with time. It wasn’t just the things he had said that haunted him, but how he had said them. He hadn’t spoken to her. He had thrown words like weapons, cutting her down with the kind of precision that only came from knowing exactly where to strike.

And now, he was standing in front of her door, staring at the grain in the wood like it might crack open and swallow him whole. His hand hovered at the handle. His fingers brushed the cold brass with a hesitation that felt like reverence, as if the moment required permission he hadn’t earned. 

He didn’t come to ask forgiveness. He wasn’t arrogant enough to believe he deserved that. What he wanted, if he was honest with himself, was just a chance to unbury the truth. To say what he meant the first time. Even if it came out wrong.

He turned the knob.

The door gave way with a soft groan that seemed too loud in the hush of the room. For a moment, he stayed still. Then he saw her.

And everything stopped moving.

She stood near the center of the room, unaware of him, newly stepped from the shower. The air was thick with the scent of lavender and steam, as if the room had breathed her in and hadn’t quite let go. Her skin still glistened from the heat. She had not dressed, had not wrapped herself in defense or modesty. She was simply there. Bare and breath-warm and real.

Her back faced him. Damp hair clung to the delicate lines of her shoulders. Droplets of water traced slow paths along her spine, catching the candlelight in soft gleams as they moved. A towel hung forgotten over her arm. It seemed she had paused mid-motion, caught in thought or in silence or in something only she understood. The stillness around her was not frozen. It was alive.

And she looked like something he could not reach.

She just existed. Unfiltered. Uncovered. Unafraid.

He felt it in his throat first, that tight, stunned catch of breath. She didn’t look like something he had the right to name. She looked like something sacred. Something ancient and untouched. Something he had broken once already.

In that moment, whatever apology he had rehearsed in the hallway vanished. His words had fled, drowned by the sharp, aching beauty of her and the realization that he had never truly seen her until now. And now, he could not look away.

“How can I help you, Theodore?” she asked, her voice a soft murmur that barely carried over the quiet hum of candlelight and steam.

She hadn’t turned to face him. Her back remained to him, shoulders rising gently with breath as she continued toweling off her damp skin with an absent grace that only made his pulse throb harder. She was bent forward slightly, reaching toward the lower half of her leg, her hair spilling down like strands of pale silk, and it was in that godforsaken angle that he caught it.

A flash.

A glimpse.

Something delicate. Bare. Exposed for the briefest second, and yet burned into his memory with searing clarity.

Her cunt. Soft. Smooth. An impossible shade of pink that defied logic, the kind of pink that existed in old love letters and rose petals pressed between pages. Baby pink. Perfect. And entirely unaware that she had just undone him.

He felt the heat surge downward, hard and immediate, as though the blood in his veins had been yanked into his cock by invisible strings. It wasn’t just arousal. It was desperation. A reverence wrapped in hunger. He didn’t want to shatter the moment. He wanted to drown in it.

He didn’t answer her right away. Words had become useless things, too clumsy for the sharp ache in his chest and the burning tension in his body. Instead, he moved toward her, each step quiet but deliberate, his gaze locked onto the smooth plane of her back, the curve of her hips, the trail of droplets still rolling down the backs of her thighs like tiny prayers.

When he reached her, he let his hands find her first. Fingers brushing along the small of her back, where the skin was warm and damp and maddeningly soft beneath his touch. She shivered slightly at the contact, but did not flinch. Did not turn. She just breathed deeper now, slower, her body beginning to understand what his silence meant.

He bent forward, lowering his mouth to the slope of her shoulder, and pressed his lips there with the kind of care that made the moment feel sacred. His mouth was warm, slightly parted, and he kissed the damp skin once, then again, letting his lips linger just long enough to taste the heat of her. The scent of lavender clung to her like a second skin, sweet and faintly wild, and he let it curl into his lungs like smoke.

She still hadn't turned around.

And somehow, that made everything worse.

Everything better.

Everything harder.

“I came to apologize,” he said, the words low and rough in his throat, as if they hurt to admit, as if dragging them into the air cost him more than he could name.

She didn’t speak right away. Instead, she let out a quiet hum, something soft and unreadable, the sound slipping between them like smoke. Her gaze didn’t waver. Slowly, with the kind of calm that always disarmed him, she reached for him. 

Her fingers, still damp from the shower, brushed against his cheekbone with an intimate ease that made his breath stutter in his chest. He leaned into her touch almost instinctively, as though his body had always known hers was the only place it wanted to rest.

Then her hand slid behind his neck, her nails just barely grazing the skin, and he dipped his head to kiss the curve of her throat. The scent of her was everywhere, lavender and heat and something softer he had no name for. Her skin was warm, dewy, flushed in the places his mouth found, and she tilted her head slightly, baring more of her neck to him without needing to say a word.

“This is how you apologize?” she whispered, her voice half-mocking, half-breathless.

“I don’t know how else to tell you,” he replied, mouth still brushing the hollow beneath her jaw. “I don’t have the right words. I never do. Not when it matters.”

She let that silence stretch for a beat. Then, softly, without looking away, she asked, “Can you show me instead?”

That. That he could do.

That he would do.

He wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her slowly against the hard line of his chest. Their bodies fit like a confession, like a secret long kept and finally spoken aloud. 

She let out a quiet gasp, barely audible, as her bare skin met the heat of him through his clothes, and her fingers tightened slightly in his hair. He could feel the rise and fall of her breath, fast and shallow now, pressed tightly to his ribs.

His hand moved with agonizing slowness, trailing up her side until he reached the soft swell of her breast. He cupped it gently at first, reverently, like she might vanish if he touched too greedily. His thumb circled the nipple, already stiffening beneath his palm, and she let out a quiet, broken sound that made something primal uncoil inside him.

“Is this what you want?” she asked, the words a trembling dare against his mouth.

He looked at her then, really looked, and shook his head once, firmly, as his hand tightened around her breast with just enough pressure to make her inhale sharply.

“No,” he said, voice low, heavy with truth. “I don’t want just this. I want you. Every part of you. I want your voice in the dark. I want the way you look at me when you’re angry. I want your hands in my hair and your legs around me and your breath caught in your throat. I want the things you don’t say. I want the softness you hide. I want everything. All of it. All of you.”

Her lips parted, but no sound came. Her pupils were blown wide, her body pressed flush against his, trembling from want. And when her hands moved to the hem of his shirt, pulling it up slowly, deliberately, there was no need for another word.

He had shown her.

And she was ready to answer.

Her fingers slid beneath the hem of his shirt with a slowness that was entirely intentional, knuckles grazing his skin like she was trying to memorize every inch of him. When she lifted the fabric over his head and tossed it to the side, her palms flattened against his bare chest, warm and smooth and trembling just slightly. 

He watched her as she looked at him, her gaze darkening, her lips parting as her nails traced down the ridges of his stomach. And then, without warning, she leaned in and kissed his sternum, just once, just long enough to leave her mouth imprinted on his skin.

The sound he made was quiet, low in his throat, something between a growl and a sigh. He brought both hands to her waist, fingers sliding slowly over the curve of her hips, down to the backs of her thighs, and then back up, stopping just under her ass. She was still warm from the shower, her skin slick in places, and she wasn’t wearing a single thing. Every part of her was soft. Bare. Willing.

And all his.

“You’re shaking,” he whispered, letting his mouth brush her ear as his hands gripped her hips tighter.

“I want you to touch me,” she breathed, her voice barely audible. 

That was all he needed.

He scooped her up with one arm under her thighs and the other around her back, carried her effortlessly to the bed, and laid her down with care that contrasted the feral way he was already moving. He knelt between her legs, eyes roaming over every inch of her, drinking in the sight like she was a prayer answered. She was flushed, eyes glazed, chest rising and falling quickly, and her thighs parted for him without a word.

He leaned down and kissed her again, this time on her belly, just below her navel. Then lower. And lower still. When his mouth finally found her, she gasped, her hips arching upward, her hands immediately fisting in the sheets. He licked her slowly at first, just the tip of his tongue tracing the seam of her, tasting her, teasing her, savoring her like he had all the time in the world. She was wet already, dripping, and when he flattened his tongue against her clit and sucked, her legs tightened around his shoulders with a sharp, involuntary jerk.

She moaned his name.

Not whispered. Moaned.

And he answered by gripping her thighs harder, holding her still as he worked her open with his mouth, exploring every part of her like she was the only thing he had ever wanted. 

He licked her deeper, more insistently now, alternating between slow, cruel strokes and quick flicks against that swollen spot that made her voice catch in her throat. Her hips were moving helplessly beneath him, chasing every movement, begging without words for more.

When he slid a finger inside her, slow and deliberate, she gasped again. Then another. Her walls clenched around him and he groaned against her, the sound vibrating through her in a way that made her legs shake. 

She was close already. He could feel it. The tension. The trembling. The sharp staccato rhythm of her breath. So he kept going. Pushed deeper. Licked harder. Let her ride it out against his mouth until her whole body arched like a bow and she came with a sound so beautiful he thought he might never recover from hearing it.

But he wasn’t done.

Not even close.

When he kissed his way back up her body, she reached for him blindly, pulling him on top of her with the desperation of someone who had waited far too long. Her hands fumbled at his trousers, yanking them down enough for him to free himself, and when his cock pressed against her thigh, slick and hard and desperate, she let out a gasp that sounded like please without saying the word.

He lined himself up, dragged the head of his cock through her wetness, and looked down at her, breathing hard.

“Are you sure?” he asked, voice strained, jaw tight with restraint.

She cupped his face, pulled him down, and kissed him with the kind of hunger that made everything else disappear.

“I want all of you,” she said. “Every inch. Every part. Every fucking breath.”

So he gave her exactly that.

And he didn’t hold back.

When he slipped back between her thighs, she was already squirming, her body still trembling from the orgasm he had pulled from her moments ago. Her skin was flushed, dewy with sweat, and her lips were parted like she was halfway between a plea and a moan that hadn’t made it out yet. Her legs fell open without him asking, already welcoming, already desperate.

But he didn’t give her what she wanted.

Not yet.

He knelt between her legs, one hand lazily stroking his cock, watching her the way a lion watches prey it already owns. He was hard and slick and aching, but he was in no rush. Not when she was like this, all needy and pliant and so damn wet for him that he could see it glistening.

He leaned forward, gripped her thighs, and spread her wider. Then he dragged the tip of his cock through her folds, letting it catch on her clit just enough to make her hips jerk. She whined, a sweet, breathy sound that went straight to his head.

“You feel that?” he murmured, his voice rough and low. “So fucking wet for me. You want it that badly, don’t you?”

She nodded, panting, her fingers twisting in the sheets.

“I want to hear it,” he said, dragging the head of his cock down to her entrance, pressing just barely inside, just the tip, then pulling back again before she could take more. “Tell me how much you want me.”

“Please,” she gasped, lifting her hips, trying to chase him. “I need you.”

“Oh, I know you do,” he said, chuckling darkly as he did it again, slipping in just enough to make her body clench, then pulling out slow and cruel. “But you don’t get to come until I say so.”

She whimpered, her hands reaching up for him, grabbing at his arms, his shoulders, anything she could hold. But he didn’t let her pull him down. He stayed right where he was, in control, smirking down at her with that infuriatingly calm confidence.

“You’ve been dripping for me since I walked in this room,” he said. “You bent over with your cunt on display like you wanted me to break you. And now you’re lying here, begging, soaking wet, and you think I’m just going to fuck you like you deserve?”

He leaned closer, just enough to let his mouth brush her ear.

“Not yet.”

She cried out, frustrated and needy, and he grinned.

Then he finally gave her something—one long, hard thrust of his fingers, deep and rough, curling just right until she gasped like the air had been knocked from her lungs.

“That’s it,” he whispered, his voice all heat and hunger. “Take it. Take what I give you.”

He fucked her with his fingers, slow at first, then faster, until she was shaking again, a desperate mess beneath him. And when her body tensed, hips bucking, right on the edge of another orgasm, he pulled out.

She sobbed.

“Oh no, not yet,” he said, shaking his head as he brought his fingers to her mouth and pressed them against her lips. “You don’t get to come until you learn to beg properly.”

She opened her mouth, took him in, licked her own taste off his fingers, and moaned.

“God, look at you,” he growled, finally giving in to the full weight of the desire coiled inside him. “You’re perfect.”

He shoved her legs open again, lined himself up, and this time when he thrust inside, he didn’t stop. He buried himself deep in one long, punishing stroke, and her mouth fell open in a silent scream.

“Oh, you feel that?” he hissed, grinding his hips against her. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Every inch. So deep you’ll feel me for days.”

She nodded wildly, clutching at him, her nails digging into his back.

“I’m gonna ruin you,” he said through gritted teeth, slamming into her again, harder now, faster. “Make you forget your name. Make you forget every man who came before me. All you’ll know is this. My cock. My name. My fucking hands.”

He reached between them and rubbed her clit with his thumb in tight, relentless circles.

“You gonna come for me now, baby? Gonna soak my cock like the filthy little thing you are?”

“Yes—yes, Theo, please, I—”

“Then fucking come,” he growled, thrusting harder. “Now. Let me feel it. Let me fucking feel it.”

She shattered. Her whole body arched, legs clamping around his waist, mouth open in a soundless cry as her climax hit her like a storm. He kept fucking her through it, riding her waves, not letting up, not slowing down.

Because he wasn’t finished.

She was still trembling when he pulled out, her body sensitive and soaked, lips swollen from his kisses, her thighs slick and shaking. She collapsed into the sheets, trying to catch her breath, but he wasn’t about to let her rest.

He leaned down, bit her inner thigh just hard enough to make her yelp, and then stood, grabbing her by the wrist and pulling her up like she weighed nothing.

“On your knees,” he said, voice thick with lust, low and sharp like velvet over blades.

She obeyed, still dazed, crawling to the edge of the bed. Her legs barely held her, but she looked up at him with those wide, glassy eyes, lips parted, flushed and waiting. Her hair was a mess, and he’d never seen anything more beautiful.

“Good girl,” he murmured, running his fingers through her tangled hair, tightening them just enough to tug her head back. “Look at you. All fucked out and still ready for more. That pretty little mouth of yours’s been begging to be filled, hasn’t it?”

She nodded, tongue flicking out to wet her lips.

“Then open.”

She did, like the good girl she was.

He slid his cock against her lips first, slow and teasing, letting her taste the mix of them still clinging to his skin. She moaned around it, and he hissed through his teeth, gripping the back of her head as he slid into her mouth inch by inch.

“Fuck, yes,” he growled. “Just like that. Merlin, your mouth is perfect. Warm. Wet. Tight. Bet you love this, don’t you? Being on your knees for me. Being used.”

She whimpered in answer, and he laughed breathlessly, hips slowly rocking, fucking her mouth with a brutal kind of grace. Not too fast, not yet—but deep. Deep enough to make her choke a little, enough to keep her eyes wet and blinking up at him.

“Take it,” he whispered, holding her hair tighter. “Take all of it.”

She did. Gagging, moaning, drooling around him, eyes fluttering like she was floating. Her hands gripped his thighs, her whole body leaning into it, eager and desperate and ruined in the best way.

He pulled out with a wet, obscene sound, strings of spit connecting her lips to the tip of his cock.

Then he bent down, cupped her face, and kissed her filthy.

No hesitation.

Tongue deep, lips rough, his hand still tangled in her hair. Her taste on his mouth, her body already arching into his again like she needed more.

“Get back on the bed,” he ordered, slapping her ass with a sharp smack that made her yelp and moan all at once.

She scrambled back onto the mattress, panting, glancing over her shoulder as he climbed after her. He flipped her onto her stomach and dragged her hips up so her ass was high, cunt spread open and still dripping for him.

He stared for a second, running a hand down her spine.

“Look at you,” he muttered. “You’re soaked. I’ve barely touched you and you’re fucking dripping.”

She whimpered into the sheets.

Then he gripped her hips and slammed into her with no warning. A broken sob tore from her throat.

“Oh, that’s it,” he snarled, driving into her harder. “Take it. Let me hear how much you need this.”

She gasped, loud and raw, her hands clawing at the sheets, her body shaking under the force of him.

“Say it,” he demanded, his mouth hot against her ear now as he fucked her. “Tell me who owns you.”

“You do,” she choked out. “You. Fuck—only you.”

That did it.

He growled, one hand snaking around to rub her clit while the other wrapped around her throat, just enough pressure to make her dizzy, light-headed, on the edge of something electric.

“You’re mine,” he hissed into her ear. “Mine to fuck. Mine to ruin. Mine to keep.”

She came again, screaming his name, body convulsing around him.

And he wasn’t far behind.

He slammed into her one last time, deep and brutal, his voice rough in her ear as he groaned her name like a prayer and spilled inside her.

They collapsed in a tangle of limbs and sweat and breathless moans, the world spinning around them.

But even as she tried to steady her heartbeat, his hand slid down between her legs again.

The room was heavy with heat and silence except for their ragged breaths and the soft rustle of sheets beneath them. Theo’s fingers traced slow, deliberate circles over her slick skin, dipping inside her again with a tenderness that belied the hunger burning in his eyes. She trembled beneath his touch, hips arching into every stroke, craving more, always more.

His voice was low, a rough whisper that felt like a secret meant only for her ears.

“You have no idea what you do to me,” he said, fingers curling just so, making her gasp, “how badly I want you… how much I need you.”

She looked up at him, eyes wide, shimmering with a mixture of want and something softer—something deeper she wasn’t quite ready to name. He caught her gaze, and for a moment, the fierce, possessive mask slipped away. His jaw tightened, and his voice dropped even lower, thick with something almost like fear.

“I shouldn’t say this,” he admitted, voice cracking just slightly, “because I’m not good at this stuff. I don’t know how to feel things like this. But you—” He swallowed hard, hand still moving inside her, “you’re the only thing I want. Every part of you.”

Her breath caught. His admission hovered between them, raw and fragile like glass.

He leaned closer, brushing his lips against her temple, and in that whisper that felt like a confession, he almost said it.

Then, as if afraid to cross the line, he pulled away just enough to bury himself inside her again. The movement was slow, deliberate, but brutal, claiming, possessive. She cried out, clutching at his shoulders, every inch of her alive with sensation.

He pounded into her, hard and steady, fingers digging into her hips as he lost himself in the feeling of her. His breathing grew ragged, throat tight with the effort to hold back the confession clawing at his tongue.

As he reached his breaking point, his eyes locked onto hers, dark and desperate.

“I lo—” he gasped, voice breaking, but then he swallowed the words back down like they burned his throat.

Instead, he grunted low and slammed into her one last time, spilling inside her with a force that left them both trembling.

His arms wrapped tightly around her, holding her close as his chest heaved, trying to catch his breath.

In the silence that followed, his lips brushed her hair, voice barely more than a growl.

“You’re mine.”

And though the words he couldn’t say hung unspoken between them, the weight of what he felt pressed down heavy on their skin, more powerful than anything either of them had ever dared to admit.

Chapter Text

When he woke, the first thing he felt was the absence. Not the pull of light against his eyes or the weight of the sheets tangled around his legs, not even the lingering ache in his body from the hours before. It was emptiness, cold and sharp, like a blade drawn slow across skin, and it cut through the haze of sleep in a way that no sound or touch ever could. She was not beside him. The space where her warmth should have been had gone cool beneath the linen. The pillow barely held the ghost of her scent, as if the house itself had already begun to erase the proof that she had been there at all.

And it hurt. Gods, it hurt more than he wanted to admit. It was a raw, consuming need, clawing up from the base of his throat and settling behind his ribs like a weight he could not shake loose. He needed her there. Needed to wake to the curve of her spine beneath the blankets, to the soft tangle of her hair fanned out against the pillow, to the steady rise and fall of her breath, grounding him before the world outside could sink its teeth into his mind. He needed it like air. Like blood. Like something he should not be so dependent on and yet was.

Every fucking day. The words burned through him, jagged and restless. He needed to wake next to her every single fucking day. Anything less felt wrong, like a spell gone sour, like a curse he could not name. And as he lay there, staring at the ceiling that seemed suddenly too vast, too empty, he knew with bone-deep certainty that no fight, no silence, no threat the world could throw would change that one simple, brutal truth.

He needed her. Here. Now. Always.

He rose slowly, every movement deliberate, pulling clothes onto skin that still felt too exposed, too raw from the night before. He splashed water over his face as if it might banish the ache behind his ribs, but the hollow remained, pulsing with a rhythm that refused to be drowned. By the time he had dressed, fingers tightening each button with more force than was necessary, the thought had already planted itself deep in his mind. He needed to find her. Not later. Not when it was convenient. Now.

The house seemed to stretch beneath his steps, each hallway longer than it had been the night before, the air too still in places where it should have breathed. He walked through the rooms with a purpose that felt far too sharp for morning light, boots soft against ancient wood, every turn of a corner met with disappointment, with another absence that made the thread at his wrist feel tighter somehow. It was ridiculous, and he knew it. Knew how absurd it was to be ruled by this sudden hunger, this low, thrumming need that had no shape beyond the shape of her.

He finally reached the threshold of the garden, the tall windows pushed open to let in air thick with sea salt and the green hush of growing things. And there she was. 

She sat cross-legged in the wild tangle of the herb beds, sunlight slipping like coins through the shifting leaves above her, casting uneven patterns across her skin and hair. A mismatched shawl wrapped loosely around her shoulders. A chipped mug of tea balanced precariously on the stone beside her knee. And surrounding her in a ridiculous, reverent semi-circle, like subjects gathered at the feet of some strange and whimsical queen, sat the guinea pigs, plump and blinking, their little faces tilted upward in apparent rapture as she fed them sprigs of parsley with a kind of ceremonial patience.

He stopped in the doorway, gripping the frame as if the sight of it had knocked the breath from his lungs.

He truly loved her. Gods, he truly did. A loony person with bare feet and wild ideas, a woman who spoke to herbs and danced with the wind and had tied a piece of herself to him without ever asking permission. He loved her in a way that left no room for logic or caution or pride. And standing there, watching her smile faintly as one particularly fat guinea pig tried to climb her lap for another bite, he realized just how hopeless he had become.

Utterly, completely hopeless.

He stepped out into the garden with the air still crisp and cool, salt from the sea riding on the wind, the sky above them stretching pale and endless, and the moment he saw her, sitting there among the wild green tangle of herbs with sunlight braided through her hair, something in his chest softened, almost against his will. The words came out warmer than he intended, rough with sleep and some strange, possessive tenderness he could not quite shake.

"Good morning, darling," he said, voice low but carrying, meant for her and her alone.

She looked up at him, eyes unreadable, face calm as ever, and answered simply, "Good morning."

Encouraged, foolish perhaps, but caught in the gravity of wanting her as he always did, he stepped closer, leaned down with slow, deliberate intent to press a kiss to her mouth, needing the feel of her beneath his lips to ground the spinning ache inside him.

But she pulled away. Smooth and sure, just far enough that the space between them widened like a chasm, and the emptiness it left hit him so sharp and sudden that it felt like a blade sliding straight through the softest part of his heart.

He caught himself before the full weight of it could show on his face, before his hands could betray the tremor that had surged through them, and straightened with effort.

"May I join?" he asked, tone carefully even, almost too careful, holding back the sudden urge to demand instead of ask.

"You are not welcomed," she replied, voice flat, cool as glass.

He blinked, the words thudding in his chest, leaving a hollow ache behind. "Darling," he tried again, this time with more desperation curling beneath the word, unable to help himself.

She looked at him now, properly, eyes bright with something sharp and gleaming beneath the calm surface. "Let us be, Theodore. Go do your morning duties. You know, your work," she said, each word clipped, deliberate, not loud but with enough edge to cut deep.

And something in him snapped then, something fragile stretched too thin after too many nights of watching her sleep and too many mornings of waking without her warmth beside him. His voice rose, raw and biting.

"What is wrong with you? The day hasn't even started and you act like a bit—"

He did not finish. The coffee cup flew through the air with startling speed and hit him square across the cheek and chest, hot liquid splattering down his shirt, burning and bitter and utterly humiliating.

He wiped a sleeve across his face, fury and disbelief warring inside him, jaw clenched so tight it hurt. "Yeah, exactly," he ground out through gritted teeth. "Like a fucking bitch."

The words hung between them for a heartbeat. Then two. And on the third, her composure shattered.

"Get the fuck out of my house. My fucking life. Leave me alone!" she screamed, voice breaking, raw and wild, no longer the Luna who floated through the halls in silence but something fierce and bright, shaking with too much emotion to contain.

She scooped Sol into her arms with shaking hands and strode toward the house, her back rigid, her breath ragged, shoulders trembling.

Theo stood frozen for a moment, soaked and furious and aching in ways he could not begin to name. Slowly, almost mechanically, he bent down and lifted Artemis into his arms, the little creature blinking up at him in wide-eyed innocence.

And as he stood there in the wreckage of the morning, the sting of coffee on his skin and her words echoing in his skull, he realized, bitter and confused, that he had absolutely no idea why she was acting this way, or why the thought of losing her was terrifying him more than any mission or any war ever had.

~

The rain had come sometime after noon, slow at first, a mist that laced itself through the brittle garden and drummed faint against the warped windowpanes, though Theo barely registered it.

The sound of it faded in and out around the edges of his thoughts like an old song he refused to remember, and by the time it thickened into a steady, insistent downpour that blurred the cliffs into smudged gray shadows and made the house groan in protest beneath its weight, he had long since stopped noticing. 

He had spent the last hours stalking the house like a cornered animal, pacing the length of the corridor, circling the perimeter of each room with restless, predatory steps, as though movement alone might bleed off the thing rising inside him, the thing that had taken root and refused to be named. Rage simmered just beneath the surface of his skin, tight as wire, sharp as glass. 

Every glance toward the empty kitchen where her presence lingered in the ghost of a half-drunk cup of tea, every echo of her footsteps drifting soft and slow across the floorboards upstairs, every trace of her scent caught on the air, sharp and clean as dried herbs and rain-damp skin, turned that simmer into a boil.

And yet beneath all of it, beneath the fury that prickled hot against his temples and the raw humiliation that still curled low in his gut, beneath the sharp ache in his ribs where her words had lodged like splinters he could not dig out, was something colder. 

A clarity that only came when he was pushed too far, when instinct rose above reason and stripped everything else bare. It was not calm. It was not control. It was the kind of cold that came from knowing exactly what he was capable of when the world refused to give him space to breathe. The kind of cold that whispered the next move before he could even think to question it. And he felt it now, humming under his skin like a second pulse, waiting.

Waiting for what, he did not know.

He had gone to the south wards to walk it off. That was the only thought that passed through his mind. Move. Move before you do something you cannot undo. His boots hit the wet stone in rhythm, hands buried deep in the pockets of his coat, breath sharp and fast in the cold.

He almost missed the shift in the wards at first. Just the faintest flicker beneath the steady hum of the boundary magic, a ripple so small it could have been dismissed as nothing more than the weight of the storm pressing against the edges of the spellwork. Almost. 

But not quite. Because his body caught it before his mind did. His spine stiffened. His breath held. His heart, which had been pounding in an uneven rhythm for hours now, stumbled once, then slammed back into its frantic pace. Too small for a proper breach. Too deliberate to be weather. He stopped instantly, every muscle gone taut as wire. The silence stretched thin around him, and for a beat he heard nothing but the sharp ring of his own pulse in his ears.

The spell slid off his tongue without thought, ancient and thin as bone dust, whispered through clenched teeth like a promise. His eyes narrowed to slits. Someone was there. Someone was watching her.

And just like that, the cold inside him sharpened to a blade.

Not her. Not while she was alone. Not while she was still raw from their fight, her voice still ringing in his skull, her eyes still burning through him. She could hate him all she wanted. She could scream at him, throw things, cast him out of her room, her house, her life. Fine. He could take it. He would take it. But no one, no one, was going to watch her. No one was going to track her through the garden, through the storm, through the soft rooms where she moved like light, where her skin still smelled like salt and rain and wild things. No one had the right to look at her like that.

Not unless they wanted to die for it.

His fingers twitched once against his wand, grip tightening. He did not think about alerting the Ministry. He did not think about procedure. He did not think about wards or warnings or containment. No. There was only one thought burning through him now, pure and absolute. Find them. Find them before they got close enough to breathe her air. Find them before they saw too much. Before they saw anything at all.

She was his.

She did not want to be his, perhaps. Not today. Maybe not ever. But it did not matter. The thread burned hot and bright against his wrist, tighter now, humming with a violence that felt almost alive, as though the magic itself had caught the scent of the intruder and was urging him forward. And gods help whoever it was, because if they had touched her wards, if they had so much as thought of her with wrong intent, there would be nothing left of them but blood in the dirt and a name no one would dare speak again.

He moved before the thought fully formed, fast and silent, already crossing to the edge of the wards, already hunting.

He found the man crouched low behind the dead bramble hedge that bordered the western edge of the garden, half-hidden in the tangle of thorned branches and skeletal roots that twisted up from the ground like old fingers. Cloaked, but sloppily, the fabric catching on the thorns with every twitch of movement. Trained, perhaps. But not trained well enough to outmatch someone like Theodore Nott. 

Not trained enough to understand what it meant to trespass here. Not trained enough to realize that of all the gardens, of all the cursed places on this rotting stretch of land, this was the one corner of the world where Theo would let the monster in his blood off the leash. Because this was where she lived. This was where she breathed. And this man had come with eyes full of hunger, or curiosity, or some cold order passed down from cowards in offices who did not know what they had sent him into.

Theo’s blade was unsheathed before his mind caught up, his body moving on pure instinct, the sound of metal whispering free lost beneath the scream of the wind. The first strike was not meant to kill. No, that would have been mercy. This was not about mercy. This was about sending a message. About feeding the part of him that had been wound too tight since the moment she pulled away from him in the garden. From the moment she shouted at him to leave. Since the moment her voice carved him open and left him raw.

It was almost too easy. A flicker of silver through the dark, a clean slice across the back of the man’s thigh, severing tendons and dropping him like a stone into the roots. A pulse of blood spilled into the earth. 

A scream that started loud but ended strangled as Theo’s hand clamped over the intruder’s mouth and dragged him deeper, deeper, into the belly of the hedge where no one could see, where even the house might choose to look away. His fingers were iron on the man’s throat, pressing just enough to make the eyes roll wild, to make the pulse thrum harder beneath skin slick with sweat and rain.

He leaned close then, breath cold against the intruder’s ear. Words were not shouted. Words were not needed. The questions came low and brutal, shaped like promises of pain. Who sent you. Why now? Who are you watching?

The answers came stuttering, fractured. Names Theo did not recognize. Orders that meant nothing. Ministry, maybe. Or mercenaries. Or worse. It did not matter. The words were not fast enough. Not good enough. And Theo’s patience had already been stripped bare hours ago, peeled away by her voice, by her rejection, by the sight of her walking away from him with Sol in her arms and no glance back.

He pressed the blade flat against the man’s cheek, slow, deliberate. The metal cold enough to bite. You looked at her. He did not phrase it as a question. It was a statement. An accusation. A sentence. And when the man choked out a panicked denial, Theo smiled without warmth. He pressed harder. You looked at her.

There was no world in which this man would leave here with his eyes intact.

No world in which Theo would allow it.

The first cut was precise, a thin line drawn beneath the left eye, not enough to blind, but enough to remind. Enough to scar. The second cut came lower, across the hand that had gripped the spyglass, the fingers that had dared trace her shape through glass. They would not hold a lens again.

The blade slowed only when the man began sobbing, wet and broken, words spilling too fast now. “Please. Please. I was paid. I didn’t know. I swear. I didn’t know.”

“Now you know”, Theo said softly.

When it was finished, when the man was left half-conscious in the roots, bleeding and shuddering, stripped of everything that made him a threat, Theo pried a ring from the man’s trembling hand. A signet, plain but marked with the faint outline of an unfamiliar crest. Not Ministry. Something else. He pocketed it without thought.

And as he stood, wiping the blood from his blade with mechanical precision, his heart still thundered not with triumph, but with one single, unrelenting thought.

No one looks at her. No one touches what is his.

Not unless they wish to be buried beneath her garden.

Something twisted deep inside him at the sight, something black and cold and uncoiling like smoke through his chest, a thing with teeth that had been gnawing at him all afternoon, fed first by her voice, then by her distance, then by this man’s face leering through the wards like a worm squirming beneath glass. 

His breath came fast, ragged, not from the exertion of the fight but from the way his hands trembled now, from the way he could not seem to unclench his jaw as he stared down at what was left of the intruder. No one looks at her. No one breathes her air. No one watches what belongs to me. The words rang over and over behind his teeth, louder than the rain, louder than the man’s gasping sobs, until all that was left was the ringing in his ears and the raw, vibrating pulse beneath his skin.

He reached down, fingers shaking, slick with blood and cold rain, and pried the ring free from the man’s limp, twitching hand. The skin beneath was raw where Theo’s blade had caught it earlier, the knuckles cracked and flayed. Good. Let him remember. Let the bones remember. He turned the ring over once between his fingers, the simple band glinting faintly in the sick light bleeding through the hedge. Not any organization. Not anyone Theo recognized. That was worse. That meant someone else had sent him. Someone else had dared send eyes toward her.

Toward her house.

Toward their fucking house.

His pulse thundered in his throat. He pocketed the ring without a second thought, sliding it deep into the hidden seam of his coat where no one would ever find it. No one would know. No one would report this. The Ministry would not ask questions they did not want answers to. He would not give them the chance. This man would vanish like all the others who had wandered too close to things they were too foolish to understand. There would be no trail. No name left behind.

The body would stay. The house would take care of it. The house always did. It had its ways, old ways, rooted deep beneath the garden where the vines listened better than any spy ever could. Already the roots were moving, whispering beneath the earth, the brambles twitching in strange, eager rhythm. They had tasted blood before. They would not refuse it now.

Theo stood slowly, blade still in his hand, breath still uneven. He stared down at the broken figure one last time, and the thing inside him, the thing that had unfurled so fast he had no hope of stopping it, whispered softly against the shell of his mind. Mine. Mine. Mine.

The house groaned low around him, old wood settling, wind pressing against the windows. He wiped his blade clean on the tattered edge of the man’s cloak, turned, and walked back toward the house. Not hurried. Not afraid. Just certain. More certain than he had been in days.

Because whatever had snapped inside him now refused to be caged again.

And if anyone else came for her, if anyone else even thought of looking, they would meet the same fate.

When he returned inside, soaked through and hands still trembling with the aftershocks of violence, the house felt different. Too quiet. Watching him. Judging him. But he shoved the feeling aside, marched to his room, stripped off his bloodstained coat and shoved the ring into the back of the drawer beneath his spare wand holster. Locked it tight. Told himself it was done.

But it was not.

~

Hours later, long after the sun had drowned beneath the bruised edge of the horizon and the lamps in the house burned low with a sickly, wavering glow that made the shadows lean too far into the walls, long after he had paced the floor of his room until the boards beneath his boots remembered the pattern of his anger, long after he had told himself again and again that he had done the right thing, that it had been necessary, that no one would ever know, not even her, the door opened without sound.

She stepped inside without knocking. Without hesitation.

And she was holding it.

The ring caught the light as she moved, gleaming dark and sharp against her pale fingers, her grip firm, almost reverent, as if the metal itself burned beneath her skin but she refused to release it. Her face was unreadable, but her eyes were not. They burned. Cold. Focused. Lethal.

Her voice cut through the air, low and blade-thin. "Where did you get this."

The words lodged in the space between them like a knife hammered into stone. And something inside him, brittle from the hours of pretending calm, snapped so sharp and so fast that it almost left him breathless.

"You should not be touching that," he said. The words came too fast. Too loud. They echoed in the room like a gunshot.

She stepped closer, slow, deliberate, her gaze locked on his face, her fingers tightening around the ring as though daring him to try and take it from her. "Where. Did. You. Get. This."

Each word landed harder than the last, paced with the cold deliberation of footsteps leading toward a precipice that neither of them could see clearly anymore but both had known was waiting all along, and as she moved closer, unhurried and unblinking, as the air between them grew thick and strange with everything they had not said, with the weight of a hundred unsaid things that had been straining beneath the surface for hours, Theo felt the edges of his control begin to fray in long, thin strands that terrified him in a way no blade ever had. 

It was not the threat of the ring or her words that broke him. It was the sight of her standing there, pale and burning, the ring in her fingers like a verdict, her gaze like a hand pressed straight to the center of his chest. It was the knowing that she could see through him, that she was seeing him now for exactly what he was.

And then he was moving before thought could catch up to instinct, before reason could cage the thing inside him that had already torn loose. He crossed the room in two long strides, shoulders taut as wire, pulse deafening in his ears, and his hand lashed out, snatching for the ring with fingers that shook from more than just rage. 

His other hand caught her wrist, too hard, too rough, the skin beneath his palm fragile and hot and real, and his breath came in a ragged growl that scraped up from somewhere too deep to name.

"Drop it," he hissed, voice shaking, barely a voice at all but a guttural command, a plea tangled in warning.

She did not drop it. Her eyes met his with that unbearable, unblinking clarity that had undone him from the very start, the kind of gaze that stripped a man to bone and made every lie inside him shrivel and die, and the sight of it, the steadiness of her, drove a knife straight through his chest with more precision than any curse could have managed.

"You killed him," she whispered. There was no question in it, only knowing. No room for denial, no room for spin. Just truth, dropped between them like a stone in deep water. "You did not report it. You tortured him."

"Do not speak like you know," he bit out, teeth gritted, voice fraying at the edges, the words tasting of blood and shame and something darker that pulsed beneath the skin of his throat.

"But I do know," she said, and her voice was steady now, soft and deadly, the kind of calm that came only after a decision had already been made. "And you are lying to me."

He could barely think. Could barely breathe. His grip tightened without him even realizing it, his fingers pressing into the fragile skin of her wrist as though the very act of holding her there might tether him to something solid. 

But nothing felt solid anymore. Not the floor beneath his feet, not the walls that seemed to close in around them, not the thread that burned hotter and tighter with every passing second. 

The rage that had been coiling inside him since the moment she had pulled away from him at breakfast, that slow suffocating fury that had bloomed beneath every cold glance and clipped word, now surged upward unchecked, flooding through his veins with a ferocity he could not contain. And beneath that rage, twisted just as tightly, was something uglier. 

The hollow ache of her distance. The sick, gnawing grief of her rejection. The image of her turning her face away when he had leaned down to kiss her. The taste of her coffee on his skin. The memory of her walking away. It all roared through him now, and there was no escape from it except through her, through this impossible moment where his grip had turned bruising and his breath trembled and his pulse hammered so violently he thought he might tear apart from the inside out.

"I did it because I had to," he ground out, each word forced through clenched teeth, jagged and raw as a blade dragged through flesh. His voice barely sounded like his own, deeper now, torn open by everything he could no longer control. "He was watching you. Watching this house. Watching us. I am the only thing standing between you and the fucking grave you seem so determined to dig for yourself."

She stared at him. Her wrist still trapped in his hand, the ring still gleaming between her fingers, her eyes locked onto his with that cold unbearable clarity that had always undone him. And in that silence, in that absolute refusal to look away or soften or yield, something inside him broke so cleanly it felt like shattering glass.

His hand loosened, fingers slipping from her skin with a sick little tremor that betrayed more than words ever could. His breath caught hard in his throat, uneven and ragged, the sound of it almost painful in the stillness of the room. 

And the weight of the day crashed over him all at once, merciless in its timing. The fight, the blood still drying beneath his nails, the man whose screams still echoed faintly in the back of his skull, the raw frantic need that had been clawing at the edges of his mind for hours now, rising like a tide he could no longer outpace, it all caved in around him until he thought he might drown beneath the sheer force of it.

"You do not get to be angry with me for wanting to protect you," he said, voice dropping low now, shaking, stripped bare of all control, all pretense. The words came out hoarse and desperate, almost pleading, and he hated himself for the sound of it, for how much of his hunger for her was bleeding through. "Not when I would burn this entire fucking world to the ground if anyone laid a finger on you."

But her eyes did not soften. They did not waver. And that, more than anything, destroyed him. Because it was not her anger that killed him. It was her distance. It was the fact that even now, even here, even with his soul flayed raw and laid bare before her, she looked at him as though he was just another threat to be weathered, another storm to be outlasted. As though she could survive him. As though she already had.

"Find someone else for this job. I do not want you here anymore." Her voice came from across the room, low but sharp enough to split him clean down the middle, every word deliberate, paced like the steady rhythm of a blade sliding through skin. She stood with her back half-turned to him, shoulders tense beneath the thin fabric of her blouse, hands trembling just slightly at her sides. But her voice did not tremble. It cut.

Theo stopped in the doorway, breath catching like he had been struck in the gut. His hands flexed uselessly at his sides. His mouth opened, closed again. Then the words came, rougher than he meant, too loud in the suffocating quiet. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

She didn’t turn. Not fully. Just tilted her head enough that he caught the glint of her profile, that cold little smile that wasn’t a smile at all. "You have asked this question before," she said calmly. "Many things are wrong. Mainly you."

His jaw clenched so hard it ached. His voice dropped to a growl. "What have I done?"

At that, she turned. Finally. Slow and controlled, until her eyes found his and held them there like a noose tightening around his throat. "Fucked me like one of your whores," she said, voice like ice snapping beneath a boot. "And then threw me away."

He stared at her. Dumbfounded. Staggered. The words sank into him with a weight he could not bear, with a truth he could not touch. His mouth worked silently for a beat too long, then the words tumbled out, unsteady, desperate. "I... I would never. Never do that to you. Not you." His voice cracked at the edges now, thin and hoarse. "I made love to you."

"Did you?" Her voice came soft now, like a question posed to a child who did not understand the game he was playing.

"I... I do not know what to say to that," he managed, hands lifting helplessly, voice thick and pleading. "You came on my cock several times. I thought you enjoyed it." His voice caught on the last word, already breaking under the weight of what she was turning this into, already lost beneath the sick pulse of shame clawing its way through his chest.

Her eyes narrowed, burned straight through him. "You were degrading." Her voice hit like a slap. "You fucked me like something you wanted to ruin, not something you wanted to keep. And I am asking you again. NO. I am demanding." She took a step forward now, eyes flashing with something cold enough to freeze the blood in his veins. "Leave. Leave me alone."

Theo could not move. Could not breathe. Could not believe what he was hearing. His body shook with the need to cross the space between them, to grab her, to make her see, to make her hear what he could not seem to say right. "You have no idea," he bit out, voice hoarse and ragged, "how much I love... fuck." His voice cracked wide open. "I would rather die than leave you."

She looked him dead in the eye then, and her words came soft, steady, lethal. "Then die."

And she turned without another glance. Without a flicker of hesitation. Without mercy.

She walked away.

And he stood there, hands shaking, throat burning, pulse roaring so loud he thought it might rip through his skin.

And in that moment, Theo had never hated the woman he loved more than he did now.

And never loved her more either.

~

The house felt wrong when he slammed the door behind him, wrong in the way skin prickles when fever begins to bloom beneath it, wrong in the way breath thins at the edges when grief wraps its cold hands around the throat and squeezes too hard, too fast. The argument still rang in his ears, sharp and merciless, her voice slicing through his chest with the precision of a blade honed on bone and regret. 

The lights flickered faintly above him, their glow pale and sickly, stuttering like a faltering pulse, and beneath his boots the wards thrummed unevenly, as if they no longer recognized him, or perhaps no longer cared to.

The walls seemed to tilt as he moved, the air too thick, pressing down against his skin in waves. He paced the length of the room without direction, coat half torn from his shoulders, movements jerky and raw, breath coming in sharp, ragged bursts. His hands shook uncontrollably. 

He dragged them through his hair over and over, fingers catching on the knots of tension that had twisted tight beneath his scalp, as if tearing at himself might somehow ease the coil tightening deeper in his chest. But nothing helped. Not the pacing. Not the airless room. Not the clawing, desperate ache behind his ribs that only worsened with each breath.

He could not stop seeing her face. Could not stop hearing her voice. Could not unhear the words that had ripped through the thin threads of control he had spent the last weeks convincing himself were strong enough to hold. Find someone else. Die, she had said. And gods, if she had meant it, if she had spoken it as command and not venom, he was no longer sure he would have had the strength to disobey.

The thought made his stomach turn. His skin felt wrong. His body felt wrong. Every muscle too tense, every nerve strung so tight he thought he might splinter from the inside out. 

His throat burned with the words he had not said, the ones he should have said, the ones that were still lodged there like barbed hooks. He wanted to tear the room apart, wanted to strip the walls bare, wanted to find something, anything, to bleed the noise from his head. 

But he only kept pacing, kept circling the room like a beast trapped too long in a cage that no longer fit its shape, driven not by reason but by the unbearable pull of her absence, her scent fading from his skin, her warmth gone from his hands.

And beneath all of it, beneath the fury, beneath the shame, beneath the sharp ache where her words had lodged too deep, there was something colder still. Something quieter. Something more dangerous. A clarity that only came when he had been pushed too far, too fast, for too long.

The mirror caught his eye as he turned too sharply. The tall one in the corner, the one he usually ignored. Framed in tarnished silver, its edges warped by time and salt air, the glass dulled not only by age but by something deeper, something that seemed to seep through the very bones of the house, as though the walls had breathed through it too many nights and left their ghosts behind. He stopped moving. Breath hitching. Pulse thudding against the fragile cage of his ribs.

He stared across the room. Watched himself watching. And for a moment, the sight of his own face should have grounded him, should have reminded him who he was beneath the wreck of this day, beneath the ruin of her words still echoing in his skull. But something was wrong. 

Not subtly wrong. Not the kind of trick light plays when the storm rolls in and shadows dance on old glass. This was wrong in a way that felt personal. In a way that felt deliberate.

He was shaking. He could feel it in his bones, in the raw tension coiled beneath his skin, in the way his hands refused to still even when he forced them down by his sides. But the man in the mirror was not. The man in the mirror stood calm. Straight. Breathing slow and even as though nothing at all had happened. As though the storm outside, the blood beneath Theo’s nails, the burn of her rejection had never existed.

His heart hammered harder. Fast enough now that the blood roared in his ears and drowned out the flicker of the lights. He swallowed against the rising pulse in his throat and lifted one hand slowly, fingers trembling so violently he could barely thread them through the matted strands of his hair. The reflection moved, but not with him. A beat too late. A fraction too smooth. The motion replayed like a memory trying to pass as truth, the image lagging as though the glass itself had grown tired of reflecting him honestly and decided instead to lie.

He stepped closer. Bare feet whispering across warped floorboards, cold now beneath his skin, the air around him too still, too charged. His breath grew ragged, caught high in his chest, sharp enough that it hurt to pull in each inhale. Closer still, until he could almost feel the chill bleeding from the glass. He stared without blinking, forcing himself not to look away, forcing himself to confront whatever had twisted behind that surface. Forcing himself to see.

And then it happened.

The reflection smiled.

Not a twitch of his own mouth. Not a shadow of expression crossing his face. His body stood locked, every muscle tight with grief and fury and the sick, spiraling ache that had been building since she walked away. But in the glass, that other version of him smiled. Slow. Wide. Cruel. The kind of smile that knew too much and cared too little. The kind of smile that stripped something vital from the air between them and left it cold.

Theo’s breath caught hard enough to hurt. His throat closed around it, his chest heaving as though he had been punched. He could not move. Could not speak. Could only watch as the reflection held that terrible expression with impossible patience. It was not him. It could not be him. And yet it was. His face. His body. His eyes, but hollow. Mocking. Waiting. As though the house had trapped some other version of him behind the glass and now, in his weakest moment, had chosen to show it.

He stared, unblinking, pulse thundering. The mirror smiled. And deep inside, something cracked.

Theo’s pulse spiked, sharp and furious, an ache blooming hot beneath his ribs and spreading out through his veins in waves that felt too big for his body to contain. His throat was dry. His mouth tasted like copper. 

The lights overhead flickered again, a long stuttering pulse that made the shadows in the corners shiver and stretch like things with limbs, like things that had been waiting for the dark. The wards beneath his bare feet hummed louder now, no longer even or soft but jagged and wrong, almost a warning, almost a song, almost a voice of their own. 

His reflection tilted its head with slow, eerie calm, a gesture far too deliberate, watching him with the patience of a predator who had already won the game before the prey had even known it was hunted.

"You are not me," he whispered, voice raw, cracked open, broken in the thick, sick silence of the room.

The reflection blinked, again too late, again too smooth, again as though the mirror itself had grown tired of pretending it could mimic him properly. The air around Theo felt thin. His chest burned with the effort of each ragged breath. Sweat prickled cold beneath his skin. And then, just beneath the static rush in his ears, beneath the hammering of his pulse, beneath the trembling weight of his own fury, he heard it.

So soft at first that for one disorienting moment he almost thought it real.

Her voice. Her voice speaking his name. The voice that had once pulled him out of the darkest rooms inside himself, the voice that had steadied his hand when he could not trust his own mind, the voice that he would have followed into fire without question. Her voice, spoken in that quiet, steady way she used when she wanted to drag him back from the edge and remind him of who he was beneath the wreckage.

But this was not her.

He knew it. Gods, he knew it. The house had learned her tone too well. The house had been watching them both too long. The house was speaking now, speaking through her, wearing her voice like a borrowed coat.

"Theo," it breathed, her name twisting through the hollow of his skull, soft as silk, sharp as a blade. "You cannot protect me."

He flinched back as though struck, as though the words themselves had teeth. His shoulder hit the edge of the wardrobe behind him. His hands gripped the air as though trying to hold onto something that was not there.

"Stop," he whispered, barely sound, more plea than command. "Stop it."

"You will fail," the not-her voice breathed, softer now, deeper now, curling through him like smoke that would not be exhaled, threading itself between every beat of his heart.

"No," he gasped, breath hitching hard, throat burning with the effort of forcing the word out, of denying what some dark part of him already feared might be true. "No."

The mirror smiled wider. Its teeth showed now. Too white. Too knowing.

He moved before thought could catch him, fists rising of their own accord, body coiling like a spring wound too tight, ready to shatter the glass, to tear through the thing that dared to wear his face, dared to speak in her voice, dared to twist what he loved into something hollow and cruel. His muscles screamed for release, knuckles already whitening as he drew back to strike.

But at the last possible moment, he stopped. Frozen mid-motion, breath locked in his throat, chest heaving. His fists hovered inches from the glass, trembling violently, caught between fury and despair. If he shattered it, if he tore the thing apart, it would not undo what had already been said, would not silence the echo of her voice lodged deep in his head, would not erase the truth of what he had done or the weight of what he could not control. It would not bring her back to him. It would not make her forgive him. It would not stop the burning in his chest where she had once fit so perfectly and now left nothing but ruin.

His breath came hard and fast, teeth clenched so tight his jaw ached, every inch of him shaking with the effort of holding himself together when every piece inside him screamed to be broken instead.

And in that trembling moment, voice raw and too thin, he whispered into the empty room, into the cold reflection staring back at him, into the house that watched and listened and would not let him go.

"I will not leave you."

Again.

"I will not leave you."

Until his voice broke apart and the words faded into silence.

His arms dropped, the last of the fight bleeding out of them, and his shoulders sagged beneath the crush of helplessness that pressed down with a weight so suffocating he could barely draw breath. It felt like the whole room had shrunk, like the walls had leaned in to watch him fall apart, to bear witness to the breaking of something they had already long suspected would not hold. 

His knees hit the floor hard enough to bruise, bone against old wood, a crack of impact that rattled through him, but he barely felt it. Pain was distant now. Pain was irrelevant. 

He knelt there beneath the cold gaze of his own reflection, beneath that smiling false face that stared down at him with the patience of the dead, and whispered into the emptiness of the room, into the stale air that seemed too thick to swallow, into the dark that swallowed every word before it could find a place to land.

"I will not leave you," he said, voice raw and thin, shredded at the edges.

Again, quieter this time, more broken.

"I will not leave you."

Again, so soft it barely counted as sound anymore, more breath than words.

"I will never leave you."

And the house listened. He felt it in the bones of the floor beneath his palms, in the low, greedy hum of the wards, in the walls that seemed to lean closer still, as if they wanted to drink in every last drop of him. The air trembled faintly, almost expectant. Almost pleased. As though the house had been waiting for this. As though it had known all along that this moment would come.

And the mirror smiled, wide and cruel and endless, as if it had finally caught something it would never let go.

And he broke.

Not in the way people imagined strong men broke, with rage or fury or some grand act of defiance. No. He broke in the small ways. In the quiet, ugly ways. In the way his shoulders began to shake uncontrollably, in the way his hands fisted helplessly against his thighs, nails biting skin, in the way his breath hitched into something closer to a sob than he would ever willingly name. 

The words choked out of him now, falling apart on his tongue, thick with grief and shame and the unbearable truth that he could not protect her, could not even hold himself together long enough to stand.

And still he whispered, again and again, voice hollow, voice wrecked, voice stripped bare.

"I will not leave you."

Because to stop saying it was to admit that it might already be a lie.

And still the house listened.

And still the mirror smiled.

And Theo stayed there, on his knees in the dark, unable to stop shaking, unable to stop speaking, a man unraveling thread by fragile thread beneath the gaze of something that no longer wore his face at all.

~

The morning had not so much arrived as it had seeped through the bones of the house, gray and heavy and without edge or promise, the kind of morning that made breath feel like an effort and thought feel like a weight too great to lift. 

The sky outside sagged beneath the threat of rain that hovered but refused to fall, a bruise stretched across the horizon that seemed to press against the old glass of the windows, turning every room dim and strange. Inside, the house felt muted and close, as though it, too, had not slept, as though it was waiting for something neither it nor its occupants dared to name.

Theo had not slept. Not truly. He had drifted in and out of something thinner than rest, a state that left his body aching and his mind raw. He had spent most of the long hours on the floor, back pressed to the cold wood, knees drawn up to his chest until they burned with the pressure.

His hands had trembled too much to be still, and somewhere between the empty hours he had lost track of time entirely, watching the faint play of shadows against the ceiling as though they might rearrange themselves into something he could understand.

When dawn came, or what passed for it beneath the bruised sky, he had only felt colder. His knees ached with the deep, dull throb of stone pressed too long against flesh. His throat burned from the words he had whispered into the dark, words meant for no one but the empty space that had swallowed them whole. "I will not leave you," he had said, again and again, as though repetition could make it truth. As though it could undo the sharp weight of her voice telling him to go, to die, to be gone from the life he had wrapped so tightly around his own heart.

But he had not left. He had not even moved. Not until the house shifted around him, its breath stirring faintly through the halls, its wards thrumming with subtle changes that only he, attuned as he was now, could feel. She was awake. She was moving. 

He tracked the soft, telltale ripples in the boundary lines with something close to hunger, every inch of him aching toward the knowledge of her presence. The pulse of the wards told him more than words could have. She had gone outside. Toward the garden, perhaps. Or the cliffs. The restless boundary line that pulled at her like the tide.

And as soon as he knew she was no longer within the house, no longer behind the thin shield of a locked door he dared not breach, he moved. Slowly at first, body stiff with exhaustion and the lingering bite of the night, but soon with purpose. With the narrow, driving focus of a man who no longer trusted himself to think too long, because thought would lead to despair, and despair would lead to ruin.

He needed to do something. Anything. His hands could still move. His hands could still make. And perhaps, if he left a piece of himself where she could find it, if he offered some small fragment of care unspoken, the thread between them would not fray to nothing. Perhaps she would see. Perhaps she would understand, even if she would not listen.

He rose, breath shallow, legs unsteady, and crossed to the door of his room. The house hummed faintly beneath his feet, a sound like the echo of a heartbeat caught in stone. He listened for her again, waited until the wards told him she had not yet returned, and then he stepped into the hall.

Toward the workroom. Toward the only thing left to him now.

Toward the hope that some part of her might still choose not to let him go.

He moved without thought, without plan, driven only by the dull, blunt instinct that had always risen in him when the things he loved were slipping from his grasp. He had no words left that were safe, no language soft enough to bridge what had torn open between them. 

Every sentence he had tried to form since the night before had collapsed under the weight of too much rage, too much shame, too much wanting that refused to be tamed, and he had already failed her with words. Words had teeth. Words had weight. Words had made her walk away. 

He could not trust himself to speak again, not yet, not when the storm inside him had not settled and her face haunted every corner of it. But his hands, his hands still knew how to make things. His hands could move without trembling. His hands could speak in ways his mouth could not.

So he went to the corner of the workroom where the old supplies lay half-buried beneath forgotten books and crumbling leaves and bits of iron and bone that no longer belonged to any clear purpose. His fingers moved of their own accord, brushing aside layers of dust and paper until they found what they needed. 

He did not think about beauty, did not think about softness or romance or any of the things he had seen in the books other men might have read for this moment. He did not know how to offer those things. He did not know how to be gentle. What he knew was how to protect. What he knew was how to build wards, how to thread magic through the bones of the earth and twist it until it stood against the dark.

The herbs he chose came without conscious thought, pulled from old bundles and brittle jars with movements so practiced they might have been ritual. Not the sweet ones she would have picked. Not the pale blossoms she wove through her hair or the lavender she brewed into tea. No. These were the strong ones. The bitter ones. The ones that burned faint beneath the skin and turned away what was not meant to be near. 

Mugwort for the sight, to keep her clear of false visions. Vervain to guard the body, to strengthen the will. Ironwort, twisted hard between his fingers, for warding against the dark, even when the dark wore the face of someone she thought she knew.

This was not an apology. He did not know how to give her that. Not when every part of him still burned with the need to pull her back, to hold her too close, to demand her forgiveness in ways that would only drive her further away. No. This was not apology. This was protection. This was all he had left to give, the only language he trusted now. The rough bundle he tied with thin black cord, his knuckles white as he knotted it three times for strength, not for beauty.

And still it was not enough.

He stared at it, chest tight, throat raw, as if the herbs alone might carry some piece of what he could not say. But it was too small. Too thin. Too brittle. It needed more. She deserved more. His gaze flicked toward the shelf where stray bits of wire and stone lay in tangled piles, remnants of old wards and half-built charms. 

His fingers found a length of simple iron chain, rough and cold against his skin. He bent over it, breath shallow, weaving the iron with a thick red thread that had once bound the edge of a protection circle. His hands moved faster now, desperate, the knots too tight, the pattern uneven. It was ugly. It was too rough. But it was his. And when it was done, when the iron and thread and bone beads sat heavy in his palm, it hummed faintly beneath his touch. A charm. A ward. Something to keep her safe when he could not.

He stared at it, pulse racing. Then he rose.

The bracelet took longer than it should have, longer than any simple charm ever had beneath his hands, but his fingers would not still, shaking with a restless, broken rhythm that refused to be calmed. The silver wire bent too easily, slipping out of alignment with every twist, coils warping beneath his touch as though they too could feel the unraveling inside him. Where there should have been smooth weaving, there were rough knots, uneven and unsightly, marks of a hand too tense, too desperate, too full of things it could not release. 

The beads he chose without thought, without care for pattern or polish, pulling them from scattered jars with trembling fingers. Mismatched, cracked, some no more than old bits of glass or stone that had long lost their shine, but each one spoke in a language older than craft. Each one was chosen with meaning. Not for beauty. Not for pride. For hope. For need. For all the words caught behind his teeth.

Stay safe. One bead. Stay whole. Another. Do not hate me. A third, darker, heavier in the palm. I love you. I love you. Over and over, the silent chant weaving through each knot, through each trembling pass of wire and thread, through each bead pressed hard between his fingers like a prayer. The words pounded beneath his ribs with each turn of the charm, pulsing through him until his throat burned with everything he could not say aloud. By the time it was done, the offering looked crude, rough, more the work of a frightened child than of a man who had trained for years in the precision of the old arts. But perhaps that was fitting. Perhaps that was the only truth he had left to give her now. Beneath the weight of her voice, beneath the ghost of her eyes, beneath the echo of her words that still rang hollow through his chest, he was no more than that. No more than a boy kneeling before a force he could not control, begging to be forgiven for things he did not know how to undo.

With slow, shaking breath, he wrapped the herbs in soft cloth, the bundle small but heavy in his palm, tying it carefully with a strand of hair-twine. His fingers brushed the charm once more, lingering over the knots, as if touch alone could will them into something more worthy. It could not. But he lifted both offerings anyway, throat raw, chest aching, and rose.

Crossing the house felt like walking through a dream half-turned nightmare. The air hung thick around him, each step down the corridor dragging him deeper toward something vast and unknowable. His pulse hammered hard enough to shake the edges of his vision, heart racing with a fear that had nothing to do with death, nothing to do with blood, and everything to do with her. Every footfall felt too loud, too slow. The walls breathed around him, the house watching in its strange, patient way, as if it knew what he carried and what it cost him to carry it.

When he reached her door, the wards stirred faintly beneath his skin. They knew him. They did not reject him. They allowed him through, soft threads of magic parting just enough to let him near. He stood there for a moment, the bundle trembling in his grasp, unsure if he had the right to leave them at all, unsure if it would be a mercy or another wound. But in the end, he laid them down. Carefully, gently, as though the smallest shift might break what fragile hope remained. The herbs. The bracelet. A silent offering. A plea without words.

Her bed was unmade, sheets rumpled and half-kicked toward the edge, the pillow faintly indented with the ghost of where her head had rested before the storm, before the fight, before her voice had torn through him with the precision of a blade honed on grief. The room smelled faintly of dried herbs and salt and rain-soaked air, the curtains half-drawn against a window that still rattled softly in its frame. He stood there for a long moment just inside the threshold, fingers tightening around the bundle until they ached, breath caught sharp in his throat as though entering this space was a trespass he could not justify and could not stop.

The house breathed slow around him, the wards low and watchful beneath his skin, neither welcoming nor rejecting him, merely observing, and that quiet scrutiny only made the ache worse. He had come here like a thief in the pale hours of morning, armed with nothing but a clumsy scrap of hope and a heart too raw to bear its own weight, and now that he stood here, now that he could see the emptiness where she should have been, he found that his legs wanted to collapse and his throat wanted to shatter.

But he forced himself forward. 

One step. 

Another. 

Until he reached the side of the bed. Until he stood over the pillow where her breath had still warmed the fabric hours before. Slowly, as if handling something sacred, as if the slightest wrong movement might tear open every wound he had tried to stitch closed, he set the bundle down. The cloth first, herbs pressed flat beneath his palm as though they might still shield her even now, as though the frail power of his hands could weave a protection stronger than the fury he had left her with. The bracelet beside it, coiled small and imperfect like a promise he did not know how to keep, a hope he did not know how to voice.

He wanted to speak. Gods, he wanted to speak. To leave some scrap of himself in the air that might tell her what his hands could not. I am sorry. I am lost without you. Please let me stay. But the words locked hard in his throat, stone and ice and iron choking the breath from him until he could only stand there, fists clenched at his sides, chest heaving with the effort of silence.

And after a moment, after a lifetime carved into the space of a few heartbeats, he fled. Back through the house, back through its crooked halls and restless shadows, back to the thin, hollow dark of his own room where he could not see the things he had left behind, where he could lie to himself and say it had been enough.

The day passed in silence. He waited. He heard her return, the faint sound of boots thudding soft against the floor, the rustle of her coat sliding from her shoulders, the slow, careful creak of her door opening. His heart slammed once against his ribs so hard he thought it might split apart. He waited. The house felt thick with tension, air stretched tight like the skin of a drum about to break.

Hours passed. He counted them by the uneven rise and fall of his breath. By the flicker of the candle that burned low and guttered beside him. By the cold that seeped through the floor and into his bones until he could no longer tell where he ended and the house began.

Night came. And still he waited. And when the waiting became too sharp, when the silence began to claw beneath his skin until he thought he might tear himself apart, he rose. Stepped out into the corridor, slow, sick with dread that tasted like iron on his tongue, heart shaking through his chest with a rhythm that was not quite fear and not quite hope.

And there it was.

Hanging from the handle of his door. Swaying faintly in the draft that whispered down the hallway like a breath drawn too long. The bracelet. Untouched. Returned. No note. No word. Just that small, perfect refusal, quiet as snowfall, sharp as a blade.

Theo stood frozen, staring at it, and the world seemed to tilt beneath him, the floor rolling like the deck of a ship caught in a storm, something deep inside pulling tighter and tighter until it felt like the thread of him might snap. His lungs burned. His vision blurred. His hands trembled so hard he thought they might never be steady again.

And the house, ancient and watching, listened. Its wards thrummed low with the echo of what it had witnessed.

But this time, the house did not smile. And neither did he.

~

It was late. The shadows stretched longer here, not gentle or soft, but heavy, distorted things that blurred the edges of thought until only raw need remained. The kind of late where even the house seemed to forget the shape of its own silence, where each creak of wood sounded too loud and too alive, as though the walls themselves had begun to listen too closely.

And still, no word from her. Not since the fight. Not a glance. Not a sound. Not even the faint echo of her footsteps crossing the floor above, the light sweep of her skirts past the threshold, the soft pulse of her magic brushing against the wards they both breathed like the pulse beneath their skin. She had vanished from his world in all but name, and that absence was no longer absence. It had shape now. It had teeth. It had a voice that spoke in the quiet of her refusal, in the deliberate severing of her presence from his orbit. The silence was not emptiness anymore. It was punishment. A blade drawn slow and deep across the fault lines of his ribs, a wound that refused to clot.

Theo could not bear it anymore.

At first, it was only a thought. A small, sharp impulse that scraped at the inside of his skull like a shard of glass. Go. Just go. Leave before you shatter entirely in her presence. Leave before this hunger, this unbearable thrum beneath your skin, devours what little of you remains. He had ignored it at first. Pushed it aside. Paced the room until his feet ached and the carpet lay worn beneath his path. But the thought grew louder, sharper, until it sang beneath his ribs, until it snarled against the cage of his breath, until it became the only thing that made sense anymore.

Move. Now. Go.

He moved before he was aware of moving, as though some deeper, older part of him had taken control. His hands shot forward, dragging the battered old travel bag from beneath the bed with jerking, uneven motions that rattled the frame and made the floorboards groan beneath him. He tossed it to the floor where it landed open, mouth yawning wide and empty, a hollow space waiting to devour whatever pieces of him he was about to surrender.

The sight of it made his throat tighten. 

A bag. 

Just a bag. 

But it looked like the end of something. The end of this. The end of them. The end of whatever fragile, impossible thread had kept him tethered to this place, to her. And yet his body kept moving as though caught in the tide of some ritual that could no longer be stopped.

He crouched beside it, knees aching beneath his weight, and stared down at the empty space with a hollowness in his chest that swallowed reason. One hand hovered above the floor as if uncertain where to begin, and then with a breathless shake of his head, he reached for the first thing within arm’s reach. Not because it mattered. Because something had to go in first, or he would never move again.

And so the slow, brutal unmaking began.

He packed slowly at first. Mechanically. Fingers moving as though detached from thought, as though if he simply performed the motions of leaving, the rest of him would follow in time. A shirt first, worn soft with age. The one she had once touched without thinking, her hand brushing against the sleeve in some forgotten moment when she reached past him for a jar of dried lavender. He could still see it clearly. The tilt of her head. The faint smile that ghosted her mouth. The way her fingers had lingered a second too long. It had never been worn again after that. 

Just folded carefully into the bottom of a drawer where the faintest trace of her skin had remained, mingled with the dusty scent of herbs and the ghost of something that had felt, at the time, dangerously close to hope. It went into the bag first. Laid too carefully for something he would never wear again. Laid as though it mattered, when none of this should have mattered at all.

The charm knife came next. Its handle worn smooth beneath his palm, the runes along its spine chipped from too many nights tracing protective circles around a house that had never fully welcomed him. He hesitated before setting it beside the shirt, as though the blade might carve through the fragile resolve holding him upright.

Then the last piece of ward chalk. Cracked and worn thin at one end, the kind of chalk you only keep because throwing it away feels like surrender. He gripped it too tightly for a moment, breath shaking in his throat, and forced himself to let go. Forced it into the bag with fingers that did not feel like his own.

A handful of coins followed. Useless weight. He would never need them. He knew this even as he slid them into the side pocket, hands trembling more with each object that passed through them. Everything he touched felt heavier than it should, as though each one had been stitched to the walls of this place, to her voice, to the line of her shoulders when she had walked away from him without a second glance, to the curve of her mouth when she had told him to die.

The more he packed, the faster his movements grew. Rushed now, clumsy. As if speed alone could dull the edges of this, as if throwing the last of himself into the bag would somehow prevent the ache in his chest from splitting him open entirely. His hands shook as he grabbed the next item, and the next, and the next, each one more frantic than the last, each one laced with a desperation that had nowhere left to go.

And then, by the time the bag was half full, the lie unraveled.

His breath caught hard in his throat. A sharp, brutal hitch that lodged there like glass. The air in the room tasted thin, sour, wrong, as though the house itself had turned against him now, as though even the walls disapproved of this coward’s retreat. His vision swam. Blurred at the edges by something he refused to name. Something he refused to feel. His heart began to pound sideways against the cage of his ribs, each beat frantic, uneven, a raw stutter that seemed to echo the unraveling truth beneath his skin.

He could not do this.

He could not walk out.

Not from this house. Not from her.

His whole body knew it.

His whole fucking soul knew it.

He stood there, frozen, rooted to the spot with one fist still clutching a crumpled shirt as though strangling fabric could somehow tether him to the moment, to her, to the world he could feel slipping sideways beneath his feet. His heart was a hammer against bone, breath trapped somewhere deep in his chest, useless now, more ragged with every second that passed. 

And then the sound came. Soft. Too soft. The whisper of footsteps outside his door, light as breath, deliberate in the way only hers ever were, like she had never learned how to hurry because the world would always wait for her. He knew those steps. Knew them better than the sound of his own pulse. He knew the rhythm of them even in sleep.

She passed. Not even stopping. Not even hesitating. Not even glancing in. Just moving past as if he were already gone, as if the empty space he left behind had already begun to fill in without him.

Something inside him shattered. Clean and merciless.

The door flew open without grace, without thought, banging against the wall with a force that made the wards along the frame hum in startled warning, ancient lines of magic flickering faint and jagged against the wood as though even they had not been prepared to witness this collapse. He was already moving before thought could catch him, before pride could chain him to the image of the man he pretended to be, the man he was supposed to be. His body had outpaced his mind entirely now, running on instinct alone, the raw and terrible instinct that screamed at him that she was leaving, and that if he did not stop her now he would never survive what came after.

He caught sight of her halfway down the corridor, moving toward the stairwell in that maddening, effortless way she always did, as if the air parted to let her pass, as if the house itself would not dare stand in her way. The distance between them was unbearable. Infinite. The kind of distance no steps could close unless she chose to stop.

"Luna." His voice cracked. Too raw, too loud, fracturing against the breathless dark that had swallowed the house. The name came out like a prayer, or a curse, or something that no longer knew the difference.

She did not turn.

"Luna, please."

Still she did not turn.

And then it happened. The worst thing he had ever done. The lowest he had ever allowed himself to fall. 

His knees hit the floor hard enough to bruise, the sharp crack of bone on wood echoing down the corridor, cutting through the silence with a violence that made the house itself seem to flinch. His palms pressed against the boards, fists curling until his knuckles burned, his head bowed so low it felt as though gravity itself had claimed him entirely. He was shaking, visibly, violently, the wreck of his breath dragging through his throat like barbed wire. His body no longer his own. His voice no longer recognizable.

"Please." The word tore from him like flesh from bone, hoarse and broken open, the voice of a man who had been stripped of every last defense and had nothing left but this, this begging, this ruin. "I will leave if you want me to. I swear to you." The words stuttered out through the shaking, fractured by the weight of the ache pressing against his ribs. "But I am begging you. Please, just tell me to stay. Just tell me to stay and I will never leave this house. I will never leave you. I will die here if you ask it. Please."

Each word bled from him, dragged across the blade of his own ribs, raw and desperate and laid bare in a way he could never have imagined himself capable of. He had nothing left to give but this. No more strength to fight with. No more walls to hide behind. Just the wreck of his voice and the hollow shell of his body, bowed in the corridor like a broken thing, hands trembling against the cold boards beneath him where even the house seemed to watch in stunned, brittle silence.

She stopped then.

Turned slowly.

Her eyes found him, wide and bright with something unreadable, something cold and terrible in its clarity, a light that seemed to cut through the dark between them like a blade. She stood frozen, breath shallow, gaze locked onto him as though seeing both a stranger and something far too familiar. Her expression did not soften. Her mouth did not open. She only looked at him.

And in that silence, more brutal than any words she could have spoken, Theo stayed kneeling, trembling, watching her as though watching the only light left in the world begin to flicker. The only thing that mattered. The only thing he could not let go. The only thing that, if it walked away now, would take whatever was left of him with it.

She did not speak.

She turned.

And walked away.

And he did not move. Not even when the sound of her footsteps faded back into the dark. Not even when the weight in his chest became something so vast it could no longer be contained by breath or bone.

Not even when the house sighed around him like it too understood that something had just broken beyond repair.

He stayed kneeling. Trembling. Hands pressed flat against the cold boards, fists curling now and again without thought, as though they could claw their way into the wood, as though anchoring himself to the floor could somehow anchor him to her, to this house, to something that still mattered. His breath came uneven, sharp bursts of air that scraped against his throat, each one a fight he was losing. 

His entire body shook with the effort of staying upright. But he did not move. Not yet. Not when her figure still lingered in his sight, a silhouette against the dim stretch of the corridor, and not when his mind, fevered and desperate, still tried to pull some meaning from her stillness, from the wide, unreadable eyes that had found him for that single unbearable moment.

He watched her as though she were the last light left in a world gone dark, the only tether holding him to a place where he had any name, any meaning. Without her, he would vanish. He already felt it starting, pieces of himself slipping loose beneath the weight of the silence. His chest felt hollowed, scraped raw, his ribs struggling to contain the force of something that refused to be caged. There were no more words. None left that would matter. None left that would reach her through the ruin he had made of this fragile thing between them.

And when she finally turned again, silent as the grave, her shoulders lifting in that small, deliberate way that always preceded her retreat, when she began to walk back into the dark with the same unhurried grace that had undone him from the start, as though the world could collapse behind her and she would simply glide onward untouched, he stayed there, unmoving. Watching her disappear. Counting each step in the hollow beats of his pulse. His throat burned to call out again, to plead, to say anything that might tether her back to him. But no sound came. Only the wreck of breath caught somewhere deep in his chest.

He stayed there long after the sound of her footsteps had faded. Long after the faint creak of the stair settled back into stillness. Long after the house, which had seemed to watch with its own quiet grief, finally let out a sigh low and mournful, the old bones of its frame groaning in a way that felt almost like pity.

He did not move. Not when the chill seeped deep into his bones, climbing up from the cold boards to wrap around his spine, tightening until every joint in his body ached with the weight of the posture he could not abandon. Not when the ache in his knees became agony, sharp and grinding, a constant throb that blurred into the larger pain pressing against his chest. Not when his fingers went numb, nails scraping faintly against the floor as though they might tear it open to find some other layer beneath where this nightmare was not true.

Not even when the house itself seemed to breathe slower around him, the flickering wards dimming as though they, too, were bracing for the shape of what had just been lost.

The bag remained half packed on the floor of his room, its mouth gaping wide like some cruel joke, a reminder that leaving had been the lie all along. The door behind him still stood open, the dim light from within spilling uselessly into the corridor where no one would see it.

And Theo knelt alone in the dark, his body broken beneath the weight of a love he could no longer carry, and could never, ever set down.

Not now. Not ever.

And when he finally broke again, when the first ragged sound tore loose from his throat, it was too soft for the house to answer, too small for the night to notice. Just the sound of a man crumbling in silence, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but the trembling shape of him still kneeling there, waiting for a mercy that would never come.

Time stopped meaning anything. It stretched and warped, folding in on itself like a shroud. The darkness of the corridor grew heavier around him, dense and soft at the edges, the way fog creeps into a valley and smothers sound, smothers thought. He could not tell how long he had been kneeling. A minute, an hour, the better part of the night. It no longer mattered. The ache in his body had passed from pain to numbness and back again in endless cycles, but he barely felt it anymore.

What he felt was the silence. The absence of her. The shape of her footfalls that would not return. The hollow ring of her words still echoing in his ribs, each one sharp enough to cut if he let it rise too close to the surface.

His eyes burned from staring too long at the empty space where she had last stood, the pale shape of her hair and the slight lift of her shoulders still imprinted in the dark. His chest ached in long, slow waves, a grief too large for breath to contain. He could not breathe. Not truly. The air in his lungs tasted thin and cold and laced with the scent of the house’s old dust and old magic, and when he finally blinked, the darkness seemed to shift around him, tilting ever so slightly, the way the sea tilts before it swallows a ship.

Somewhere far off, a wall creaked softly. A door eased itself half-shut with no touch. The house was listening. The house had always been listening. And now, in the void of her absence, it seemed to lean closer, its breath damp and cold against his neck, its bones humming low with the same grief that trapped him here.

"I will not leave you," he whispered again, the words barely a thread of sound this time, no louder than breath, as if speaking louder would tear what remained of him apart.

The house gave no answer. Only the long, slow groan of its timbers in the dark, the mournful creak of floorboards that seemed to pulse beneath his knees, as though even the ancient wood beneath him had begun to weep.

A flicker of movement caught the edge of his vision. He turned his head too fast and the world spun, swimming gray and black at the edges. The tall mirror down the hall stood half in shadow, half in the sickly glow of the nearest wardlight, its glass dark and empty, but not empty enough. A shape moved there, not quite his reflection, not quite a trick of the eye. He could not look too long. He would not. If he did, he feared what he would see. What was left of him would not survive the truth of that glass.

And so he stayed still. Knelt with his hands shaking faintly now where they pressed into the floor. Mouth dry. Throat raw. Heart trapped between too many broken beats. And though some dim, half-buried voice in the back of his skull urged him to move, to get up, to finish packing, to run, another part, deeper, older, rooted in bone and blood and the thread that still burned at his wrist no matter how he had tried to ignore it, whispered one truth he could no longer deny.

He would not leave. Not even if it killed him. Not even if she never looked at him again. He would kneel here until the world crumbled to dust if it meant staying close to her.

He lowered his head at last, eyes closing as though in prayer, as though he could shut out the ruin of this night and the ruin of himself. But the dark behind his lids was worse than the corridor. It was full of her. Full of the shape of her mouth when she said "leave," full of the soft brush of her fingertips he would never feel again, full of the sound of her walking away from him for the last time.

A dry sob broke in his chest, silent and sharp, shaking him so hard he thought for a moment he might actually fracture, might finally split open right there on the floor.

But still he knelt. Still he whispered.

"I will not leave you," he mouthed now, voiceless, as the draft passed cold fingers through his hair, as the mirror down the hall watched in silence.

And when the candle finally guttered out behind him and the last light bled from the corridor, the house seemed to sigh once more, long and low and tired.

And Theo, wrecked beyond pride or reason, stayed exactly where he was.