The first time it happened, he told himself it was nothing. Just exhaustion, nothing more. A trick of the mind, stretched thin and fraying, worn down by too many sleepless nights and the silent pressure of a conscience that refused to stay quiet. He had been functioning on muscle memory alone, slipping through days like a ghost in his own life. Each step, each action, each breath felt like a loop in some grim recording he couldn't stop playing. The routines stayed the same, but his grip on them was loosening.
He knew exhaustion well. He knew how it worked—how it didn't break you all at once but crept in slowly, slipping through the cracks of your thoughts like smoke. It made the air feel thicker. It made shadows bend in ways they shouldn't. He had seen what it did to people—strong men, trained men, men who thought themselves invincible—until they weren't. Until their minds blurred the line between reality and nightmare. He had watched good soldiers fall apart because they could no longer trust their own senses. And he had sworn, with quiet conviction, that he would never be one of them.
But he was. Or at least, something was happening. And no matter how he tried to explain it away, it didn't stop.
The first time, he had jolted awake in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, lungs heaving like he'd been drowning. The darkness of his room felt suffocating, heavy, like something was sitting on his chest. There was a sound still ringing in his ears, sharp and sickening—the unmistakable slice of a blade through flesh. His pulse thundered in his throat. His hands shook. For a moment, he didn't know where he was.
The dream had been too vivid. It hadn't felt like dreaming at all. The alley had been cold, damp, exactly as it had been that night. The stone beneath his boots slick with rain or blood or both. The air was sharp and metallic, full of the quiet hum of dying streetlamps and the far-off rattle of a city pretending to sleep. He had felt the weight of the knife in his hand, familiar and solid. He remembered the exact angle of the cut. The pressure. The resistance of skin, then the sickening ease of muscle splitting beneath it. He remembered the way the man's breath hitched, then stopped. A stuttering heartbeat. The body going slack. The warmth of life draining from it.
He had been certain it was real.
But then he woke. And as the silence of his room settled in around him, that certainty began to decay. The details slipped away like smoke. His heartbeat remained frantic, but his mind clawed for logic, for something to hold onto.
Just a dream, he told himself, pressing the heels of his hands to his temples. Just a dream. His voice was shaky, even in his own head. But it was enough to get through the rest of the night.
Until it happened again.
And then again.
And again.
Some nights, it was exactly the same—the same alley, the same movements, the same moment of death. As if time were looping, dragging him back to the same act over and over, forcing him to relive it with agonizing clarity. But other nights, something was... wrong. Off. As if the dream was changing. As if whatever was inside it had begun to notice him.
Sometimes it was the way the man looked at him before dying. His lips would twitch—not in fear or pain, but in a smirk. Slow. Twisted. As if he knew something Theo didn't. As if he were in on a joke that hadn't been told yet. And sometimes, the body didn't fall at all. It would just... stand there. Silent. Still. Watching.
Those were the worst nights.
The man's eyes would lock onto his, cold and expressionless, as if waiting for something. He wouldn't speak. He wouldn't blink. He would just stare. And Theo would feel like he couldn't move, like the air had thickened into tar, like time had slowed around them. He'd wake from those dreams with the image of those eyes burned into his vision, still seeing them even in the dark, still feeling them long after he was awake.
No matter what he told himself—about stress, about sleep deprivation, about trauma—it didn't change the way it felt. Something wasn't right. And with each night that passed, that wrongness dug in deeper.
He had killed someone in that alley. He was sure of it.
But now, he wasn't sure what he had killed.
And then, there were the dreams that were worse—those nights where he wasn't in the alley anymore, where the familiar rhythm of blood and breath and the finality of death no longer anchored him in the illusion of control. Instead, he was somewhere far more suffocating. He was in his own room. Not in the chaos of the kill, but in the quiet aftermath of everything that had come after. The kind of silence that presses in from all sides, thick and damp like rot under the floorboards. The streetlamp outside spilled its cold, coppery light through the window, casting shadows that shifted unnaturally, stretching long across the floor like fingers reaching for him. The mirror in the far corner of the room—the old one, the one he'd been meaning to cover but never quite managed to—stood like a sentry, tall and watchful, its surface swallowing the light and giving nothing back but a reflection that should have been familiar.
Except it wasn't.
It looked like him. It wore his shape. It moved like him. But something about it was wrong in a way that didn't feel like a mistake—it felt intentional, deliberate, as if the thing inside the mirror had studied him, mimicked him, then twisted something just slightly, just enough to make his stomach churn and his chest go tight. The jaw was too sharp, the smile too wide. The posture was just a little too still. His own reflection stared back at him, unmoving, unblinking, no breath fogging the glass, no rise or fall of the chest, just the cold weight of its gaze locking onto his. His heart would stutter, his limbs would freeze, and a crushing pressure would settle against his ribs like invisible hands wrapping around him, squeezing until the air thinned and his vision blurred.
And then—it would move.
Not suddenly. Not violently. Just enough to be wrong. Just enough to tell him that he was no longer alone in his own skin. It would tilt its head, or blink once, or curl its lips into a smile that wasn't his. That couldn't be his. Slow. Deliberate. Unnatural. A predator's grin stretched too wide across his own face, as if it were trying to convince him of something he didn't want to understand. And then, just before he could move, before he could react or scream or run, before he could even remember how to breathe—it would lift one hand, raise it in a slow, taunting wave, and hold it there like a threat, like a promise.
That was always the moment he woke. Gasping. Trembling. The air in his lungs refusing to move, the phantom weight of something unseen still pressing down on his chest like a shroud. He'd try to shake it off, sit on the edge of his bed and run his hands through his sweat-damp hair, muttering half-formed reassurances under his breath, telling himself it was only a dream, only his mind playing tricks, only echoes of exhaustion turning his thoughts inside out. But the words never helped. Because the dreams didn't stop. They only grew heavier. Sharper. Hungrier.
And then, the worst part—he started feeling it when he was awake.
It began as something small. Barely noticeable. Just a flicker, a flash, a tremor of movement in the corner of his eye. The kind of thing anyone might brush off. He had been sitting in the kitchen, hunched over a mug of tea that had long gone cold, steamless and bitter, his thoughts a tangled mess of memories he didn't want and questions he couldn't answer. His entire body ached with fatigue, not just in the bones but in the marrow. He didn't look up when it happened. He didn't need to. He felt it.
A shift.
A shape.
Just inside the doorway.
No sound. No motion. Just the sense that something was there. Waiting.
He hadn't turned his head. He refused to. Some instinct buried deep in his spine screamed at him not to move, not to acknowledge it, because if he looked—if he dared to face it—it would become real. So he had shut his eyes. Inhaled slowly. Counted to five. Waited for the moment to pass. And when he opened them again, the doorway was empty. But the air still felt wrong. He could still feel it, the lingering chill on the back of his neck, the way the shadows seemed to hold their breath.
And then it happened again.
Only this time, he wasn't alone.
He had been walking down the hallway, distracted, thoughts spiraling around something Luna had said that afternoon, something that hadn't made sense at the time but now gnawed at the edges of his memory. And then he saw it—at the far end of the corridor. A figure. Just a shadow. Just the shape of someone standing perfectly still. Watching him.
His breath caught. His feet froze. Every nerve in his body lit up, screaming to move, to turn away, to pretend he hadn't seen it. But before he could do anything—before his muscles could respond, before logic could reassert itself—the hallway lights flickered once. A brief stutter. A blink.
And it was gone.
He wasn't stupid. He understood the effects of sleep deprivation, of trauma. He knew how the mind could warp under strain, how guilt could manifest in cruel, inventive ways. He told himself that. Over and over. But none of it explained the way it lingered. None of it accounted for how it seemed to grow, how the dread didn't fade but deepened. None of it explained why, even when he was fully awake, he felt watched. Marked. Followed.
And the worst part—the part that made his stomach twist and his hands clench until his nails bit into his skin—was that he wasn't the only one who noticed.
Luna knew.
She didn't say a word. She never did. But it was in her eyes.
It was in the way she looked at him when he entered a room, gaze resting on him just a moment too long, like she was reading something just beneath his skin. In the way she tilted her head, soft and quiet, as if listening to a voice he couldn't hear. In the way her silver eyes would flick to the corners of the room when the air grew heavy, when the shadows moved wrong, when the silence thickened into something almost solid.
She knew.
And for the first time in years, Theo didn't know if he wanted to know what she would say—if he asked her to tell him the truth.
~
The nights had begun to blur at the edges, bleeding into one another like ink seeping across old parchment, until the boundary between dusk and dawn felt meaningless, time stretched thin beneath the weight of too many unanswered questions and not enough silence that could comfort him anymore. Each hour passed in agonizing slowness, a ritual of pacing the worn, creaking floorboards with bare feet and an aching spine, his body moving through the rhythm of insomnia while his mind curled inward like a fist. There were too many moments when the silence within the house became unbearable, not because it was loud—but because it was alive, charged with something unseen, something waiting. The safehouse, which had once offered a fragile illusion of protection, now felt hollow and breathless. The walls no longer simply stood around them—they watched, pulsing with invisible tension, as though they were holding something in, or worse, holding something out. The shadows had grown teeth. They stretched too far, reached too long, crawling across the floors like ink slicking across water, always still at first glance, always waiting for the moment he might blink, might drift, might surrender to sleep—so they could inch closer.
At first, he resisted. Told himself he was simply on edge, still adjusting, still struggling to settle into a place filled with faces that wore familiarity like a mask but carried something else beneath. This house was full of people who weren't strangers, but felt like they could be—people shaped by war, by survival, by secrets they never voiced aloud. He told himself it was restlessness. Just too much stillness after too much running. Just old instincts refusing to settle. Just nerves.
But that excuse didn't last.
As the days wore on and the nights grew longer, the lies unraveled. The quiet became suffocating, a pressure behind his eyes and in his lungs, and the fatigue carved deep shadows beneath his eyes like bruises. His body grew heavier, but his mind refused to shut down. And eventually, he gave up the pretense. There was no more use in pretending he could sleep. No point in trying to force his way into rest when sleep had become a hunting ground. It didn't matter how tightly he wrapped the blanket around himself, how many deep, meditative breaths he took, how desperately he counted backwards in his mind to trick himself into slipping under—because the moment he started to drift, it would begin again.
That breath. That impossibly soft exhale of something he couldn't see, grazing his neck like it had been standing just behind him. That weight pressing down on his chest like a hand—or something worse. That presence that did not belong, that didn't feel like dream or memory but something older, colder, and very, very real. The dreams—if they were dreams—didn't feel like visions anymore. They felt like doorways. Like traps. And every time he fell into them, they pulled him back to that alley, to the bloodless body, to the gaping silence that had followed the kill. And always, that same wrongness. That refusal to fade.
So instead, he gave up on sleep entirely. Most nights found him in the common room, long after the others had gone to bed, sitting in the corner with a drink he barely touched, the glass resting forgotten in his palm while his fingers traced its rim in slow, distracted circles. He didn't drink for the warmth or the comfort—he drank because it gave him something to do. Something to hold. Something that might tether him to the moment. The fire flickered across the room, but even the flames felt strange, as though they burned in reverse, curling inward instead of out, as if the shadows between them had begun to move on their own, whispering things to one another when he wasn't paying attention.
Sometimes, he tried to read, but it was a lost cause. His eyes would scan the same page over and over, unable to absorb a single word. His mind was a storm of half-formed thoughts, spirals of suspicion and dread that looped endlessly, chasing their own tails. On other nights, he would just sit in silence, watching the fire and listening to the creaks of the old house, convinced—though he couldn't explain why—that it was listening back.
None of the others seemed to notice. Or maybe they did, and they simply chose not to look too closely.
Draco had rolled his eyes the first time Theo mentioned the dreams, waving him off with a sarcastic remark about cabin fever and too much brooding. He had leaned back in his chair like he wasn't worried at all, dismissing the growing terror with a lazy flick of his hand and a reminder that they had all seen worse. That it was probably just stress. Just another side effect of being locked in with too many memories and not enough air.
Blaise hadn't been much better. He'd given Theo one of those looks—the kind that said he thought he understood, that he believed this was just another ghost from the war following Theo around, another trauma he hadn't buried deeply enough. He hadn't asked questions. He never did. Just raised his glass, smirked like he was in on the joke, and told him he was getting too soft.
Even Hermione, with all her sharp insight and carefully measured compassion, had hesitated before responding. She had tilted her head slightly, concern flickering behind her eyes, but still she offered her suggestion gently: maybe try some Dreamless Sleep, maybe give it time, maybe stop spiraling into the worst-case scenario before things got out of hand. As though this was something that could be reasoned with. As though this was something human.
None of them understood.
Not really.
But she did.
Luna hadn't said a word about it, not directly. She hadn't pulled him aside, hadn't questioned him, hadn't offered empty comfort or scientific rationality. She didn't need to. Because it was in the way she watched him—quiet, steady, not judgmental, but observant. Always observant. It was in the way her gaze lingered an extra second longer than necessary whenever he entered the room, as if she were checking to make sure he was still whole. It was in the slight tilt of her head, the way her eyes drifted toward the darkest corners of the room at the exact moment the air grew too still, too thick, too wrong—as if she could hear something he couldn't. As if she recognized it.
As if she'd felt it too.
She saw things no one else did. Things they didn't want to see. And Theo, for the first time in years, found himself terrified not of what she might say—but of the possibility that she might say nothing, because if Luna Lovegood was watching the shadows...
Then maybe the shadows were real.
Luna never questioned him, never looked at him like he was slipping through the cracks of his own mind, never treated him as if he were some fragile thing unraveling at the edges, no matter how fractured his voice became or how strange the words were that spilled from his mouth in the quietest hours of the night; she never tried to tame his confessions with reason or wrap them in the safe confines of logic like so many of the others had, never offered the soft dismissals he had grown used to—those gently spoken lies that tried to package madness as recovery, fear as fatigue, visions as dreams. She simply listened, filling the silences between his sentences with a stillness so steady, so absolute, it made the things he said feel real, as though they weren't delusions at all but truths he had been too afraid to name until now. Her eyes never wavered, never darted away in discomfort or flickered with pity the way others' did when he spoke of the shadows that moved on their own or the mirror that didn't return his reflection quite right; she held his gaze with a quiet steadiness that made him feel, for the first time in weeks, like he wasn't entirely alone in this.
As if she had already known.
As if, in some strange, unspoken way, she had always known.
He didn't remember when it began—when the nights started to belong to the two of them—but he remembered the feeling. At first, he told himself it was coincidence, nothing more. He would find himself in the dim hush of the common room, the air heavy with the scent of old books and smoke, fingers curled around a glass of something he never finished, his gaze locked on the flickering hearth or the dark windowpane that reflected only the vague outline of a man he barely recognized, and then she would be there. Not arriving. Not announcing her presence. Just there, drifting into the room like a thought that had always existed, as if she had been waiting for him to notice her—not just that night, but always.
She never asked if he wanted her company. She never needed to.
She would settle into the seat across from him with a grace that was almost otherworldly, her movements so quiet they barely made a sound, her posture relaxed but never careless, as if she was both part of the room and somehow untouched by it. Sometimes her fingers would trace invisible lines across the table's surface, symbols no one else could see, patterns only she understood. Other times, she would hum under her breath—soft, absent, a strange little melody that curled around the room like smoke. It was the same tune he had heard that night in the alley, the one that had lingered in his ears long after he'd left the scene, the one that still made the fine hairs on his neck rise without warning, though he still couldn't explain why.
Eventually, the silence would unravel, not with sudden urgency but with something slower, quieter, like breath drawn after too long underwater. The words came—halting at first, uneven. Not because he didn't trust her—he did, more than he trusted anyone—but because saying the truth aloud gave it form, gave it weight, and once it existed in the world, it could no longer be ignored or buried. He had spent so long pretending it wasn't happening, but in her presence, the pretending felt childish, cowardly. She didn't ask. She didn't push. She simply tilted her head, silver eyes reflecting the low light like a pool of still water, patient, knowing, as if she was waiting for him to remember that some truths can't be contained.
And when the silence stretched too long—when it began to press down on him like a hand against his chest, when it filled his lungs with something too heavy to breathe through—he let go.
"It's worse when I'm alone."
The words scraped their way out of him, rough and gravelled, like something that had been hiding in the back of his throat for far too long, something sharp and unspoken that left its mark as it passed through. He hadn't meant to say it, not out loud, not like that—but it was the only thing he could manage. It was the only truth that mattered.
She didn't blink in surprise. Didn't tilt her head in question. Didn't flinch at all.
She just looked at him, soft and still, and in a voice that barely stirred the air between them, she murmured, "They don't like silence."
The words sank into him like ice, slow and searing. They carried no explanation, no logic, no attempt to soften the meaning. But he understood. He felt the truth of it run along his spine like cold fingers. He didn't need her to elaborate.
That was how it began.
Now, it had become a quiet ritual. Not one either of them acknowledged aloud, but one they kept without fail. A pattern written in silence and smoke, in the dark hours when the house seemed to hold its breath. The others had long since stopped asking why Theo never went to bed before dawn, and if they noticed that Luna vanished from her room just as the night deepened and always returned as the sky began to shift to pale grey, they said nothing. Perhaps they understood more than they let on—or perhaps they were simply afraid to ask.
The nights belonged to them now.
They spoke in low voices, words barely more than whispers, as if raising them too high might tear the veil between them and the thing that listened, as if acknowledging its presence too loudly would give it permission to step through. He told her things he hadn't even told himself—about the dreams that no longer felt like dreams, about the hours he spent caught between waking and sleep, unsure where one ended and the other began. He spoke of the body that had vanished, of the alley that reappeared behind his eyelids every time he closed them, of the shifting shadows and the crows and the sensation—that awful, overwhelming sensation—that he was never truly alone.
She never interrupted. Never tried to comfort him with empty platitudes. Never asked him to explain himself. She just listened, utterly still, her hands folded in her lap, her fingers twitching only slightly as if tracing invisible shapes into the air—shapes that may have been protection, or invitation, or understanding. Her breathing was the only sound in the room besides his voice and the occasional crack of the fire, and even when he faltered, when the words came out in fragments, she stayed.
And when he finally fell silent, voice hoarse, eyes burning, the weight of his own thoughts having bled too heavily from his chest to carry alone anymore—that's when she would speak.
Always softly. Always gently. Always with a certainty that steadied the world around them.
"You're not imagining it."
And even though he had already known—deep down, somewhere he didn't want to name—that she would say exactly that, hearing it spoken aloud made something inside him twist and pull tight. It should have been a relief. It should have been a balm. But instead, it lodged beneath his ribs like a cold blade, because if he wasn't imagining it—then it was real.
And if it was real, then something was coming.
Luna never questioned him, never looked at him like he was slipping through the cracks of his own mind, never treated him as if he were some fragile thing unraveling at the edges, no matter how fractured his voice became or how strange the words were that spilled from his mouth in the quietest hours of the night; she never tried to tame his confessions with reason or wrap them in the safe confines of logic like so many of the others had, never offered the soft dismissals he had grown used to—those gently spoken lies that tried to package madness as recovery, fear as fatigue, visions as dreams. She simply listened, filling the silences between his sentences with a stillness so steady, so absolute, it made the things he said feel real, as though they weren't delusions at all but truths he had been too afraid to name until now. Her eyes never wavered, never darted away in discomfort or flickered with pity the way others' did when he spoke of the shadows that moved on their own or the mirror that didn't return his reflection quite right; she held his gaze with a quiet steadiness that made him feel, for the first time in weeks, like he wasn't entirely alone in this.
As if she had already known.
As if, in some strange, unspoken way, she had always known.
He didn't remember when it began—when the nights started to belong to the two of them—but he remembered the feeling. At first, he told himself it was coincidence, nothing more. He would find himself in the dim hush of the common room, the air heavy with the scent of old books and smoke, fingers curled around a glass of something he never finished, his gaze locked on the flickering hearth or the dark windowpane that reflected only the vague outline of a man he barely recognized, and then she would be there. Not arriving. Not announcing her presence. Just there, drifting into the room like a thought that had always existed, as if she had been waiting for him to notice her—not just that night, but always.
She never asked if he wanted her company. She never needed to.
She would settle into the seat across from him with a grace that was almost otherworldly, her movements so quiet they barely made a sound, her posture relaxed but never careless, as if she was both part of the room and somehow untouched by it. Sometimes her fingers would trace invisible lines across the table's surface, symbols no one else could see, patterns only she understood. Other times, she would hum under her breath—soft, absent, a strange little melody that curled around the room like smoke. It was the same tune he had heard that night in the alley, the one that had lingered in his ears long after he'd left the scene, the one that still made the fine hairs on his neck rise without warning, though he still couldn't explain why.
Eventually, the silence would unravel, not with sudden urgency but with something slower, quieter, like breath drawn after too long underwater. The words came—halting at first, uneven. Not because he didn't trust her—he did, more than he trusted anyone—but because saying the truth aloud gave it form, gave it weight, and once it existed in the world, it could no longer be ignored or buried. He had spent so long pretending it wasn't happening, but in her presence, the pretending felt childish, cowardly. She didn't ask. She didn't push. She simply tilted her head, silver eyes reflecting the low light like a pool of still water, patient, knowing, as if she was waiting for him to remember that some truths can't be contained.
And when the silence stretched too long—when it began to press down on him like a hand against his chest, when it filled his lungs with something too heavy to breathe through—he let go.
"It's worse when I'm alone."
The words scraped their way out of him, rough and gravelled, like something that had been hiding in the back of his throat for far too long, something sharp and unspoken that left its mark as it passed through. He hadn't meant to say it, not out loud, not like that—but it was the only thing he could manage. It was the only truth that mattered.
She didn't blink in surprise. Didn't tilt her head in question. Didn't flinch at all.
She just looked at him, soft and still, and in a voice that barely stirred the air between them, she murmured, "They don't like silence."
The words sank into him like ice, slow and searing. They carried no explanation, no logic, no attempt to soften the meaning. But he understood. He felt the truth of it run along his spine like cold fingers. He didn't need her to elaborate.
That was how it began.
Now, it had become a quiet ritual. Not one either of them acknowledged aloud, but one they kept without fail. A pattern written in silence and smoke, in the dark hours when the house seemed to hold its breath. The others had long since stopped asking why Theo never went to bed before dawn, and if they noticed that Luna vanished from her room just as the night deepened and always returned as the sky began to shift to pale grey, they said nothing. Perhaps they understood more than they let on—or perhaps they were simply afraid to ask.
The nights belonged to them now.
They spoke in low voices, words barely more than whispers, as if raising them too high might tear the veil between them and the thing that listened, as if acknowledging its presence too loudly would give it permission to step through. He told her things he hadn't even told himself—about the dreams that no longer felt like dreams, about the hours he spent caught between waking and sleep, unsure where one ended and the other began. He spoke of the body that had vanished, of the alley that reappeared behind his eyelids every time he closed them, of the shifting shadows and the crows and the sensation—that awful, overwhelming sensation—that he was never truly alone.
She never interrupted. Never tried to comfort him with empty platitudes. Never asked him to explain himself. She just listened, utterly still, her hands folded in her lap, her fingers twitching only slightly as if tracing invisible shapes into the air—shapes that may have been protection, or invitation, or understanding. Her breathing was the only sound in the room besides his voice and the occasional crack of the fire, and even when he faltered, when the words came out in fragments, she stayed.
And when he finally fell silent, voice hoarse, eyes burning, the weight of his own thoughts having bled too heavily from his chest to carry alone anymore—that's when she would speak.
Always softly. Always gently. Always with a certainty that steadied the world around them.
"You're not imagining it."
And even though he had already known—deep down, somewhere he didn't want to name—that she would say exactly that, hearing it spoken aloud made something inside him twist and pull tight. It should have been a relief. It should have been a balm. But instead, it lodged beneath his ribs like a cold blade, because if he wasn't imagining it—then it was real.
And if it was real, then something was coming.
~
Theo drifted toward wakefulness through a thick, molasses-slow haze of pain, not the kind that screamed or stabbed, but the kind that sank its teeth in deep and refused to let go, dull and unrelenting, a rhythmic throb that pulsed in time with every breath he took. It wasn't agony—not the white-hot flash of injury he knew how to fight through—but something slower, deeper, something that lived beneath the surface of his skin and curled around his ribs with patient, lingering insistence. It was a reminder, more than anything, that something had happened—something had gone wrong. His body felt heavier than it should have, not just with the weight of the ache but with exhaustion that went beyond sleeplessness, the kind of fatigue that rooted itself in the bones, that tangled itself through muscle and sinew until even the act of breathing felt like an effort, until the very idea of opening his eyes was enough to make him want to sink back down into the dark and stay there.
His instincts, honed and unforgiving, told him to move anyway. To get up. To push through it. That was what he'd always done, what he'd been trained to do. Pain was background noise. It was data. Something to catalog and endure. You didn't stop because of it—you just recalibrated. But the moment he tried, the second his muscles tensed in preparation to sit up, something sharp and unforgiving yanked tight in his chest, a sudden flare of heat that warned him in no uncertain terms that if he kept moving, something was going to tear. He froze, breath catching in his throat, and in the stillness that followed, he became aware of something else—something his instincts had already noticed before his mind caught up.
He wasn't alone.
The awareness didn't come with a sound or a sudden jolt of movement, but as a shift in the air itself, the unmistakable gravity of another presence occupying the space beside him, calm and still and impossibly close. His body reacted before he had time to think, muscles twitching with the kind of readiness he hadn't felt in weeks, nerves sparking with the sudden jolt of potential danger—and then his eyes snapped open, and the tension drained from him all at once.
It was her.
Luna.
She was beside the bed, far too close, the quiet weight of her presence wrapping around the room like a second heartbeat. One knee was drawn up onto the mattress, the curve of her frame partially silhouetted by the flickering, amber glow of a single candle perched on the bedside table. The flame cast long, shifting shadows across the walls, its light catching in the pale glint of her hair and the silver-blue of her eyes, tracing the delicate curve of her mouth and the cool precision etched into every movement she made. Her face was soft in the candlelight, strangely serene, but her hands—her hands were anything but passive.
Her hands were on him.
And fuck—his shirt was gone.
The realization hit at the same time as the sting—sharp and undeniable—the hot drag of needle through torn flesh, a flare of pain that yanked him out of whatever fog he'd been drifting in and anchored him fully, painfully, in the moment. His body tensed instinctively, and then immediately relaxed again, his breath leaving him in a slow, careful exhale as the truth settled in his mind.
He was hurt. Badly enough that he hadn't even tried to handle it himself.
And Luna was stitching him back together.
That should have been the whole story. Simple. Clinical. Practical. A necessary task. But it wasn't. It never was with her. Not with the way she moved. Not with the way her touch felt. Not with the way the air between them had thickened into something heavy and charged and unspoken.
Because she was too close. Because the silence was too full. Because her hands were too gentle.
Her fingers were cool and steady as they pressed against his ribs, adjusting the angle with quiet, practiced movements, and it should have been nothing. It should have hurt more than it did. But instead, every careful brush of her skin against his sent a bolt of awareness racing through him, sharp and electric, leaving heat blooming in places that had nothing to do with the wound. She leaned in slightly, threading the needle again with careful precision, her breath brushing against his collarbone in soft, measured intervals that made his skin crawl in the best and worst ways, and when he looked at her—really looked—he saw the faint furrow between her brows, the subtle parting of her lips as she focused, the slight tilt of her head as she adjusted the tension of the stitch.
He should have said something. Anything.
He should have broken the silence, made some wry comment, thrown up a barrier of sarcasm or bravado to protect the fragile space between them from whatever this was rapidly becoming. But he didn't. Couldn't. He just sat there, jaw clenched tight, breath shallow, trying not to react to the way her fingers ghosted over his skin again, impossibly careful, impossibly precise.
"You do this often?" His voice cracked like splintered wood, lower than he meant, rough and ragged and still soaked in the weight of whatever place he'd just come from. It sounded wrong to his own ears—too vulnerable, too real—and still she didn't flinch.
"Only when necessary."
The answer came soft, effortless, as if she hadn't noticed the way his body had gone tense under her touch, as if this were routine, unremarkable. Her voice was like breath—measured, calm, detached from the sharp edge of his reaction—and yet somehow, still intimate. Still devastating.
He drew in a slow breath, willing himself to stay still, to not let her see what this was doing to him. "And is it always this—" He hesitated, the word coiling tight in his throat, dangerous and stupid and impossible to stop. "Intimate?"
This time, she looked at him.
Not a glance, not a twitch of acknowledgment, but a slow, deliberate lift of her gaze, her silver-blue eyes catching the candlelight as she turned toward him. Her expression didn't change—not really—but something in her face shifted. The barest tilt of her lips. The smallest flicker of amusement—or understanding.
"Pain requires proximity," she murmured.
The words hung in the air between them like a spell, soft and heavy and far more than they appeared to be. They weren't just an explanation. They were a truth. A confession. A map to a place neither of them had dared to name.
He hated how her voice sounded like it had been crafted just for him, like something sacred whispered into the hollow spaces of his chest, something meant to be felt rather than heard. It landed somewhere deep inside him and stayed there, echoing in the places he couldn't quite reach.
His throat was dry. Too dry.
He looked away, desperate for something to focus on besides the way her breath kept brushing across his skin or the way her fingers kept moving with such unshakable care. He stared at her hands instead, at the soft flick of candlelight that shimmered along the fine bones of her knuckles, at the glint of the needle as it vanished into his skin again, sharp and slow and somehow gentler than it had any right to be. He felt everything—every drag, every stitch, every subtle shift of her body as she leaned in closer—and none of it felt like pain.
It felt like something else entirely.
Something he didn't want to name.
When she finally tied off the last stitch, her fingers brushing once more against the raw skin of his ribs, he didn't breathe. Not until she reached for a clean cloth and pressed it softly against the wound, the coolness a shock against the heat that had been building beneath her hands. He thought that might be it—thought that would be the end of it—but then she lingered, her touch moving lower as she wiped the dried blood from his skin, slow and careful and thorough, and it took everything he had not to shift beneath her hands, not to let the moment swallow him whole.
And then—finally—she moved.
She sat back, shifting her weight off the mattress, and he nearly exhaled in relief. Nearly. The space she left behind felt colder than it should have. He kept still, jaw tight, eyes trained on the ceiling as she studied her work in silence, that same unreadable scrutiny in her expression—the kind that made him feel like she was seeing more than just his injuries, like she was peeling him back layer by layer and finding every secret he had tried so hard to bury.
"You'll live," she said at last, and it should have been a simple thing, an easy thing, the kind of reassurance one gives without thought—but the way she said it made his chest clench. Made something coil tight in his stomach. There was too much in those words. Too much knowing. Too much truth.
He opened his mouth to respond, already reaching for something sharp, something sarcastic to dull the edge of whatever the hell had just happened—but before he could speak, her gaze dropped, her expression shifting almost imperceptibly as her eyes caught on something he hadn't noticed yet.
And when he followed her line of sight, when he looked down and saw the inside of his own forearms—marked by thin, fresh lines, shallow but deliberate, pale red against the starkness of his skin—his breath caught.
He didn't remember getting them.
He hadn't had those before.
And something in him, quiet and cold and primal, knew—they weren't from her.
They weren't from him.
Something had left its mark.
And it was just beginning.
Before he could move, before the denial could rise fully in his throat, Luna reached out with the same quiet certainty she carried into every room, her fingers ghosting over his skin with the barest hint of pressure, so light it was almost a question, so gentle it might have been imagined if not for the way his entire body went still in response. Her touch skimmed across the marks on his forearm with slow, unhurried precision, as though she wasn't merely observing but reading, as though the scratches themselves were a language only she could decipher, and the second her skin met his, something inside him lit up—not with pain, not with fear, but with an intensity that hollowed out his lungs and made the air around them feel heavy, humid, electric. It wasn't the burn of injury, wasn't the jolt of being wounded or the sting of a fresh stitch being pulled too tight; it was something deeper, something older, something that twisted low in his gut and crawled up along his spine in a slow, aching coil of sensation that had nothing to do with the physical and everything to do with her—with the unflinching calm of her presence, the uncanny steadiness of her fingers, the quiet way she seemed to cut through the walls he had built without even trying.
"You're being marked," she said, not in fear, not in warning, but with a kind of resigned reverence, her voice soft and low, shaped by something ancient and certain, as if the words weren't a theory or a possibility but a fact—something inevitable, something already sealed, something written in the spaces between his breath, between his heartbeat, between them. She didn't flinch as she said it, didn't hesitate, and somehow that made it worse, because it meant she meant it. Because it meant she had already seen the truth of it.
And Theo reacted before he could stop himself.
His entire body recoiled, snapping back with a suddenness that made his vision swim and his pulse stutter, one arm yanking out of her reach like she had burned him—not with fire, but with the unbearable weight of knowing, the kind of knowing he wasn't ready to face, wasn't ready to feel, wasn't ready to admit might be true. The movement was too fast, too reckless, and pain bloomed hot beneath his ribs as the fresh stitches pulled taut, a sharp tear of sensation that should have grounded him—but even as he felt it, even as his body screamed at him to slow down, he barely noticed. It wasn't the pain that had gutted him. It was the words. The words and the touch and the way they burrowed under his skin like a seed taking root, like something he couldn't dig out no matter how hard he tried.
"You're talking nonsense," he snapped, the words biting and ragged, slicing through the charged silence with more force than he intended, spilling out too fast, too raw, laced with something dark and frantic he didn't want to name. The sharpness in his tone felt foreign in his own mouth, like it belonged to someone else entirely, like he was already losing hold of who he was, and the way the words echoed back at him made his skin crawl.
But she didn't react.
She didn't flinch. Didn't withdraw her hand. Didn't meet his hostility with matching force or even a flicker of discomfort. Instead, she simply looked at him with that same maddening calm, the same unshakable poise that made it impossible to know where her thoughts began or ended, and then—she smiled. Soft. Almost fond. Unreadable in the way only Luna could be. It wasn't the smile of someone who had been insulted. It wasn't even the smile of someone amused. It was the kind of expression that suggested she had seen this moment already, that she had walked through this conversation before he had ever spoken the words, that she had known from the very beginning that this was how it would go. It was the smile of inevitability. Of patience.
Of someone waiting.
"Not nonsense," she said, and her voice was a murmur again, low and measured, the kind of sound that settled under the skin rather than over it, the kind of sound that made his pulse slam against his ribs as if trying to escape, the kind that turned the room colder even as his blood ran hotter. "Just something you don't want to hear yet."
And the worst part—the part he could neither speak nor silence—was the truth buried in her words.
Because she was right.
Gods help him, she was right, and that single, unbearable truth lodged itself somewhere behind his ribs and refused to be dislodged, no matter how tightly he clenched his fists or how desperately he tried to look away from the thin, red marks carved into his skin by something he hadn't seen, something he hadn't chosen, something that had already found him—and wouldn't let go.
~
This was horrible, and yet even that word felt too shallow, too restrained, too small to capture the twisting, choking thing curling in the pit of his stomach, the slow and deliberate way panic crawled into his chest and wrapped itself around his ribs like a serpent with no intention of letting go, tightening with every breath until each inhale felt like a struggle against something unseen but impossibly real. Marked—she had said he was being marked, as if that were a simple truth, as if that word didn't carry with it a thousand implications he wasn't prepared to face, as if it were a label he had somehow earned without his consent, without even realizing he'd been pulled into something ancient and inescapable. And what did it even mean, to be marked? Why him? Why now? He had spent ten years avoiding this exact fate, spent a decade building walls around himself so high and so impenetrable that nothing could get in—no ghosts, no gods, no curses, no fates, no monsters. He had bled for that distance, had honed his instincts to the edge of violence, had trained himself into something sharp and unreachable, and yet now—now she was looking at him like it was already too late, like something had found him and decided he belonged to it.
It had to be nothing, it had to be, because if it wasn't, then the world he'd built around himself was already falling apart. It had to be Luna being Luna, Lovegood being Lovegood, strange and ethereal and always speaking in riddles that folded in on themselves, wrapping around his logic like ivy through stone and choking the structure from within. That had been his reassurance from the beginning, his internal mantra—the one that kept him tethered whenever she tilted her head just so or let her gaze linger too long or whispered truths in that soft, measured voice that always sounded more like prophecy than conversation. She didn't mean anything by it—she couldn't—because if she did, if she was right, then everything he'd ignored was about to crash down on him, everything he'd buried was about to claw its way back to the surface, and something inside him knew he wouldn't be able to stop it.
His fingers twitched where they rested against the edge of the mattress, his breath coming in shallow bursts that didn't reach his lungs, the rhythm of his pulse tripping over itself as it hammered against the inside of his throat, his ribs, the fragile architecture of a body that no longer felt entirely his. He could still feel her touch, still feel the delicate pressure of her fingertips against his skin like she had inscribed something into him without ink, like her hands had branded him with something unseen but inescapable, and the memory of it made the heat inside him spike—unbearable not because of pain, but because of the intimacy, because of the way his body had responded, because of the part of him that had wanted her to stay.
And that was worse—that was so much worse than any mark or curse or phantom wound, because why had she touched him like that? Why had she let her fingers linger with such care, with such unbearable softness, like he was something fragile and known, like she recognized whatever was happening to him, like she understood it? The thought made his chest tighten, made his thoughts spiral further, because no one touched him like that—not with care, not with reverence, not like they saw him. His skin wasn't supposed to remember anyone's touch. It wasn't supposed to burn in their absence. It wasn't supposed to ache from the echo of something so gentle it felt unreal. Her voice had curled around a truth he wasn't ready to hold, and now it was inside him, embedded in the marrow of his bones, and he couldn't shake it free.
He was unraveling.
His fists clenched against the mattress, fingernails biting into his palms in an effort to anchor himself, to claw his way back to a reality where none of this mattered, but the pressure of his own hands barely registered through the noise in his head, through the rush of memories that weren't memories, through the way her words kept echoing—soft, certain, final. He had no defenses against her. Not really. She had seen straight through him like smoke. Had looked at him like she knew what waited underneath all the sharpness he wore like armor, and worse, like she accepted it. He didn't want her to see him, didn't want her to understand him, didn't want to be known—not like that, not when it meant giving up the last scrap of distance he had left.
But she had seen. She had known. She had left him with words that refused to loosen their hold, that looped endlessly in his thoughts, tightening like vines each time he tried to pretend they meant nothing. She had said it with the kind of certainty that made arguing pointless, had said it like it was already done, already real, and now every breath he took felt like breathing in the end of something he didn't know had even begun.
The pressure in his chest built until it bordered on panic, his breath too fast, too shallow, his heart trying to outrun a truth that had already caught him. He needed to move. Needed to get away from the heat her presence had left behind, from the way her touch still echoed against his skin like a memory burned too deep, from the awareness she had placed inside him like a seed waiting to bloom. He needed this to be meaningless. He needed this to be a mistake. He needed her to be wrong.
But she wasn't.
And now he had no idea who he was if everything she saw in him was real.