Theo didn't trust easily. He never had, never would, and there was no part of him that wished otherwise, no buried softness, no secret yearning for comfort or connection to disprove the truths he had long ago carved into himself with the precision of a blade honed by necessity. Trust was not a virtue, not a kindness, not a balm for weary souls longing for warmth; it was not a generous thing passed between friends like laughter or shared secrets, not some quaint notion sewn into the hearts of the hopeful or the kind—it was a weapon, a liability, a debt incurred by the desperate and paid in full by the damned. It was a currency far too expensive for someone like him to afford, a gamble with stakes too high and losses too permanent, a bargain struck in ignorance and paid out in betrayal, and he had watched others hand it over like fools, bright-eyed and trembling, only to watch them crumble when the cost came due, only to be left bleeding when the illusion broke and they realized too late that trust was not protection—it was exposure, and exposure was fatal.
He had not come to this conclusion through theory or secondhand warning, had not been gently dissuaded from misplaced idealism by kind mentors or cautious friends; no, he had learned this lesson the way all his lessons had come to him—through suffering, through consequence, through the slow and merciless erosion of any belief that the world might be safer than it seemed. He had spent too many years learning that truth in silence, in the space between the lies others told and the truths they wielded like knives, had spent too many nights stretched out on cold mattresses beneath colder ceilings, counting the ghosts of his own mistakes, tracing the jagged echoes of betrayals that had never come with blood but had still carved something into him so deeply it could not be seen without peeling him open. Trust, he knew, was not lost—it was taken, and the people who took it rarely gave anything back that didn't come poisoned.
He remembered every hand that had gripped his shoulder until it needed to let go, every smile that had softened only long enough to see what it could take, every alliance that had wilted under the weight of reality when usefulness dried up and sentiment proved to be nothing more than another convenient lie. Faces blurred in memory not because he had forgotten them, but because he had learned to strip them of identity the moment they began to edge too close, learned to stop giving names to people who would eventually become cautionary tales, who would vanish the second it no longer served them to stay. There were too many of them—too many who had once called him comrade or friend or brother, too many who had stood at his side until they hadn't, who had promised and vowed and reassured and then walked away with no explanation but the silence left in their wake. He had stopped asking questions when the answers never came. He had stopped expecting anything except absence.
It had started long before the war, long before bloodied fields and broken vows and crumbling ideologies, long before his name became something whispered in fear or contempt, long before the lines between hero and villain, soldier and survivor, victim and perpetrator began to blur until he no longer knew where he stood—if he stood at all. No, it had started in the house he had grown up in, if that place could even be called a home, under the cold shadow of a man who had spoken not in affection or affirmation but in orders, in expectations, in the kind of calculated cruelty that left no room for tenderness. His father had been the first to teach him the danger of trust, had been the first to show him that love was conditional, that safety was a myth, that approval was nothing more than a leash, and that trust, if offered, would always, always be turned back against him as proof of weakness. There had been no comfort in that house, no kindness, no sanctuary, only survival, only the cold mathematics of behavior and punishment, of silence and consequence.
And then the war had come, as inevitable and brutal as he had always known it would, and with it, the final confirmation that anything not locked behind walls would be torn apart. He had seen the desperation in people's eyes, had seen them turn on each other with startling ease, had watched loyalty fracture and re-form like smoke, had watched men murder with one hand while swearing allegiance with the other. He had seen what happened when fear outweighed principle, when desperation eclipsed morality, when trust became something sold rather than earned. In those years, he had watched too many people switch sides with the wind, had watched truth die beneath the weight of politics and power, had watched the same hands that had once lifted him up now deliver him into the fire.
There had been a moment—just one, a sliver of possibility so brief he sometimes questioned if it had been real—when he had let his guard down, when he had believed that maybe, just maybe, something stronger than history or war or bloodlines could hold. He had wanted to believe it, had tasted the fragile, unfamiliar shape of hope like sugar on the tongue, had thought perhaps there were people who would not turn, who would stay, who would not leave him to rot in the ruins of his own disillusionment. But trust, when misplaced, had a way of becoming deadly. The wrong words had been overheard, the wrong eyes had been watching, and suddenly, every secret he had dared to share became ammunition, every vulnerability he had revealed became a weapon, and he had been reminded—violently, thoroughly, with no room for interpretation—that trust did not save anyone. Trust killed.
So he had stopped. He had buried the naive boy who had once believed in loyalty and affection and the possibility of something like safety, had entombed him beneath layers of detachment and discipline and the unshakeable conviction that no one, no matter how kind or sincere, could be let too close. He had built walls—not the kind others could see, but the kind that wrapped around the core of him, invisible and impenetrable, constructed brick by brutal brick until nothing of him remained unguarded. Every word that left his mouth was measured, every glance calculated, every step precise, and behind it all, behind the smooth expression and the carefully chosen silences, there was a mind trained to notice, to anticipate, to prepare for the moment someone would try to turn his trust into his undoing.
He had become a shadow, something fluid and ungraspable, something that could slip through cracks and vanish into smoke, because shadows could not be betrayed, could not be held, could not be hurt. And that, more than anything, had become the foundation of his survival—not power, not cunning, not cruelty—but distance. Not the kind others imposed, but the kind he created himself, deliberately, absolutely, without exception.
And yet—despite everything, despite the war and the blood and the bones he had buried beneath the weight of his own silence, despite the betrayals that had left his skin a map of invisible scars and his heart a locked vault no one was meant to enter, despite the carefully constructed years spent ensuring that he belonged to no one and that no one, not ever, could claim even the smallest sliver of him without permission, without consequence, without risk—here he was, sitting in a room dimly lit by candlelight that flickered not just against the walls but across the silver-blue eyes of the girl sitting opposite him, eyes that had never flinched in the face of his darkness, never recoiled from the sharp edges of his quiet, never tried to turn his silence into something neater, something more manageable, something softer or easier to name. Here he was, listening to Luna speak in riddles that defied logic and coherence, in language that bent the world sideways and twisted his perceptions into strange new shapes, words that should have meant nothing and yet rooted themselves into the hollows of his chest with a weight he couldn't shake, her gaze settling over his skin not like scrutiny, not like invasion, but like inevitability, like a storm already arrived, like the slow recognition of something ancient and preordained, something that had always been meant to happen in exactly this way, in exactly this room, in exactly this quiet.
Here he was, with her, and the walls he had spent his entire life building—stone by stone, with the precision of someone who knew too well the price of weakness—were beginning, impossibly, irrevocably, to crack, hairline fractures forming where her words lingered too long, where her presence made the air feel too close, too electric, too real. It was fucking terrifying, not in the way death was terrifying, not in the way nightmares were terrifying, but in the way hope was, in the way vulnerability crept in disguised as comfort, in the way the terrifying possibility of what if slithered beneath his skin before he had a chance to stop it. Because he did not trust—he could not trust, not when trust had always been a game he lost before it began, not when trust had been the weapon that undid him before, not when he had learned, again and again, that offering someone belief was the same as handing them a knife and turning your back—but somewhere, somewhere deep in the quietest part of himself, in the space between heartbeat and breath, in the part of him that he never let anyone see, he feared that it had already begun, that the damage was already done, that she had somehow slipped through the cracks before he even noticed the fissures forming, and now it was too late to stop what was coming.
Luna had never asked for his trust, had never reached for it with greedy hands or dressed it in the costume of safety, had never tried to coax him with honeyed promises or drag him into the light like all the others had tried to do. She had never asked for explanations, never demanded reasons, never attempted to translate the wordless storm of his mind into something tidy and palatable—had never sought to fix him, never even suggested that he was something in need of mending. She had simply waited, not passively, not blindly, but with the strange, measured stillness of someone who already knew, already understood, who stood at the edge of his unraveling with her feet planted firmly in the dark, unafraid of the monsters that lurked there, willing to watch without flinching as the seams began to split. Unlike the others—those who came armed with logic and pity, who tried to parse him like a riddle to be solved, who wanted tidy resolutions and safe conclusions—she had never tried to drag him into clarity, had only stayed quiet when the first fractures cracked open inside his mind, when the darkness whispered too loudly, when the world began to tilt and blur and shift in ways he no longer trusted himself to navigate alone.
And when the moment finally came—when sleep no longer brought rest, when waking felt like drowning, when the shadows began to move with intelligence and hunger, when he began to fear that he was not alone even in his own mind—she had been there, not surprised, not alarmed, but ready, like she had always known this was coming, like she had been waiting for him not just patiently but faithfully, as if she had read the ending of this story long before he realized he had been living it. The paranoia had begun slowly, subtly, like a fog creeping in through a cracked window, coiling into the corners of his awareness, threading itself into the hours between midnight and morning, feeding on his exhaustion, growing in the silence he tried to ignore. It had begun as flickers—shadows at the periphery, a cold breath on the back of his neck, the sudden stilling of his heart when he knew he was alone but felt otherwise—and he had told himself it was stress, told himself it was nothing, told himself he could handle it, until he couldn't, until the voice whispering his name in an empty room didn't feel like imagination, until the taste of blood in his mouth upon waking didn't feel accidental, until the reflection in the mirror smiled at him when he wasn't smiling at all.
And it had been too much, too fast, too real, and against every carefully forged instinct, against every hard-earned rule, against every survival mechanism carved into him by war and upbringing and fear, he had gone to her, to the only person who might not flinch, to the only person who might already know. He had turned to Luna, not because he trusted her—because he couldn't, not really—but because he was already losing himself, and she was the only fixed point left in a world that no longer made sense. She had not looked surprised when he showed up, pale and trembling and furious with himself, trembling from dreams that felt too close to truth and too distant from anything rational, his hands shaking with the aftershock of something he couldn't name, couldn't define, couldn't fight. She had simply stepped aside, as if the threshold between them had never really been hers to control, as if she had been expecting him all along, as if his arrival was not a choice but a certainty he had only just accepted.
Her world had never mirrored his—it bent in ways his did not, thrummed with magic he did not understand, pulsed with quiet, dangerous things that felt neither light nor dark but something older, something deeper—and stepping into her space had felt like stepping into something ancient, like crossing into a liminal place between reality and myth. The air had been thick, tinged with smoke and something metallic, something that curled beneath his tongue and made the fine hairs along his arms lift, something that whispered warnings even as it lulled him deeper. The walls were lined with books that didn't look written so much as summoned, trinkets suspended on invisible threads that danced when no wind moved them, and sigils drawn in charcoal and bone across wooden beams where candlelight shifted in unnatural ways, bending and swaying like it had its own breath, its own will. It had been too much, too strange, too her, and yet it had felt like he belonged there in the way a storm belongs to the sea.
And she had stood in the middle of it all, barefoot and still, watching him with that maddening, unnerving calm, waiting not for an explanation but for him to name what he was not yet ready to say, not forcing, not pushing, just being, her silence more patient than any comfort he'd ever been offered. His throat had been too tight, his fists clenched too hard, the words lodged behind his teeth like broken glass, but he had said them anyway, because something inside him knew this was the only place they could be spoken. Something is wrong with me, he had whispered, the words trembling with the weight of confession, of failure, of fear, and she had not winced, had not dismissed, had not responded with false reassurance—she had simply nodded, like it had all been written into the walls long before either of them arrived, like she had been waiting for him to find the courage to admit what she had already seen.
And in that silence, in the quiet, terrifying stillness of her acceptance, Theo had realized something that nearly brought him to his knees: he had been waiting for her, too.
He had expected as much, had expected the strangeness, had anticipated the signature oddity that seemed to cling to her like a second skin, had braced himself for the subtle wrongness that followed in her wake like smoke curling through half-lit hallways, but not like this—not this overwhelming, suffocating tide of things that should not have existed in the same room, in the same breath, in the same reality, not this strange, endless collection of objects that defied logic and chronology and the rules of the known world, not this quiet, watchful pressure that settled across his shoulders like a judgment passed by something ancient and unseen, something that saw without needing eyes and waited without moving. He had come prepared for the uncanny, for the peculiar shape of magic that hung around her like the scent of rain before a storm, for the otherworldly hum of her presence that made the air feel stretched and pulled at the seams of his thoughts—but nothing, not even the war, not even the memories that still burned like coals behind his eyes, had prepared him for the sheer weight of being in this space, for the immediate and inescapable feeling that the room itself was alive, not sentient in the way of minds and language, but breathing, pulsing, aware.
Her space was not a room in the traditional sense, not a chamber defined by walls and floorboards and furniture arranged with human purpose—it was a world entirely its own, a cultivated thing, a breathing construct shaped not with intention but with instinct, with vision, with hands that touched beyond the veil and brought back pieces of dreams, memories, futures, and folded them together into something both beautiful and terrifying. Every surface was cluttered with artifacts that defied explanation—trinkets that looked like they had been forged under moonlight, feathers arranged in impossible spirals, dried flowers plaited with ribbons that shifted shade in the candlelight, petals fragile and brittle but still clinging to their fading scents like they remembered what they once bloomed for. Jars lined the shelves, their glass fogged from age or intention, some packed with curls of parchment inked in languages he didn't recognize, some filled with things that shimmered like smoke or twitched like nerves, some containing nothing at all, or worse—something that looked like absence. Crystals glittered in impossible shades, casting shifting patterns on the walls that moved even when the light didn't, refracted pulses of color and shadow that breathed and trembled like heartbeat and breath, like something responding to him even as he tried not to look too closely.
And beneath all of it, under the books and jars and soft, flickering light, under the strange warmth and suffocating familiarity of a place he had never been before, were the symbols—painted, etched, scorched into the floorboards and the beams and the edges of shelves, some looping like vines, some jagged and sharp as broken bone, none of them recognizable but all of them wrong, not wrong like a mistake, but wrong like a door where there should be no door, like a mouth that whispered in a language no human had ever spoken, like a map leading nowhere but still promising to get you lost. They shimmered when he looked directly at them, pulsed when he tried to ignore them, crawled behind his eyes like something he could almost understand if only he allowed himself to go mad. They were written into the room the way nerves are written into a body, and standing on them felt like standing inside something's skin.
The books—dear god, the books—they were stacked in precarious towers, some threatening collapse with every breath he took, some leaning together like conspirators whispering secrets he wasn't meant to hear, some half-opened on desks and chairs as if she'd been reading them all at once in a fevered trance. Some were bound in leather worn down to near transparency, spines cracking like old joints, pages crumbling at the edges as if resisting being read. Some were scorched along the sides, fire-kissed and blackened, still smelling faintly of ash and something more pungent—something that reminded him of old magic and old sin. Others were so delicate he didn't dare step too close, certain that even the drag of his breath might reduce them to dust and memory. But none of that, not the symbols, not the jars, not even the impossible humming of the air itself, was what made the hair on the back of his neck rise, what made his gut coil like something inside him recognized the threat before his mind could name it.
It was the crows.
They were everywhere, not living, not breathing, but undeniably present, carved into the room like sentinels or warnings or watchers that did not sleep. Figurines perched on shelves and mantels, small and sharp-eyed, always angled to face inward. Paintings stretched across the beams above his head, done in thick, black strokes that bled into the wood grain, their inked eyes glossy in the candlelight. Stone carvings, brass castings, delicate paper silhouettes—all of them shaped like crows, all of them still, unmoving, but somehow seeing, and he felt them watching, not with sight but with a presence that pressed at the back of his mind, that curled its talons into his thoughts, that whispered we are here, we have always been here, we will see you through to the end. None of them were identical, but they shared something—an intention, a gravity, a kind of knowledge etched into their features that made him feel like prey. They were not decoration. They were not aesthetic. They were ritual. They were purpose. They meant something. And he didn't want to know what.
His throat had gone dry, parched as if the room had drawn the moisture out of him, as if it fed on discomfort the way fire feeds on air, and he swallowed hard, forcing his eyes away from the shapes that loomed just a moment too long, from the carvings that threatened to look back if he stared, from the weight of that unblinking silence. He tore his attention from the eyes that were not eyes and turned it toward the only person in the room, grounding himself in the one presence that made no sense but felt more solid than anything else here. She stood still, her body framed by flickering light, the shadows painting sharp lines across her face, the silver-blue of her eyes reflecting the dance of flame and something older, something deeper, something that flickered too steadily to be just light. Her expression was unreadable, not because it was blank, but because it was knowing, tilted just slightly as though she were listening to something beneath the sounds he could hear, waiting not with impatience but with a certainty that twisted his stomach tighter.
It was the tilt of her head, the silence that stretched between them like a held breath, the suggestion of a thousand words unspoken and already understood—and when she finally spoke, her voice low, steady, threading through the stillness like a spell being cast, he didn't flinch so much as freeze, because he had known she would speak eventually, had dreaded it, and yet the words still landed like iron against his chest. You're starting to see it now, aren't you? The breath left him in a sharp exhale, jaw clenching, hands curling into fists, nails digging into palms as if trying to tether himself to the ground, but her words were already seeping beneath his skin, into his ribs, his bones, the quietest parts of him that knew she was right.
He wanted to deny it, wanted to scoff, to deflect, to retreat into the safety of disbelief and mockery, to pretend her words were nonsense and he was still the man who needed things to be rational, provable, explainable, but something in him—something exhausted, frayed, unraveling—couldn't summon the lie. And so, when he spoke, his voice came out hoarse, thin, more breath than words. I don't know what I'm seeing. And she didn't respond the way anyone else would have, didn't grin with triumph or mock him for the admission, didn't press for more, didn't twist the opening into an opportunity—she only looked at him, something soft, almost sorrowful flickering across her features like she pitied him, like she mourned something already lost. And then, quieter than the rustle of candle flame, she said, That's what scares you the most.
And it hit him—not as a revelation, not as a new truth, but as something he had always known but refused to look at too closely, because she was right, because he didn't know, because he couldn't know, because whatever was happening to him was beyond the limits of language and logic, because the shadows were no longer just shadows, the voices no longer just tricks of memory, because the line between nightmare and reality was fading too fast, and in the spaces between his thoughts, something waited, something watched. He had spent years believing in the tangible, clinging to the visible, trusting only in what could be seen and broken and held—but this wasn't something he could dismantle or control. This was something older, something already entwined with him. And she had known. She had always known. Luna had not simply accepted this moment—she had anticipated it, waited for it, stood at the edge of it like a lighthouse waiting for the inevitable wreck. She had not wondered if it would happen, only when.
His throat tightened, breath shallow, limbs tense with the urge to run, but he did not move, did not look away, did not pretend. He stood rooted in place, and for the first time in years, for the first time since the war had taught him that faith was dangerous, that trust was lethal, that the unseen was to be scorned or killed—he found himself listening. And somewhere deep within, beneath the fear and the uncertainty, beneath the ruins of everything he thought he understood, was a quieter truth, terrifying in its simplicity: he might actually believe her.
~~~
The candle flickered between them, its warm glow painting their faces in swaying amber and gold, shadows dancing across the walls like silent witnesses to a conversation that hadn't fully begun, like sentries carved out of light and smoke holding their breath while something ancient stirred in the stillness. The flame wavered, as though caught in the inhale of something not quite present and not quite gone, bending slightly to one side before standing tall again, and for a long time—longer than it should have been comfortable—they sat without speaking, their silence thick and alive, not empty, not awkward, but watching, the way a forest watches when you step just a little too far off the path. There was something in it, in that silence, that pressed down on the space between them like a hand held just above a wound, a tension so precise it could have been crafted, a stillness that begged for breath and yet refused to release it.
Theo sat in the chair opposite her, the legs uneven and creaking faintly under his weight as if the very room were wary of him, his fingers resting against the rim of a glass he hadn't meant to take, hadn't wanted to hold, but now clutched in both hands as if the heat of the long-cooled tea might still anchor him to something safe, something familiar, something human. He hadn't planned to be here. He hadn't planned to stay. He certainly hadn't planned to speak. But the moment had unraveled around him like a tightly wound thread catching on a nail, a slow, unrelenting unraveling that left no room for denial, no pause long enough to rebuild the walls he usually kept so perfectly intact.
Luna had let him in—not just into the safehouse, not just into the warm, flickering circle of her candlelit sanctuary—but into something deeper, something older, something that curled beneath the surface of words and names and time. She had opened the door without question, without hesitation, without expectation, and in doing so had pulled him into her world without ever once reaching for him, had offered the quiet of her presence like an invitation written in breath and moonlight and whatever magic lingered in the edges of her strange, sacred space. Now here they were, breathing the same heavy air, sharing the same charged stillness, feeling the pulse of something rising between them that neither of them wanted to name first.
She watched him across the flickering glow, her gaze steady and unblinking, silver-blue irises catching the light in a way that made them look liquid, reflective, like they held more than just sight—like they were pools for divination, mirrors turned inward and outward all at once. There was no pressure in her stare, no challenge, no demand—but there was patience, and that was almost worse. She was waiting. Not for anything specific, not for a confession or a breakdown or a sudden, clear answer. She was waiting the way the sea waits for the tide, the way the moon waits for the eclipse, the way something inevitable waits for the person it has already chosen. She was waiting for him to arrive at the place he had already been walking toward for far too long.
He exhaled, the sound rough and barely audible, his shoulders rising then falling as if the motion alone might shed the tension that had anchored itself into his bones over the past few weeks, an ache that throbbed between his ribs and behind his eyes, an ache born not of injury but of something older, something unspoken, something gnawing at the edge of his awareness like teeth against stone. He adjusted his grip on the glass, the sound of skin against cool ceramic grounding him, the heat long gone but the shape of it still familiar enough to cling to. His mouth was dry. His throat burned. He hadn't meant to say anything. He had planned to sit in silence, to exist in the edges of her world without inviting its gaze fully onto him. But the words, when they came, fell from his mouth without ceremony, low and hoarse, weighted with too much and too little all at once.
"Something's following me."
The words landed with the weight of a bell tolling at midnight, not loud, not sudden, but final, the kind of sound that reverberates through the bones long after it fades from the air, the kind of truth that doesn't echo but stays, crawling into corners and settling like ash. The room seemed to tilt with it, not visibly, not physically, but inwardly—some unseen axis shifting beneath their feet as the candle's flame curved to one side, the shadows shuddering along the wall, the silence growing deeper. Luna didn't move. Didn't blink. Didn't recoil in the way people always did when he said too much. She didn't tell him he was paranoid. Didn't try to laugh it off. Didn't reach for logic like a shield, didn't offer him grounding facts or soothing platitudes or any of the neat little compartments that other people tried to stuff the unexplainable into so they could sleep at night.
Instead, she tilted her head, just slightly, the way owls do when they hear something beneath the floor, when they know something is crawling that hasn't yet shown itself, and her voice, when it came, was soft and curious, but not surprised, not even particularly alarmed. "What does it feel like?" The question wasn't clinical. It wasn't diagnostic. It was something else—gentler, deeper, a thread of connection that pulled taut between them and dared him to follow it, dared him to unravel the thing curled tight in his chest.
He laughed—not because it was funny, not because there was anything remotely amusing about any of this, but because it was either that or scream, and the laugh that came out of him was sharp and dry and so hollow it sounded like it belonged to someone else. He shook his head, pressing his thumb and forefinger against his temple, trying to rub the chaos out of his skull, trying to force his thoughts into order, trying to find a starting point that didn't sound like madness. He had tried to make sense of it. He had tried so hard to keep it in the realm of the explainable. The flickers in his peripheral vision—just shadows. The cold sweats at night—just nightmares. The whispers—just drafts and nerves and the echo of too many sleepless nights. The scratches that appeared on his arms—sleepwalking, maybe. Something he did to himself. Except he never woke with blood beneath his nails. Never felt the pain until he saw the marks. Never remembered the act of harm, only the consequence.
He wanted to say it was stress. Wanted to say it was grief. Wanted to say it was guilt. But it wasn't stopping. And it wasn't going away. And every time he closed his eyes, it felt closer. His voice dropped, his throat tightening around the honesty, his fingers clenched too tightly around the glass now for comfort. "Like I'm never alone."
The air between them seemed to still even more, the candle bowing again as Luna shifted slightly, her fingers brushing lightly against the metal base, her touch so faint it looked accidental, but the flame responded anyway, bending toward her as though it knew her, as though it recognized its mistress. She didn't flinch. Didn't frown. Didn't break eye contact. Her voice was soft, but final. "You aren't."
The words landed like a slap across the back of his neck, and his entire body tensed, shoulders drawn back, the glass in his hands creaking faintly under the strain of his grip, his jaw tightening as his gaze snapped to hers. "I need you to stop saying things like that," he said, his voice low, sharp, more afraid than angry, and he hated that she would know the difference. But she only hummed, not mocking, not dismissive, but thoughtful, curious, her eyes scanning his face as if reading the words he hadn't yet said, as if peeling back his skin with nothing but patience and presence. "Why?" she asked, her voice patient and unyielding. "Because it makes it real?"
His jaw clenched harder, his shoulders burning, his pulse a deafening roar in his ears, and yes, that was exactly it, because if it was real, then it wasn't over, then it never had been, then everything he told himself he buried had only ever been sleeping, and now it had woken up and remembered his name. It meant he had failed. It meant the past was not the past. It meant the nightmare still had teeth. And she—she had known it would come to this. She had always known.
"I just need to know what the fuck is happening to me." His voice cracked at the edges, not with emotion but with exhaustion, with the sheer weight of pretending he could still carry this alone. Luna studied him, long and slow, as if measuring something that couldn't be measured, and when she finally spoke, it wasn't a revelation, it wasn't an epiphany—it was confirmation. "You left something unfinished."
The chill that spread down his spine didn't feel metaphorical. It felt like fingers. Cold, bone-thin, pressing down along each vertebra like they were counting. His breath hitched, his hands twitching against the glass, and he blinked slowly, trying to stay grounded, trying to stay here. "I killed him." The words were sharper than he meant, defensive and brittle and thin as a cracked blade, and for the first time, he wasn't sure he believed them.
Luna didn't argue. She didn't correct. She simply watched him, her voice nearly a whisper, but steady, unwavering. "You killed his body." And the room shifted.
The candle dimmed for a heartbeat too long. The shadows in the corners stretched just slightly further than they should. The hair on the back of his neck rose. He didn't realize he had gripped the table until his knuckles began to ache. "That's the same fucking thing," he ground out, as if saying it forcefully would make it true, but Luna only gave him that look—that soft, sorrowful, maddeningly certain look. "Is it?"
Something twisted in his gut, low and sick and rising. Something primal. Something afraid. And still, he stayed. Still, he watched her. And when he pulled back—not in body, but in the smallest, subtlest ways—she let him. She didn't reach for him. Didn't follow. Didn't try to pull him closer. She simply sat, quiet and unmovable, letting the silence stretch between them like a thread waiting to be tied or cut. The flame between them trembled.
And when he finally looked at her again, when their eyes met over the flickering candlelight, the air between them heavy with smoke and fear and something else he wasn't ready to name, he knew—she wasn't going to let him run from this. And gods help him, he wasn't sure if he wanted to anymore.
~~~
He joined Blaise for breakfast, not out of desire or habit or anything resembling routine comfort, but because hunger had finally eclipsed the exhaustion dragging at his bones, because the safehouse kitchen, for all its peeling walls and flickering sconces, at least offered the illusion of normalcy when the world beyond it refused to grant him even a moment of peace, but the second he stepped inside, before he had even reached for a mug or glanced toward the bread basket or decided whether the headache pulsing behind his eyes was worth confronting, Blaise was already talking—already speaking in that low, honey-drenched voice of his, one that always hovered somewhere between arrogance and affection, only this time it was softened in a way that made Theo's teeth ache, speaking not of the mission, not of the weather, not of strategy or theory or any of the things they used to fill the quiet with—but of her, of Ginny, of the curve of her smile and the rasp of her laugh and the way she slept with one hand tucked under her cheek like a child, of the way she walked barefoot through the house without fear or hesitation, as though the floorboards would part for her if she asked, and the way she tilted her head when she listened, like every word that came out of Blaise's mouth was something worth keeping, something worth treasuring, and the more he spoke, the more obvious it became—not just obvious, but undeniable—that Blaise was in love with her in the kind of way that hurt to witness, the kind of way that made the air in the room grow thick and metallic, that made everything around him feel sharper, harsher, as if love could be weaponized just by being too present, too sincere, too overwhelming in its unfiltered expression, and Theo, sitting across from him, watching the flicker of warmth in Blaise's otherwise unreadable eyes, felt a tension settle in his jaw, a slow, bitter twist in his gut, not because he envied it—he didn't, not really—but because he couldn't bear to hear it, couldn't bear to be in the presence of something that pure, that raw, that whole, when all he had were pieces and shadows and the quiet knowledge that some people were simply not built for that kind of thing, and so he didn't want to participate, didn't want to add anything to the conversation, didn't want to nod or smirk or make any of the expected noises of camaraderie or approval, because the sound of Blaise talking about Ginny—about the softness of her, the rightness of her, the way she made his entire world tilt on its axis—was a kind of misery Theo hadn't braced himself for, a reminder that some people still had something to lose, and he, Theo, with all his ghosts and all his grief and all his unspoken fears, had nothing left to offer but silence.
Blaise, who had been swirling the last of his coffee with far more flourish than necessary, a self-satisfied smirk already tugging at the corner of his mouth as if he'd been waiting for the perfect moment to shift the conversation from his own embarrassingly heartfelt monologue about Ginny's freckles and her laugh and the way she pronounced the word chimney like she was secretly mocking the English language, finally leaned back in his chair with a dramatic stretch and an exaggerated sigh, his voice a low drawl soaked in amusement and mischief as he said, "But enough about my baby girl," the words punctuated with a kind of possessive warmth that made Theo's stomach twist just slightly—not in jealousy, but in something colder, older, more worn out and reluctant—"what is going on between you and Loony?" and the way he said it, the particular inflection on Loony, wasn't cruel, wasn't mocking in the way others said it, but was still irreverent enough to grate under Theo's skin, to drag its claws down the inside of his ribs with that too-familiar scrape of irritation he couldn't quite explain, because Blaise never meant harm, never intended insult, never wielded language without knowing exactly what it would do, and yet Theo's response came sharp and fast, before he could wrap it in anything more diplomatic, his tone clipped and colder than the air outside the window, "Do not call her that," and though Blaise arched an eyebrow in that way of his—half surprise, half smug victory—he didn't interrupt, didn't push, just watched, like a man who had baited a trap and was now simply waiting to see what would crawl out of it.
Theo rubbed the back of his neck, his eyes fixed on a spot just past Blaise's shoulder, something inconsequential like a crack in the wooden beam or the way the sunlight hit the floorboards in a narrow, golden slit, trying to ground himself in the simplicity of observation, in the mechanical act of distraction, before sighing through his nose and muttering, "Nothing is going on," because what else was he supposed to say, what else could he say, when even he didn't know what was happening between them, between him and Luna, between the way her voice lingered in his thoughts longer than it should, the way her presence settled in his bones like warmth after a fever, the way he found himself seeking her out in moments of silence, of panic, of aching solitude, not because he needed answers—though perhaps he did—but because something about her made the chaos in his head quiet just enough for him to think.
"We're just friends... I guess," he added after a pause, but even as the words left his mouth, they felt hollow, untrue, not because the friendship wasn't real—it was, achingly so—but because whatever had begun to spin itself between them wasn't just friendship, wasn't just the familiar comfort of companionship or shared space, wasn't just late-night tea in her candlelit room or the way she listened without blinking when he said things he hadn't even meant to share, when he muttered confessions under his breath like curses or warnings and she met them with stillness instead of pity. It wasn't just friendship when her presence lingered long after she'd left the room, when her voice echoed in his head in moments she hadn't even spoken, when the memory of her fingertips brushing against his arm during a passing moment in the hallway sent a shiver through him hours later for no logical reason at all. But how could he explain any of that to Blaise, to the man who had found love and claimed it without hesitation, who had seen what he wanted in Ginny Weasley and simply decided it would be his—how could he explain the terrifying vulnerability of not knowing, of standing on the edge of something vast and wordless and ancient and not being sure whether it was a sanctuary or a cliff?
Blaise gave him a look, one of those frustratingly knowing ones, all dark eyes and tilted grin, a smirk playing at the edge of his lips like he was already writing a story in his head, a romantic tragedy or a dark comedy or perhaps both, and said, "You guess? Mate, you've spent the last ten minutes looking like you're about to bite the inside of your cheek clean through just thinking about her name. That's not friendship, that's foreplay." Theo groaned, dragging a hand down his face, but the worst part was that Blaise wasn't entirely wrong, because the moment Luna entered a room, everything shifted, not just the air, but him, something inside him recalibrating without his consent, some internal compass turning toward her like she was north and he hadn't realized how lost he'd been until she showed up with soft words and stranger truths and made him believe—for a fraction of a second—that maybe he wasn't broken beyond repair.
But he wasn't going to say that, not to Blaise, not to anyone, not out loud, because putting that kind of thing into words felt like a spell, like the moment he named it, it would vanish or change or worse—matter—and so instead, he leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, eyes shuttered, and muttered, "Just drop it, Blaise,"
but Blaise only chuckled, low and amused and maddeningly smug, the kind of laugh that said I'll drop it for now, but I'm not done with this conversation, and the worst part was that Theo knew it too, because Blaise might be a lovesick idiot, but he wasn't blind, and he sure as hell wasn't wrong.
And still, despite everything—the denial, the sharpness, the refusal to name the thing coiled in his chest—Theo couldn't stop thinking about the way Luna had looked at him the night before, in the quiet between questions and confessions, her eyes like the reflection of stars in a pool too deep to measure, like she already knew the end of the story and wasn't afraid to live through it anyway.