The safe house was no longer a place of stillness; it pulsed with frantic life the moment they arrived, its walls thrumming with the rush of magic and panic, the very air seeming to tighten around them like a vice. The wards flared briefly as the group crossed the threshold, crackling with the residue of their flight, and then closed again behind them with a low, thunderous hum. Inside, the atmosphere shifted, the tension settling in thick and suffocating, draping itself across every surface, every breath, every glance exchanged. The unspoken fear was palpable—hovering like stormclouds too heavy to release rain, waiting instead to break in other, quieter ways. No one dared to exhale fully, as if doing so might invite collapse.
Pansy moved first, adrenaline her only fuel now, her body caught somewhere between urgency and numbness. There was no hesitation. Her thoughts came in jagged flashes—blood, Luna, hands shaking, don't drop anything, don't fall apart—but her hands themselves were eerily steady, guided by muscle memory and something fierce coiled at the base of her spine. She flicked her wand sharply, and a bucket materialized in a corner with a quiet snap of displaced air. The water that filled it was cool, clean, but somehow even the sight of it made her nauseous, as though it mocked how little she could really cleanse from what had just happened. Her heart thudded loud in her chest, a drumbeat of panic that refused to settle, but she forced herself to push past it, to do what needed doing.
She turned on her heel and yanked open the supply cabinet with more force than necessary, snatching the cleanest towel she could find and immediately plunging it into the water, her jaw clenched as she wrung it out with trembling fingers. Without waiting, without asking permission, she dropped to her knees in front of Luna and brought the damp cloth to her face. Blood had dried in streaks down her cheeks, caked into the hollows of her throat, spattered like war paint across her collarbones. Dirt clung to her lashes. Her usually serene expression was absent, replaced by the blank, unblinking stare of someone who had seen too much and was still somewhere else entirely.
Pansy pressed the cloth to her skin with as much gentleness as she could manage, though her own breathing was shallow now, forced and uneven. Luna flinched under the touch, her shoulders jerking slightly, and Pansy stilled for a heartbeat before continuing, more carefully this time. Her hand tightened reflexively, her fingers digging into the towel, not out of anger but out of a desperation she didn't yet have the words for. She needed to clean her. She needed to see Luna's face beneath the blood. She needed to do something , because if Luna wasn't okay—if she fractured completely—Pansy wasn't entirely sure what would be left of herself on the other side.
The towel turned red almost immediately, the water bleeding from it in thin crimson rivulets that slid down Luna's jaw and soaked into Pansy's sleeves. She didn't react. She only conjured another, her wand twitching slightly as the spell activated, her eyes never leaving Luna's face. The soiled cloth was tossed aside without ceremony, joining the growing pile of ruined fabric at her knees.
Again, she wiped.
Again, the white towel stained, the color blooming like ink spreading through paper.
And again.
And again.
She scrubbed as if repetition alone might undo reality—as if by wiping the blood away over and over again, she could erase what had happened in the clearing, could banish the image of rope against throat and limbs that dangled too still in the moonlight. Each pass of the cloth was more frantic than the last, not cleansing so much as begging , trying to pull Luna back from whatever ghost-filled place her mind had fled to. The silence between them pulsed with dread, and though Pansy's movements were swift and practiced, the tremble in her off-hand betrayed her—tiny, betraying shudders that crept into her bones and wouldn't stop.
"Luna," she said suddenly, sharply, her voice slicing through the heavy air like a blade against flesh, unforgiving and edged in panic. "We need to prep for an operation. Now. "
Something flickered behind Luna's glassy gaze, and she turned with a speed that was almost inhuman, her blood-smeared face unreadable but suddenly aware . "We need the medical room prepped in sixty seconds," she said, her tone devoid of anything soft, her voice clipped and edged in iron. It was not the dreamy cadence of the woman who once spoke to shadows and starlight. This was not the Luna who made madness sound like poetry. This Luna stood at the edge of a battlefield in her bloodied boots, looking war in the eye without blinking. "Hermione, sterilize the equipment. Pansy, I need every healing draught, sorted by potency and use. We need Blood-Replenishing Potions in bulk , and don't stop until you've found everything. "
The commands cracked through the air like thunder, and in their wake came movement—instinctive, immediate, almost violent in its urgency.
Pansy didn't walk. She ran , bolting toward the storage cabinets with the speed of someone whose entire future was bleeding out two rooms away. Her breath came in shallow, panicked bursts, but she barely felt it—barely felt anything as she tore open drawers and flung them wide, her fingers yanking vials off shelves in a blur of motion that was more survival reflex than thought. The clinking of glass filled the room, rapid and discordant, echoing like bones rattling in a crypt. Her hands trembled harder now, the weight of what could be slipping through her fingers with every second that passed too loud, too sharp, too real .
"Blood Replenishing Potion… Wiggenweld… Essence of Dittany," she chanted under her breath, not calmly, not methodically, but like a woman holding off madness with the sound of her own voice. She lined them up in harsh, regimented rows, color-coded and alphabetized out of necessity, not control—because one slip, one delay, one wrong bottle , and someone they loved might never wake again.
Just across the wall, Hermione worked with a ferocity that bordered on feverish. Her wand sliced the air in precise, brutal arcs, each sterilization spell sparking violently as it collided with metal and stone, her incantations muttered with the rhythm of someone reciting scripture before a storm.
"Scourgify. Purifico. Reparo."
Again. And again. And again.
She repeated the words like a mantra, not because she needed to—but because if she stopped speaking them, if she let her mind drift even for a second, it would land squarely on the image she couldn't unsee: Draco, blood in his mouth, his skin grey and cooling, lying still on a cursed floor while everything inside her screamed . Her hands were steady, but her thoughts were unraveling, fraying at the seams with every blink.
And all around them, the safehouse pulsed like a living thing—magic crackling along the walls, air thick with blood and spells and fear, the scent of iron and fire and skin still lingering. This was not a home anymore.
It was a trauma ward.
The metallic tang of blood still hung in the air, clinging to the stone walls like a curse. It was faint now, diluted by distance and adrenaline, but it lingered just enough to twist Hermione's stomach into knots. It coated the back of her throat with a coppery film, haunted the edges of her senses like a memory that refused to fade. She could taste it with every breath, could feel it woven into the fibers of her robes, like it had soaked into her skin. The surgical instruments gleamed on the counter, rows of them lined with sterile precision, their sharp edges catching the candlelight and throwing tiny flashes against the walls. They looked too clean. Too polished. As though they hadn't been used to cut flesh before. But Hermione knew better. They didn't wait passively—they anticipated , like executioner's blades, hungry for the moment their work would begin.
Luna stood in the doorway like the eye of a hurricane, eerily calm in the center of chaos, the flickering light casting long shadows across her blood-smeared face. Her presence was quiet but commanding, her posture rigid, her gaze sweeping the room with methodical intent. She saw everything—every crack in the routine, every heartbeat slightly too fast. She wasn't cold, but she was clinical, stripped of softness now, as though she had shed it like skin in the clearing.
"Pansy," she said, voice like steel wrapped in silk, "check the expiration on the Blood-Replenishing Potion. It has to be fresh."
"Already done," Pansy shot back from across the room, not turning from the table where she stood sorting vials with ruthless efficiency. Her voice was sharp, short, the edge of it fraying under the weight of her pulse hammering in her ears. Her hands moved faster than her thoughts, as if if she paused too long she might be crushed by the weight of the stillness pressing in from all sides.
Luna's eyes shifted. "Hermione. Towels. Gauze. Third cabinet—go."
Hermione was already moving before the command was finished, yanking the doors open with a violent tug, the rusted hinges screeching in protest. She ripped the supplies free, the sound of tearing fabric splitting the silence like a scream muffled beneath layers of stone. Her hands shook, but she kept moving, stuffing gauze into a basin, pressing towels against her chest as if they might keep her anchored. "How bad is it going to be?" she asked, her voice breathless, brittle, as though she already knew the answer but couldn't bear the silence that would follow if she didn't speak.
Luna didn't answer at first. Her fingers ran absently over the towel in her hand, slow and repetitive, the tension in her grip tightening until the fabric twisted beneath her palms. She stared through it, like she could already see the blood that would soon soak through. When she finally spoke, the word was soft, but it hit like a hammer. "Bad."
The simplicity of it made it worse.
No comfort. No euphemism. Just truth.
Her eyes flicked up, not to meet anyone's gaze, but to the empty space in the center of the room where bodies would soon be laid out—where decisions would be made that couldn't be undone. "We need to be ready for anything," she added, and the way her voice faltered on the last word made Hermione's spine stiffen.
The weight of those words settled across them like a burial shroud, thick and suffocating, draping over their shoulders and winding around their throats. It didn't matter how brightly the room was lit—shadows clung to every corner, and every breath felt just slightly too loud.
Pansy leaned against the wall just outside the operating room, her arms crossed so tightly over her chest they trembled from the strain. The cold stone at her back offered no comfort, only a reminder that this place had seen too much death already. Her fingers tapped out an erratic rhythm against her sleeves as she stared into the flickering torchlight, her jaw clenched, every instinct in her body screaming to move, to act , to do something , but there was nothing more to be done—not yet. Waiting was the worst kind of torment. It was stillness laced with helplessness, and it was eating her alive from the inside.
Across the room, Luna hadn't moved. She stood perfectly still, the bloodstained towel clenched in her fists as if it were the only thing keeping her grounded. Her face was unreadable—blank, severe—but her eyes betrayed her. They shimmered, silver and glassy, wide with fear, with helpless rage, with something that looked too much like prayer. She didn't speak, didn't blink. But her eyes pleaded with whatever gods or ghosts might still be listening not to take him. Not this time.
Hermione paced, her feet dragging slightly with each uneven step as if the air itself had turned heavy. She moved like she couldn't bear stillness, like if she stopped her body, her mind would catch up—and she couldn't allow that. Her fingers curled and uncurled restlessly, the muscles in her jaw twitching with barely restrained emotion. She wanted to scream. She wanted to hex something, destroy something, undo everything. But all she could do was move, count the seconds, and keep her back to the door, because the moment she saw them carried in, broken and unconscious, something inside her would shatter.
Time lost meaning as minutes stretched into something longer, colder, heavier than time. A silence had taken the room, but it wasn't still—it hummed with dread, with magic held just under the skin, with grief that had not yet been permitted to breathe. It was the silence before a scream. The silence before the final blow lands.
The silence before the world ends— or doesn't.
The fragile stillness of the safehouse shattered like glass beneath a boot as the first crack of Apparition tore through the air. It was sharp, violent—too loud in the breathless quiet that had swallowed the house whole. Then came a second. A third. A fourth. The magic reverberated off the stone walls in a series of concussive bursts that sounded like gunfire, each one snapping through the silence with the urgency of catastrophe. It was not the gentle arrival of guests. It was the sound of something arriving from the edge of death.
All three women froze where they stood, as if turned to stone by the noise. Towels fell from Hermione's arms. Pansy's fingers twitched at her sides. Luna's breath caught in her throat.
For one harrowing moment, no one breathed.
It was Luna who moved first, her silver eyes widening in an instant before she took off like a spell had ignited beneath her feet. She moved fast, not with grace but with raw, breathless desperation, her boots skidding slightly as she rounded the corner. Pansy shoved off the wall with so much force she nearly slipped, her heart punching against her ribcage like it was trying to claw its way out. And Hermione—Hermione trembled all over, her limbs slow to respond, as if her body feared what her heart already knew was coming. Her throat tightened around a silent plea— please, let them be alive —as her legs finally remembered how to run.
The hallway stretched before them like a gauntlet, dimly lit by guttering candlelight, the shadows deepening with every step. And then, at the far end, shapes emerged from the darkness.
Draco was the first to appear, stepping through the gloom with the rigid, lethal grace of a man carved from stormclouds. His expression was unreadable, all sharp angles and ice, but it wasn't his face that stopped them in their tracks—it was his arms. In them, cradled like something too precious to be broken but too broken to be precious, was Blaise. His body was limp, heavy, motionless, his head lolling against Draco's shoulder. Blood streaked his jaw, smeared across the corner of his mouth and down his throat like war paint. His eyes were shut. His skin had lost all its warmth. And yet—his chest rose. Barely. But it rose.
Behind him came Titus, broad shoulders bent beneath Theo's sagging weight. The younger man was draped over him like a lifeless doll, one arm dangling at an awkward angle, his robes torn, blood crusted in the creases of his clothing and across the knuckles of one hand. His face, usually composed, was almost unrecognizable—swollen, bruised, pale as wax. A gash ran along his cheekbone. His eyes were open but unfocused, blinking slowly as though waking from a nightmare he couldn't quite shake.
And then, trailing after them, came Neville and Ginny.
Both looked like shadows of themselves. Ginny's hair was wild, her face drawn and ghost-pale, her arms streaked with soot and blood that was not her own. Her eyes were vacant, sunken, like something vital had been scooped out of her chest and left bleeding behind in that clearing. Neville looked older, heavier somehow, as if the act of holding everything together had aged him in minutes instead of years. His clothes were torn at the sleeves, his wand clenched so tightly in his fist his knuckles had gone white.
The room tilted.
For Hermione, the world pitched sideways, her hands reaching out instinctively to grab the doorframe as her knees nearly gave beneath the weight of relief colliding with terror. They were alive. They were alive. But they were broken, battered, half-here and half-gone, and the sight of them like that— her Draco, Ginny's Blaise, Luna's Theo—was enough to make the air feel too thick to breathe.
Something deep in the house groaned—wood settling or magic shifting—but it sounded too much like grief. Too much like the last gasp of something sacred unraveling.
Hermione barely registered her own body in motion, as though her limbs belonged to someone else entirely—some reflexive version of herself that knew what to do while her mind still lagged several seconds behind, stunned by the raw sight of them, the smell of blood, the tremor of magic still clinging to their skin. Her feet moved instinctively, each step heavy and soundless all at once, and before she could think, before her brain could process the devastation unraveling before her, her arms were already wrapping around Ginny, pulling her into the safety of her chest the instant she crossed the threshold. Ginny didn't fall—she folded , crumpling into Hermione like a house collapsing inward, all scaffolding lost, her body trembling so violently that it rattled Hermione down to the bone. And then came the tears, hot and sudden, soaking through the fabric of Hermione's shirt in great shuddering waves, a desperate, wordless sound escaping her that broke open something raw in the space between them.
Hermione held her tighter, her own arms trembling now, one hand curling into the mess of Ginny's hair as she pressed her lips against her friend's temple and whispered something—words that were meant to be comfort, but felt hollow even as they passed through her lips. "It's okay," she murmured, her voice catching around the shape of that lie. "They're here now. They'll be okay." But as she said it, she felt the words fall apart between them, flimsy and thin as ash, dissolving into the heavy air. Please , her mind screamed beneath the quiet, please let that be true , because if it wasn't, if they had only been given their bodies back to lose them again, she didn't know if any of them would survive it.
Across the room, Pansy didn't waste a second on words. Words were too slow. Useless. Dead things. She moved with wild, reckless speed, her boots skidding across the stone floor, her heart hammering with such brutal force that it echoed in her ears like a war drum. The sound of her blood roared louder than thought, louder than reason. She saw Neville and nothing else. And then she was there , crashing into him with the momentum of every fear that had clawed its way through her since the moment Luna screamed his name through the Floo. He barely had time to brace himself before her body hit his, her arms wrapping around his middle so tightly it bordered on painful, her hands fisting into the fabric of his shirt with such desperation that it looked like she was holding herself upright through him alone.
Neville didn't hesitate. He didn't even speak at first. He simply reached for her like he'd been drowning and had finally touched shore, cupping her face with both hands, his fingers slipping into her hair, grounding her, framing her like something sacred. And then he kissed her— not with heat, not with lust, but with the kind of desperate, anchoring need that came only after watching the people you love slip through your fingers. His mouth moved against hers with a shaky kind of reverence, as though he couldn't believe she was real, and her grip on him tightened until her nails dug into his shoulders through the fabric of his robes.
"They're alive," he breathed against her lips when they finally broke apart, his forehead falling against hers, their breath mingling in the scant inches of space between them. "They're alive." The words were thick with disbelief and relief and something unspoken that neither of them could afford to name.
And that's when Pansy broke.
The sob tore out of her like a wound reopening, guttural and high, shaking her entire frame as her arms slipped up around his neck and she buried her face in the curve of his shoulder. "I was so scared, Nevie," she choked, the nickname cracking through her like glass under pressure, her voice a strangled thing barely able to find shape. "I thought—I thought I'd lose you too." She didn't realize how tightly she was holding him until he winced, but she didn't loosen her grip. She couldn't. If she let go, he might disappear, might vanish like a dream, and she couldn't bear that—not now, not ever.
Neville's breath shuddered through his chest as he held her, grounding her with hands that remained impossibly gentle despite the tremors moving through them both. "I know," he whispered, his voice tight and thick, the syllables uneven with the effort of staying calm. "But I'm here. We're all here. And Hermione and Luna—" he turned as he spoke, his gaze landing on Hermione still wrapped around Ginny, both of them locked in a quiet hurricane of grief and relief—"they're going to fix this. We'll get through it. We always do."
But even as he said it, the room didn't lift. The air stayed thick, the silence oppressive. The magic lingering in the atmosphere had the feel of something not yet done. Something unresolved. Because not everyone was speaking. Not everyone had moved .
Draco and Titus still stood in the doorway like statues carved from shadow, unmoving, silent, their bodies rigid with the weight of what they'd carried—not just the men they'd brought home, but the experience itself. The blood was still wet on their clothes. Their hands were stained to the wrist. Their faces were unreadable, but their stillness screamed what their mouths wouldn't yet say. Something had happened out there. Something worse than they were prepared to explain.
Only Ginny saw it—the single tear that carved a slow, glistening path down Draco's cheek, catching the flickering light as it fell, silent and unannounced. No gasp. No sob. Just that one sliver of grief slipping free from a man who, by all rights, was not supposed to break. Because Draco Malfoy didn't cry. He didn't fracture. He didn't bleed where anyone could see it. He wore pain like armor, turned loss into distance, kept his jaw clenched and his spine straight and his silence sharp enough to wound.
But something had shattered.
And in that tear—just one—was the entire weight of it. The horror, the blood, the helplessness of standing beneath that gallows and thinking, for a moment too long, that they were already dead. The images wouldn't stop playing behind his eyes—Blaise's head lolling like a marionette's, Theo's bruised lips parting in shallow, labored breaths, their bodies too still, too cold, too close. Ginny had seen this expression before, once before, when Draco had stood in this very house with Hermione's blood still drying beneath his fingernails, his face white with the terror of nearly losing her. And now, here he was again—his hands stained, his shoulders bowed under a weight no one could help him carry—and this time it was Blaise and Theo lying broken behind him.
She didn't say anything. She couldn't. Because what could be said in the face of a grief that kept repeating itself, over and over, until it became part of your marrow?
How much more can we take?
The thought wasn't a scream. It was a whisper, buried so deep in Ginny's chest it barely formed words. It was a tremor in her bones, a tremble behind her ribs, an ache in the silence between each breath.
Luna's voice, even and unwavering, broke through the heavy quiet like the edge of a scalpel slicing through flesh—not cruelly, but with clinical precision, cutting through grief to reach the necessity beneath it. Calm but unyielding, she stepped forward and reclaimed her role not as the ethereal observer, not as the whimsical woman they all knew from a different lifetime, but as a healer—sharp, grounded, and terrifying in her focus. "Hermione and I will take care of them," she said, each word shaped with clarity and command, "but we need to be sanitized first. We can't afford mistakes. Pansy, go wash up. Neville, stay with Ginny. Keep her steady."
There was no room for protest in her voice, but still, Pansy faltered for half a second, her feet refusing to obey even as her brain screamed logic. She didn't want to move. Didn't want to put even a single breath of space between herself and Theo, not after what she'd seen—after what they'd all almost lost. Her body screamed to stay, to reach for him, to hover and protect and watch . But Neville, still grounded despite the panic behind his eyes, gave her hand one final squeeze before gently uncurling her fingers from his. The motion wasn't forceful, just firm, and for a moment she hated him for it—hated that he was right.
"Go," he said softly, but there was something final in the way he said it, like he was trying to speak belief into her. "We need to let them work."
Her breath caught in her throat, her stomach lurching with a wave of sickness that had nothing to do with blood and everything to do with fear. Still, she nodded—jerkily, almost mechanically—and forced her feet to turn, her body to obey, even as every instinct in her rebelled against the growing distance between her and Theo's motionless form. She had to trust Luna. Had to trust Hermione. Had to believe this wasn't the end.
But Ginny didn't move.
She stood like a statue, frozen not from shock, but from something colder, heavier, more insidious. Her body remained tucked against Neville's side, but her mind was somewhere else entirely. Her eyes—burning and dry, past the point of tears—were locked on Draco with the kind of intensity that could cut stone. She barely heard Neville's quiet reassurances murmured against her ear, the way he pulled her closer like he could physically shield her from what they'd witnessed, from what they might still lose. Because nothing could touch her in that moment. Not warmth. Not reason. Not comfort.
Because she knew that look.
She recognized it too well—too intimately.
It was the look of someone who had returned from the edge, only to realize they hadn't brought everyone back with them. That vacant, haunted stare. That rigid jaw clenched so tight it could shatter teeth. That fragile stillness disguising a soul unraveling quietly beneath the skin. It was the look of a survivor burdened by the weight of breath—of still being here when others might not be.
It was guilt, pure and corrosive.
Not for what he had done, but for what he couldn't do.
And so Ginny, quiet now, no longer sobbing but suspended in the hollow space between devastation and numbness, reached out. Not with desperation. Not with force. But with something softer, more human. A slow, trembling hand extended toward Draco's, her fingers brushing the back of his as if asking permission to make the contact complete.
He didn't pull away.
But he didn't move either.
He simply stood there, unmoving, frozen in the doorway like a relic—his hand resting in hers, barely responding, as if the warmth of touch hadn't reached him yet. And still he stared, eyes unfocused, face expressionless, while the chaos of triage whirled behind him and the woman who had touched his hand tried, wordlessly, to tether him back to the living.
~~~~~~
The moment they stepped into the surgical room, the door thudding shut behind them like the final beat of a war drum, the world seemed to shrink. The outside noise—crying, murmuring, the rattling shuffle of pacing footsteps—vanished behind thick stone and locking charms, leaving only the harsh scent of blood and antiseptic clinging to the cold air, a mix so sharp and acrid it hit the back of Pansy's throat like smoke. The overhead torches flickered low, their flames casting a sickly glow on the white-tiled floor that was already stained with crimson, and for a split second, she faltered, the nausea curling low in her stomach threatening to rise.
But then something shifted—not in the room, but in them.
With no words, no ceremony, the women who entered that room ceased to be wives, or lovers, or friends. They became soldiers, surgeons, healers carved out of trauma and necessity, women who had stood too many times at the intersection of hope and ruin. Their hands, still trembling with fear a heartbeat ago, steadied. Their eyes sharpened. Every breath became deliberate. They had done this before—too many times. And the price of hesitation had always been loss.
On the surgical beds, Theo and Blaise looked more like corpses than men. Their bodies lay still, twisted into unnatural angles that defied peaceful unconsciousness. Deep lacerations carved grotesque paths across their torsos, angry and dark against pallid flesh. The bruises around their throats were blackened, swollen, and unmistakably shaped by rope. Their wrists bore ligature marks, blistered and raw. There was something hollow in the way their limbs hung off the edge of the tables—too limp, too loose, as though life had only recently crawled back into their chests. It wasn't just the blood. It was the silence of their stillness that spoke louder than anything. They hadn't simply been attacked. They had been punished.
Luna moved first, not with softness, but with a chilling kind of efficiency. The etherealness that so often hovered around her was stripped away, leaving behind something steel-forged and terrifying in its purpose. She approached Theo like a surgeon surveying a patient on a battlefield, her eyes scanning his body not with fear but calculation. "We need to work quickly," she said, and her voice, though calm, had lost all its dreamlike edge—it was sharp now, clinical, threaded with grim authority. "They're both critical. Hermione, start stabilizing Blaise—his vitals are tanking. Pansy, Theo's airway is compromised—focus there first. Keep him breathing."
The command hit Pansy like a slap. Her feet moved before her thoughts caught up, knees locking as she dropped beside Theo's bed and forced herself to look, really look, at him—not as her friend, not as someone she had teased a thousand times over drinks, but as a body broken beyond recognition that she had been tasked to bring back. For a breath, she couldn't breathe. Then she pressed a hand over her mouth, gagging against the burn in her throat, forcing it down. She could not lose control. Not here. Not now.
Breathe, Parkinson. Focus. Save him.
With shaking fingers, she grabbed a sterilized cloth and dabbed gently at the dried blood crusted around his lips, his breath hitching weakly against the contact. Her wand moved next, gliding over his chest in smooth, practiced arcs, scanning beneath the bruises and swelling. What she saw made her blood run cold. The diagnostic spell glowed faintly red across his ribcage—multiple fractures, several cracked clean through. There was fluid shimmering in his lungs like dark water, and a faint pulsing of hemorrhagic light told her there was internal bleeding pooling somewhere too deep to reach without intervention.
She blinked hard, tears stinging, then bit down on the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.
You do not get to break. Not while he's still breathing.
Hermione, at the adjacent table, was already moving in tandem with Luna's commands. Her hands were coated in healing salve and blood, wand tracing stabilizing charms in rapid succession over Blaise's chest as she murmured incantations under her breath like a prayer, her jaw set, her brows furrowed so deeply it looked like her face had been carved into something ancient. There was no time to process, no space for fear. Only the sound of spellwork, the dull beeping of a monitoring charm, the wet rattle of broken breath clawing through damaged lungs, and the overwhelming, relentless beat of time pressing against their backs.
Failure, in this room, was a death sentence.
Hermione moved with the focused intensity of someone walking a tightrope over fire, each step measured, each motion precise, her hands gliding through the air in swift, controlled arcs as she cast a series of diagnostic spells over Blaise's chest. Her brow was furrowed with concentration, her eyes scanning the glowing threads of magical data that hovered above his unconscious body, translating the tangled patterns into a mental list of injuries too long, too brutal to absorb all at once. "He's lost too much blood," she said tightly, her voice clipped and breathless but unwavering, as if speaking the truth aloud might force the room to stay anchored in reality. "The ligature marks around his neck—deep, overlapping—it wasn't just one attempt. They tried to strangle him. Repeatedly. The swelling along the trachea confirms compression trauma. Bruising to the carotid. Lack of oxygen. There's internal damage—bruised kidneys, minor liver laceration—but I can't address it yet. I need to stabilize his vitals before his heart gives out. He's slipping."
At the table beside her, Luna's hands hovered over Theo's twitching form, her fingers barely brushing the surface of his skin, yet the contact was enough to make his entire body flinch violently, as if even unconsciousness could not spare him from pain. Her expression remained hauntingly calm, but her voice—though soft—carried a gravity that turned every syllable to stone. "Cruciatus exposure," she murmured, eyes narrowing as she tracked the subtle, spasming movements rippling along Theo's arms and legs. "Long-term. Sustained. There are necrotic echoes in the nervous system—residual dark magic, threaded into the muscles like wire. They didn't just cast it once. They kept him in it for hours, over and over again, until the spell wore thin and his nerves cracked open under the weight. If we don't isolate and neutralize the magical residue soon, the damage will be irreversible. He'll lose motor function. Maybe cognition. Maybe worse."
Pansy's mouth moved before her brain could catch up, a guttural curse sliding from her lips, low and venomous, as her grip tightened on the edge of the table. The rage inside her was volcanic—hot, consuming, barely contained. It boiled just beneath the surface of her skin, itching to be released, to find someone to blame, to punish. But there was no time for fury. Not now. Not when Theo—her Theo, her insufferable, brilliant, ridiculous friend who brewed poisons like poetry and made the darkest things somehow bearable—was laid out before her like a body waiting for last rites. She swallowed hard, shoved the fire down into the pit of her stomach, and forced herself to move.
She bent over him with a hand that still trembled ever so slightly and reached out to brush the sweat-soaked curls from his forehead, her fingers lingering for just a moment longer than they should have, needing the contact, needing him to feel that he wasn't alone. "Stay with me, Theo," she whispered, her voice rough, fierce, trembling at the edges. "Don't you dare leave me. We're going to fix this. I don't care what it takes."
As if summoned by the sound of her voice, Theo's body convulsed violently beneath her hand. His back arched off the table, his mouth twisting in a silent cry, and then he began to choke—his lungs rejecting the air like poison, like even the act of breathing had become too painful to endure. Panic gripped Pansy in a chokehold, but her instincts overrode it. She didn't scream. She didn't cry. She moved, fast and brutal, grabbing the nearest flask of powdered bezoar and jamming her fingers inside without measuring, scraping out a pinch and forcing it past Theo's parted lips. "Swallow, damn it," she snapped, her voice breaking as she massaged his throat, coaxing his muscles to respond with the desperation of someone dragging a soul back from the edge. "Come on, Theo. Come on."
He didn't respond. His lips were slack, his eyes fluttering beneath their lids. Her heart slammed against her ribs, loud enough she could feel it in her temples. No. No, no, no. You are not dying on me. I will kill you myself if you try. Her magic began to spark at her fingertips, wild and unchecked, her wand trembling as she turned toward Luna with frantic urgency.
"Luna—his lungs! I need help with his lungs!"
But Luna was already there, already moving, her wand slicing through the air in a series of slow, deliberate gestures that shimmered with unfamiliar complexity. She didn't speak right away—just focused, drawing power from somewhere ancient and intimate. And then a soft silver mist emerged from the tip of her wand, curling and spinning like smoke caught in moonlight, sinking into Theo's chest with a sound like a sigh. The purifying charm—the old one, the dangerous one—slithered into his bloodstream, weaving through his magic like thread pulling a tapestry back into shape. It sought out the corruption, the rot, the lingering fragments of the Cruciatus curse, and began to unspool them, strand by toxic strand.
Theo's chest rose sharply, then stilled, then rose again—this time slower, deeper, steadier.
Pansy collapsed forward slightly, her hands pressed flat to the edge of the table, her breath coming in short, shallow bursts as her eyes tracked the faintest movement in his ribs. He was breathing. Not well. Not safely. But breathing. The first, tenuous sign of his body responding, of his soul deciding—maybe—to stay tethered to this world.
She let out a shaking breath, part sob, part laugh, part war cry.
Across the blood-slicked tiles of the surgical room, Hermione stood hunched over Blaise's unmoving body, her brow beaded with sweat, hands trembling faintly though her movements never faltered. Her wand hovered just above the line of his clavicle, glowing a deep crimson as she channeled a complex transfusion spell, the air around her crackling with the strain of sustained magic. Her other hand rested gently over his sternum, grounding her as she whispered the incantation under her breath like a prayer, sending pulse after pulse of restorative energy surging into his veins, urging his ravaged body to accept the enchanted blood replenisher coursing through him. It wasn't elegant. It was raw, desperate magic, the kind that tore at your own reserves just to give someone else a chance.
His skin, once gray and waxy, had taken on the faintest blush of pink, a fragile wash of color that clung to the hollows of his cheeks like a question not yet answered.
"He's responding," Hermione said, her voice flat with focus, stripped of emotion even as her eyes flickered with the faintest glint of hope. Her hands didn't stop moving, not even for a second. "But his magical core is depleted. I can barely sense it. If he doesn't stabilize soon, he might go into collapse. I don't know how much more his body can take."
"He needs stabilization potions," Luna said sharply, not looking up from Theo as she checked for signs of neurological recovery. "Both of them do. Immediately."
Pansy didn't need to be told twice. She moved fast, legs shaking beneath her as she crossed the room in a sprint, nearly colliding with the edge of the supply cabinet as she flung it open. Her hands trembled as she yanked down bottle after bottle, muttering the labels aloud in a frantic litany. "Dittany. Blood Replenisher. Strengthening Draught. Phoenix Root. Oh fuck, oh fuck—" She caught the right vial at last—bright amber, concentrated, volatile—and practically dove back to Theo's side, her heart pounding so hard it made her vision swim.
She slid a hand beneath his neck, tilting his head gently but firmly, careful not to jostle his fractured ribs. With her other hand, she uncorked the vial and tipped a few precious drops into his mouth, praying his battered throat wouldn't reject the liquid. For a breathless moment, nothing happened.
And then, mercifully, his throat spasmed once—and then again—and he swallowed.
It was weak, involuntary, but it was something, and the gasp that tore from Pansy's chest was half a sob, half a war cry. Her lungs burned. Her eyes stung. But she didn't stop moving. She pressed her forehead to his for a heartbeat and looked up at Luna with wide, desperate eyes.
Luna, who hadn't paused once, gave her a single, sharp nod—just enough to say he's still in the fight. "He's responding," she said, quieter now, her voice frayed around the edges. "He's fighting."
But there was no time to celebrate.
A strangled sound split the room, and Hermione's head jerked up just in time to see Blaise's back arch violently off the table. His mouth opened in a silent scream, and his body twisted as if trying to crawl away from a pain still buried somewhere inside his chest. Hermione reacted instantly, slamming both palms flat against his sternum and summoning a surge of golden light that poured from her wand into his body like liquid sunlight, thick and glowing and terrifying. The light seeped into his skin, spreading down his arms, across his abdomen, into the deep recesses of the damage they couldn't see.
His breath, once a shallow stutter of panicked gasps, began to slow.
One inhale.
Then another.
Deeper. Measured.
Hermione slumped forward, her body folding over his as the tension drained from her limbs all at once, but her hands remained pressed against him, her wand still glowing. "It's working," she whispered hoarsely, almost as if she didn't trust the words. "His heart rate—it's slowing. It's steady."
Silence followed. Not the brittle, fearful kind from earlier—but the suspended hush of a room daring to hope.
And then, as if the spell had passed between them, a ragged groan broke from Theo's lips.
It was low. Guttural. Unmistakably human.
His fingers twitched—barely, but enough for Pansy to see—and then again, curling against the sheets in a clumsy, instinctive attempt to reach for something, anything. Pansy's breath caught in her throat as she grabbed his hand, squeezing hard, her grip fierce and trembling. "You're okay, Nott," she said, voice cracking into a whisper. "You're safe. Do you hear me? You're safe. You're home."
His eyelids fluttered, just enough for a flash of blue to surface. The eyes didn't focus. They didn't see. But they were open, and for now, that was enough.
At the next table, Blaise, still lost in unconsciousness, shifted slightly. His head turned toward Hermione's hand, just a fraction, as though reaching for warmth in a world he hadn't quite returned to yet.
And that, too, was enough.
Luna exhaled a long, shuddering breath, her entire frame sagging for the first time since they entered the room. She braced a hand on the table, her other still gripping her wand, as though her body didn't know how to stop fighting even as the danger receded. "They're not out of the woods," she murmured, her voice quiet and thinned by exhaustion. "But they're going to live."
The words echoed like scripture in the room.
Pansy shut her eyes tightly, pressed Theo's cold, trembling hand to her forehead, and let the tears come—quiet, raw, ugly tears of relief and rage and the lingering trauma of almost. She didn't know if she wanted to laugh or scream or vomit. So she just whispered, brokenly, "Thank Merlin," like it might hold the universe together for one more breath.
Hermione slowly straightened, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her arm, her eyes drifting across both beds—at Blaise's color slowly returning, at Theo's fingers twitching in Pansy's grip. The sight carved something sharp and sacred into her chest. They had done it. Somehow.
Only then did Pansy's knees give out. She collapsed into the nearest chair, her limbs shaking, her hands still curled protectively around Theo's.
Luna sank into the seat beside her, her face pale, streaked with blood and sweat. She reached up and brushed a clump of damp hair from Pansy's forehead, her fingers lingering just long enough to ground them both.
"We did it," Luna whispered, as though saying it too loud might break the fragile spell holding everything together.
Pansy let out a soft, humorless laugh—low, rough, and raw from disuse. "Yeah," she murmured, her voice hollow with disbelief. "Barely."
Across from them, Hermione met Pansy's gaze. Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be. In that shared glance passed something heavier than exhaustion—something rooted in blood and memory, a silent vow forged in survival.
Never again.
Not like this.
Not if they could help it.
Blaise blinked slowly, the movement sluggish and uncoordinated, as if the act itself took more effort than his body could currently afford. His vision swam with shadows at the edges, the overhead torchlight glaring down in piercing white streaks that made his head throb in protest. Everything felt too bright, too sharp, too loud—like the world had returned in high relief after being stripped to nothing but pain and darkness. His limbs were leaden, his muscles aching with that deep, sick kind of exhaustion that came not from effort but from survival itself. He couldn't tell where he was hurt exactly—because everything hurt—but none of it mattered. Not the tightness in his throat, not the fire in his ribs, not the stiffness locking his joints. None of it registered fully until he saw the faces gathered around him.
The first thing he saw was Pansy—her face pale, streaked with drying tears, mascara smudged like bruises beneath her eyes. She was gripping his hand in both of hers, white-knuckled, clutching so tightly it bordered on painful, as though if she loosened her hold even slightly, he'd vanish like mist. Her skin was damp where his fingers pressed against her cheek, and she didn't seem to notice or care that she was shaking. The razor-edged composure she normally wore like armor—snide comments, eye-rolls, ever-perfect lipstick—was completely gone. In its place was something terrifyingly fragile. She looked at him like she didn't believe he was real, like if she blinked, he'd disappear again into the shadow of that clearing. Her lips were moving, but no sound came out. Just his name, over and over, whispered like a mantra—like a prayer. You're here. You're alive.
Beyond her stood Hermione, arms crossed tightly over her chest, her posture deceptively composed, but her eyes betrayed her. There was no mistaking the way she stared at him—like he was some impossible thing brought back from the dead, a man resurrected from a gallows no one expected him to survive. But beneath the thin layer of awe was something heavier. Her stare wasn't just stunned—it burned. There was an anger simmering beneath the shock, buried deep and quiet, like a fault line waiting to split. It hadn't found its voice yet, but he could feel it—the weight of it pressing down on her ribs. It wasn't anger at him. It was the kind of fury born from helplessness. The kind of rage you carried when you'd watched someone you loved nearly die, and all you could do was scream on the inside.
He swallowed hard—or tried to. His throat felt like it had been dragged over gravel, raw and swollen and bone-dry, every breath he pulled like breathing in dust and heat. But he forced sound from his lungs anyway, because one name pushed past everything else in his fogged mind. "Theo?" The word scraped out of him like a rasp, hoarse and strangled, but it carried all the weight of panic and dread that had been curled tight in his chest since the first flickers of memory began to return.
Hermione moved instantly, her arms uncrossing as she stepped forward, all sharp edges softening into something warm, gentle, and fiercely certain. "He's here," she said quickly, crouching beside him so he could hear her clearly. "He's alive. He's going to be okay. Luna's with him now, keeping him stable."
A shuddering breath escaped his chest, sharp and violent, as if he'd been holding it since the ropes had first closed around their throats. His body sagged deeper into the pillows, his eyes fluttering closed for a moment as a tremor of relief rippled through every bruised inch of him. "Thank the gods," he murmured, voice breaking on the syllables, the words dissolving into breath and disbelief.
But before he could slip too far into that relief, a sudden, sharp crack against his bicep jolted him back to the present.
He flinched, eyes flying open, pain flaring in his arm where a palm had just met flesh. Pansy was glaring down at him now, her hand still poised midair, her mouth trembling with fury.
"You fucking idiot," Pansy hissed, though her voice trembled with more feeling than venom, thick with the kind of emotion that lived in the back of the throat, coiled and heavy and threatening to spill over at the slightest touch. She leaned over him, eyes shining and jaw tight, and for once, there was no performance in her sharpness. No theatrical rage. This was the pure, undiluted terror of almost losing someone and not knowing how to breathe through the aftershock. "Don't you ever do that to me again. Don't you ever make me look at you like that again. I will kill you myself if you scare me like that a second time, Zabini."
His lips, cracked and raw and barely holding together, curved into something that almost resembled a smirk—a ghost of the self he'd been before rope met skin and time stopped breathing. It was barely there, but it was him , and the flicker of it made her eyes flood again. "Shut up," he murmured hoarsely, his voice a scratch of silk over stone. He brought her hand to his lips with more reverence than he probably meant to show, his fingers guiding hers like they were made of glass, like he hadn't earned the right to touch anything delicate. He pressed a kiss to her knuckles, slow and deliberate, letting his lips linger there for a moment longer than necessary. "You won't get rid of me that easily, Parkinson."
She scoffed through the knot in her throat, rolling her eyes with the reflex of someone trying to stay upright while the world still trembled under her feet. "Gods, you're insufferable," she muttered—but she didn't pull her hand away. In fact, her grip tightened, her perfectly manicured nails digging slightly into his skin as if anchoring them both. She wasn't letting go. Not now. Not for anything.
But Blaise's smirk faltered.
His eyes flicked around the room, sweeping over the haze of bloodstained cloth, soft candlelight, the remnants of magic still humming low in the air, but something tugged at him—something wrong, something missing . His instincts, dulled by pain but never silenced, surged forward like a wave crashing against a fractured shoreline. His breath caught in his throat. His chest tightened, but not from injury.
His voice was suddenly sharp, raw with unease. "Where's my wife?" he asked, the words slicing the air with a new, rising urgency. The light humor in his eyes vanished, replaced with something dark and sharp. "Where is she? Is she okay?" His body tensed beneath the sheets, muscles straining, his pulse skittering beneath the surface. He tried to sit up, tried to move, but the motion only sent pain flaring through his abdomen.
Pansy moved fast, pressing a firm hand to his shoulder to keep him down, her touch gentle but immovable. "Stop. Don't do that—you'll tear the stitching. She's fine, Blaise."
Hermione stepped forward then, her features softening, though there was a flicker in her eyes—something unreadable, something laced with memory and weight. She crouched beside the bed, her fingers brushing her hair back from her face as she met his gaze with the calm certainty of someone who understood the depth of his fear. "She's outside with the others," she said quietly, the words like balm. "Ginny hasn't left the door since we brought you in. I'll go get her."
Blaise exhaled, his head sinking back into the pillow as though the very air had been knocked from his lungs—not from pain this time, but from the force of his own relief. Still, the tightness in his chest didn't quite loosen. Not until he saw her. Not until he could touch her, hear her voice, feel her hands on his face. He needed more than words. He needed her .
Pansy watched him closely, still gripping his hand like a lifeline. She didn't soften much, but her voice gentled slightly as she leaned in. "She's been waiting for you, you know," she murmured. "Wouldn't let anyone touch your room. Sat there like a ghost for hours. I thought she was going to hex Titus for breathing too loudly."
A tired, fractured smile tugged at the corner of Blaise's mouth, and he blinked slowly, the haze still clinging to the edges of his consciousness. "I know," he whispered—just that, barely audible, but it was enough. Not just an acknowledgment of Ginny's love, but a confession wrapped in exhaustion and awe and that deep, shattering gratitude of a man who knew he'd been dragged back from the brink, and that someone had waited— stayed —through all of it.
He squeezed Pansy's hand gently, a thank you that didn't need words, and let himself slip into stillness again, waiting for the only thing that would let him breathe freely.
His wife.
~~~~~~
Time moved with a strange, cruel elasticity—stretching out each second like sinew pulled too tight, making minutes feel like hours, like days. Ginny couldn't sit. Couldn't stand still. Couldn't breathe without feeling like her ribs were caving in. Her legs carried her back and forth across the length of the corridor like she might wear a groove into the stone, her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides, her nails digging half-moons into her palms. Her anxiety didn't sit quietly. It crawled up her spine, clawed at her lungs, gnawed at the back of her throat like a living thing made of smoke and teeth, whispering every terrible possibility she was trying not to think of. What if he's gone? What if they couldn't save him? What if I didn't say enough, or soon enough, or the right things at all?
Neville sat beside the door, slouched in a wooden chair that creaked beneath him, his hands loosely clasped between his knees, but his eyes never left her. He didn't speak. He didn't try to calm her. He didn't offer false comfort or platitudes that would only make it worse. He was just there. Solid. Steady. Present. His quiet presence was the only thing tethering her to reality, the weight of his gaze reminding her to stay grounded, to breathe, to wait. But the longer she waited, the more impossible it became.
And then—finally—the door opened.
Ginny froze mid-step, her breath catching as though the sound itself had cracked something open inside her. The hinges creaked, and through the widening gap emerged Luna, pale and blood-smeared, her blonde hair tangled and plastered to her temples with sweat. There was something unearthly about her in that moment—not in the whimsical way Luna often existed outside the edges of the world, but in the way she had come from somewhere no one else wanted to go. She looked like she had been through hell. And she had. But her chin was lifted, her shoulders squared, and her voice—when she spoke—was quiet, steady, calm.
"They're stable," Hermione said, her voice soft but sure, like a stone dropped into a still pond. "And they're awake."
For one breathless, suspended heartbeat, the hallway was silent. No one moved. And then the relief hit like a wave, sweeping through the space so suddenly it was almost disorienting. Ginny's knees buckled beneath her before she even realized she was moving, and she stumbled forward, catching herself against Neville's arm. He stood quickly, wrapping an arm around her waist to steady her, and she gripped his sleeve like it was the only thing anchoring her to the floor. She didn't cry. Not yet. The tears were there, pressing behind her eyes like thunderclouds, but she couldn't let them fall until she saw him. Until she touched him.
Hermione appeared next, slipping out from the room behind Pansy, her features drawn and hollow with fatigue. Her eyes found Ginny instantly, and something in them cracked open—tenderness, maybe, or empathy, or that shared knowing only women who had lived through fear together could understand. She stepped forward, tucking a stray curl behind her ear, her voice softer than Ginny had ever heard it.
"Blaise is asking for you," she said gently, like she knew the words themselves might undo her. "Come. He's waiting."
Ginny nodded, but it was a delayed, automatic movement. Her legs felt boneless, her chest constricted, her heart thudding so loudly in her ears that it drowned out the rest of the world. She moved forward slowly, her feet carrying her with a sort of detached determination, like walking into a memory she hadn't lived yet. Every step toward that door was a war. A breathless, aching, holy thing.
And then she was inside.
The room was dimly lit, cast in the soft, flickering glow of charmed candles and the gentle pulse of healing enchantments that lined the walls. The scent of antiseptic clung to the air—sharp and medicinal—mingling with the metallic tang of blood and the sweeter notes of healing potions that lingered in stoppered vials beside the beds. There was a low, persistent hum of monitoring spells that moved like distant thunder, a soft magical rhythm measuring every breath, every heartbeat, every flicker of life. The air itself felt sacred—like something had happened here that the walls would never forget.
She saw him.
And for a moment, her legs stopped working altogether.
Blaise lay propped against a mound of pillows, his skin still far too pale beneath the warm tones of his complexion, his jaw bruised, his bottom lip split, his arms covered in healing salves and half-closed wounds. But his eyes were open. And they were his—dark, intelligent, weary but alert, and locked on the door the moment she entered. He breathed in like she was air, like seeing her gave his lungs permission to expand again. His lips parted, and his whole face changed—not with pain, not with exhaustion—but with that raw, aching expression of someone who hadn't let themselves believe they would see the person they loved again until they were standing in front of them.
He was alive.
He was awake.
And he was looking at her.
She saw Theo first, propped up on the bed with Luna at his side. Luna was cradling his face in her hands, their foreheads touching as they murmured soft words to each other. The love between them was palpable, a quiet, unbreakable connection that made Ginny's chest ache.
Ginny didn't hesitate. The moment she saw him lying there, pale but alive, her heart surged with a relief so intense it nearly knocked the breath from her lungs. The sterile scent of antiseptic clung to the room, the soft beeping of monitoring charms filling the silence, but all she saw was him. Blaise.
His dark eyes met hers instantly, as if he had been waiting for her, searching for her. His gaze—usually sharp, guarded, unreadable—was open now, raw with something deeper, something only for her.
"Amore," he rasped, the word catching like smoke in his throat, rough and raw and worn thin from screaming and silence, but still it carried more tenderness than she thought her heart could survive. That one word, hoarse as it was, shattered something inside her. It cut straight through the fog of fear that had been choking her for days. That voice, his voice, sounded nothing like it used to, but it was still soaked in so much love, so much knowing, that it nearly brought her to her knees. It was the kind of word you didn't say unless you'd nearly lost everything.
Her breath hitched audibly, and she moved toward him like she was stepping through water, slow, cautious, reverent, as if her very presence might cause the moment to collapse in on itself, might break whatever fragile magic had brought him back to her. Her legs barely obeyed her, her hands fluttering uselessly at her sides for a moment before she finally closed the distance between them, her eyes never leaving his.
When she reached his bedside, she didn't speak. She couldn't. Words felt too clumsy, too small, too brittle for what was clawing its way up her chest. Instead, she reached for him, carefully, slowly, and he met her halfway, lifting a hand that trembled with effort. His fingers brushed against hers like they were made of smoke, light and shaking and unsure. But that touch, as fleeting as it was, grounded them both. Even through the layers of bandages wrapped around his wrists, even through the deep violet bruising that blossomed across the bones of his hand like storm clouds, he was still Blaise. Her Blaise. The man who had flirted with death and somehow dragged himself back to her.
His grip closed around her hand with a desperation that made her breath catch again, not strong, not forceful, but pleading, as if he needed to feel her skin beneath his to believe this was real. His thumb trembled as it swept across her knuckles, the touch uneven but unmistakably intimate. Then, without a word, he brought her hand to his lips. The kiss he placed there wasn't passionate. It wasn't performative. It was quiet. Devotional. Like a prayer whispered into cupped palms, like the kind of apology only the nearly-dead could give. "I'm sorry," he whispered, and his voice cracked right down the middle, as though it physically hurt to speak. His eyes, dark, shining, filled to the brim with unshed tears, held hers with a nakedness that she had only ever seen once before, and that had been years ago, in the quiet dark of their first night together. "I'm so sorry, baby girl."
The words landed in her chest like thunder. She couldn't move for a moment. Couldn't breathe around the lump in her throat. Her body trembled with the effort to stay standing. She had pictured this moment so many times, agonizing over it during the long hours of not knowing if he was alive or dead. She had envisioned herself bursting into the room, shouting, sobbing, furious, throwing curses and accusations and grief-soaked pleas at his bruised face. She had imagined clawing at his chest, demanding to know why he'd gone, why he'd risked everything, why he'd almost left her here to burn alone in the ruins.
But now, standing here, the reality of him in front of her, alive, broken, breathing, robbed her of all that anger. There was no room for fury, not anymore. Not when she could feel the heat of his breath on her fingers. Not when his blood was still drying beneath his fingernails. Not when every inch of him bore the marks of survival.
All that was left was love. Raw, brutal, breathtaking love, the kind that makes you ache, the kind that folds you in half when you look at someone and realize you were two seconds from living in a world without them.
She leaned down, finally, gently pressing her forehead to his, their breath mingling in the thin space between them, her eyes fluttering shut as she whispered the only words that could live in that sacred silence.
"You came back to me," she breathed, and her voice broke wide open. "You came back."
She reached out slowly, reverently, as if the very act of touching him required a permission neither of them had the strength to ask for. Her fingers slid into his dark curls, brushing through them with the kind of gentleness usually reserved for lullabies or prayers, and she let herself breathe in the warmth of him, the anchoring presence of his body beneath her hand. He was warm, alive, trembling beneath her touch, and the fragile beat of his pulse beneath her palm felt like a miracle disguised as muscle and blood. She stroked his temple with her thumb, her movements soft but deliberate, as if she could soothe the demons from his skin by memorizing the curve of his face. Her voice, when it came, was quiet and trembling, but steady in the way of someone who had finally let go of fear and was speaking only truth. "The worst sin, Blaise," she whispered, her words soaked in sorrow, heavy with a kind of grief that couldn't be screamed, only spoken into the space between two bodies that had almost been torn apart, "is that you've destroyed yourself and betrayed your soul over and over again, for nothing. For shadows. For ghosts."
The words hit him like a blow. His breath caught in his chest, sharp and shuddering, and his fingers clenched around hers as if her truth had cut through him deeper than any blade could. His eyes, wide and glassy, never once left her face. They were wet with tears he hadn't allowed himself to shed until now, tears that trembled at the edges of his lashes but never fell. "Not for nothing," he said, his voice rough and barely more than a whisper, but it carried the full weight of his defiance, his devotion, his desperation. "Never for nothing. I'd do it all again, Ginny. Every mission. Every lie. Every burn on my soul. I would do it a thousand times over if it meant protecting you and Valerius."
Her breath hitched, but she didn't let go of him. She couldn't. Her fingers stayed tangled in his hair, moving slowly as she traced the ridge of his temple, the slope of his cheekbone, the bruises that painted him in shades of purple and black. He was so beautiful, even broken like this. Especially broken like this. "You can't keep doing this," she whispered, and this time her voice cracked under the strain of it all, thin and trembling, brittle with the effort to hold herself together. "You can't keep throwing yourself into the fire and expecting me to be okay with it. You can't expect Val to grow up waiting at the window, wondering every night if his father is going to come home in one piece. Wondering if he's going to come home at all."
His throat bobbed as he swallowed hard, and when he opened his mouth again, his voice came out ragged, stripped bare of pretense. "I don't know how to stop," he admitted, his words torn from a place he had never let anyone see. "I don't know how to be anything else. This is all I know. This is the only thing I've ever been good at."
Ginny inhaled sharply, her chest heaving, the tears finally blurring her vision, though she blinked them away before they could fall. She leaned in, pressing a kiss to his forehead, her lips lingering there as if she could breathe sanity back into him. "Then we'll figure it out together," she whispered, the vow settling between them like a promise sealed in fire and forgiveness. "I don't care about the past. I don't care about the blood on your hands or the lies you had to tell or the parts of yourself you had to give away. I don't care about any of it. I just need you to come home to me. To us. That's all I'll ever ask of you. That's all I'll ever need."
His face crumpled then, for a breathless moment, and the walls he had built over decades cracked at the seams. His jaw clenched, his eyes squeezed shut, and when he finally spoke again, his voice was barely holding together. "I'll come home," he said, and there was no bravado in it, no performance. Only trembling, blistering truth. "I swear it, Gin. I'll always come back to you. Crawl back to you if I have to. Drag myself through fire if that's what it takes."
She let out a breathy, tear-soaked laugh, the sound both joyful and aching, and cupped his face in both hands, her thumbs brushing the corners of his mouth, his jaw, the stubble along his chin. She leaned down, her lips brushing his as she spoke. "You idiot," she whispered, and her voice was a blend of exasperation, devotion, and desperate love. "You stupid, reckless, stubborn man. I love you. I love you so much it scares me. I love you more than anything I've ever known."
Blaise's hand came up, trembling but sure, and rested over hers where it cradled his cheek. His fingers curled gently around her wrist, his touch grounding, reverent. "And I love you," he said, his voice hoarse but steady, not just a response but a vow that echoed in the space between their bodies. "More than you'll ever understand. You and Valerius—you're not just my reason. You're my entire world."
And Ginny let herself sink into him, slowly, entirely, resting her forehead against his once more, their breaths mingling in the narrow space between them, the rhythm of their heartbeats finding each other again like two halves of a whole that had been scattered and finally brought back together. She closed her eyes and let the quiet hold them, let the weight of survival settle across her shoulders, but she didn't move. She wouldn't. He was here. He was alive. He had come back.
And whatever battles waited beyond the door, whatever demons might rise again to pull them apart, none of it mattered right now.
Because right now, in this sacred, bloodstained, candlelit silence, he was hers.
And this time, it was the truth.
Notes:
I'm going to take a break after this, I hope you understand. xxx