Cherreads

Chapter 1 - The Quiet Assignment

MINISTRY OF MAGIC

Department of Magical Records and Archives

Internal Operations Division

Level Seven, Restricted Correspondence

Recipient:

Mr. Theodore Atticus Nott

(Current Assignment Clearance: Level Grey)

 

Mr. Nott,

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

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

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

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

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

No further instructions will follow. Proceed accordingly.

Office of Internal Operations

Ministry of Magic

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

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

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

Luna Lovegood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

~~~

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Would you like some tea?"

He didn't even blink. "No."

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

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

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

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

"He's prettier than the last one."

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"They said you were unstable."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do your hands ache after you kill someone?"

That one hung longer.

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

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

Still, he stayed.

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

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

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

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

 

~~~

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And through it all, she watched him.

She did not blink. She did not smile.

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

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

And she did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"They don't ask for anything," she added after a moment. "They just look."

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

He finally looked at her.

Just for a second.

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

It was recognition.

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

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

Theo did not answer.

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

"Why haven't you left this place?"

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

Luna didn't flinch.

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

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

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

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

It did not feel metaphorical.

It felt literal.

And that unsettled him.

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

The question should have been an insult.

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

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

Her eyes met his.

"I used to be stranger."

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

The room was too quiet after that.

The wind outside had stilled.

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

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

So he drank his tea.

And it was cold.

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

And something in his chest went tight.

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

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

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

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

The touch was brief.

Bare skin to bare skin.

And something in the room shifted.

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

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

The house felt heavier.

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

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

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

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

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

He hated how the words landed.

Hated how close they came to something real.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He didn't know why he said yes.

Maybe it was the silence.

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

He nodded once. "Fine."

She smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

Soft and pulsing.

Silver-white and steady.

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

She didn't comment on it.

Didn't acknowledge it at all.

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

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

She said nothing.

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

And he didn't ask what it meant.

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

Because he knew.

Not in language.

But in instinct.

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

Something that would not turn back.

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

 

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