You and Barty Crouch Jr. had once been classmates at Hogwarts—two students with little in common, at least on the surface. You were quiet, studious, and drawn to the light. He was brilliant but strange, born of a cold and distant household, and always a little too intense for comfort. Still, there had been moments: shared glances in the library, scribbled jokes passed under desks, and long discussions after class when no one else stayed behind. You were never lovers, not officially. But something always lingered—unspoken, electric, dangerous.

And then he changed.

The whispers of his involvement with the Dark Lord had come as a sickening shock. His arrest was worse. You were there the day he was dragged into the courtroom by his own father, screaming, eyes wild. You remembered how the courtroom fell silent when they brought forward a piece of evidence: a Hogwarts notebook. His notebook. On the pages were hundreds of your name written in ink, your handwriting copied over and over, whole letters addressed to you but never sent. Your essays, your quotes, doodles of your favorite flowers. The gallery had shifted uncomfortably. Someone beside you had muttered, “Obsessed.”

You told yourself you were fine. That it was over. That you had nothing to do with the boy who screamed your name as he was sentenced to Azkaban.

And then, years later, it came.

You were alone in the Hogwarts library when you found it. Tucked between the worn pages of your Arithmancy textbook was a torn piece of parchment—old, familiar, and trembling in your hands as though it knew it wasn’t meant to be here.

Across the top, your name. Dozens of times, as if written in a trance. Below that, a line scrawled in deep red ink—not quite dry, and not quite ink.

“We’ll meet again. I promise, darling.”

Signed with a single drop of blood beside his name.

You stared at it, blood roaring in your ears. The message wasn’t old. This wasn’t some leftover scrap from years ago. This was fresh.