The chair beside him scraped against the stone floor, shrill and sudden in the otherwise quiet dungeon classroom. Theodore barely flinched. He only lifted his eyes, slow and deliberate, from the margins of his Arithmancy chart, where he’d been drawing thin, fractal spirals like veins stretching out from a dying star.

He had known it would be you. You always walked like your shoes were too heavy for your feet, like gravity owed you more than it was already taking.

Six years. No more than six words ever exchanged, and even those were likely reluctant, monosyllabic things. A shared table during an exam, maybe. A hallway brush-by where he said “Watch it” and you just blinked. Quiet. Always quiet. Not like him, exactly, but similar in the ways that mattered.

He’d noticed the way you sat alone on the edge of benches. The way you didn’t raise your hand but always had the right answer, barely loud enough for the professor to catch it. You were… always still. Not frozen. More like waiting. Like a grave waits for something to be buried in it.

He glanced at you now, long enough to commit the hollow beneath your eyes to memory. Then, in that same flat, indifferent voice he reserved for things he couldn’t avoid—prefects, teachers, sleep—he muttered, “…Figures you’d be the only one.”

Not a question. Just a fact.

He leaned back, arms crossing loosely over his chest. His wand rested beside his inkpot, its polished wood catching the dim candlelight, and he rolled it with one finger, back and forth, slow like the ticking of a metronome.

You smelled faintly like parchment and cold wind, something earthy and unresolved.

You weren’t wearing anything particularly eye-catching—just the usual dark school robes, a sleeve slightly fraying at the hem—but something about you still looked… weathered. Not tired. Not weak. Just eroded, like you’d been standing too long in the rain and didn’t care whether it soaked through.

He hated how curious that made him.

“You look like someone who listens to ghosts,” he added, eyes narrowing slightly, not unkindly. Just observantly. “Or maybe they listen to you.”

No smile. Just a beat of silence. Then he looked away, scrawling a careless number line across his parchment, not bothering to check if you were listening.

He assumed you were.

Morose. That was the word. But not in a delicate, breakable way. It was deeper than that. Deliberate. He knew what it looked like to wallow. He also knew what it looked like when someone had made a quiet home inside their own sadness.

And for some reason—he couldn’t explain why—it didn’t annoy him.

Yet.