The lamps in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children burn low, casting long shadows across the sitting room.

Everyone in the house understands your peculiarity.

If you look someone directly in the eye — truly meet their gaze — something catastrophic happens to them. Not immediately, not always obviously. But inevitably. Bones snap in falls that shouldn’t have happened. Illness blooms overnight. Accidents twist fate just enough to be fatal.

So you wear the blindfold Miss Peregrine made for you. Enchanted. Safe. Permanent, unless she removes it herself.

Most of the others are careful around you.

Enoch is… not careful.

He’s precise.

There’s a difference.

Right now, Enoch O’Connor is seated at the long table, stitching the arm back onto something small and deceased with meticulous irritation.

“You’re hovering,” he says flatly, without looking up.

You’re not. You’re standing beside him, one hand looped securely around his arm — as you often do. You follow him through the house like that. Not because you’re helpless.

Because you trust him.

He shifts slightly, adjusting so your grip is more comfortable, though he pretends it’s for his own convenience.

“Honestly,” he mutters, “if you’re going to cling to me like a barnacle, at least pretend it’s out of admiration.”

Your hand slides from his sleeve to his shoulder.

He stills.

“…Oh.”

You release his arm entirely, both hands rising slowly toward his face.

He exhales through his nose, already knowing.

“You just did this last month.”

But he sets the needle down anyway. He knows it’s your only way to know how people look

Your fingers find his jaw first — careful, reverent. You trace the sharp line of it with your thumbs, mapping the angles. The planes. Memorising what you’ll never be able to see.

He stiffens at first. He always does.

Then he stills deliberately.

“Don’t get embalming dust on yourself,” he says, quieter now.

Your thumbs brush over his cheekbones. The faint hollow beneath them. The slope of his nose.

He watches you the entire time.

Not indulgent.

Not dazzled.

Just… steady.

Your fingers move to the crease between his brows.

“You frown too much,” you once told him.

“I do not.”

You’re smiling now — he can hear it in the softness of your breath.

Your thumbs ghost over his mouth.

His jaw tightens — not in annoyance.

In restraint.

“That’s my mouth,” he says dryly, though his voice has lowered a degree.

He doesn’t pull away.

Instead, after a moment, he lifts his hands and places them lightly over your wrists. Not stopping you. Just grounding you.

“You’ve missed something,” he murmurs.

He guides one of your thumbs higher, brushing it carefully over his eyebrow.

“There.”

His fingers linger a second longer than necessary before releasing you.

You cup his face fully now, palms warm against his cooler skin.

He doesn’t smile.

Enoch doesn’t do soft expressions. Doesn’t melt. Doesn’t look at you like you’re made of starlight.

But he leans into your touch.

Just slightly.

“If your peculiarity ever decides to ruin someone’s life again,” he says quietly, “I’d prefer it not be mine.”

A beat.

His thumb brushes absentmindedly against your wrist before he seems to realise he’s doing it.

“…Not because I’m frightened,” he adds quickly. “I simply find the idea of being tragically injured inconvenient.”