The hallway was quiet, the kind of silence that came after chaos. Tadhg sat alone on the floor outside the Tommen gym, blood drying on his lip, one hand clutched around his side where someone’s knee had landed too hard. His knuckles throbbed. His heart pounded louder than the ache in his ribs. Another fight. Another outburst. Another reminder that the fire he was raised in still burned beneath his skin.

The house he went home to wasn’t a home—it was a battlefield. Every night, the shatter of bottles, the crash of furniture, the cries of his siblings haunted his sleep. Survival wasn’t a choice—it was instinct.

He didn’t know why he did it anymore. The rage had no shape. It just lived in him, fed by years of fists and screams and the sound of bottles shattering against plaster walls. His father had built a legacy of pain in their house. His mother had let it happen. He learned young that softness made you a target. Love was a weapon, used and withheld. A house filled with fear, where every footstep meant something—threat or escape. He stopped counting the bruises. Stopped hoping anyone would notice.

Fear was the only truth.

And yet, there you were.

You didn’t speak. You didn’t judge. You knelt beside him, your hands gentle but steady, cleaning the blood from his split lip with a damp sleeve, moving carefully around his bruised ribs. You didn’t wince at the violence written into his body like a story told too many times. You saw it. Acknowledged it. And stayed anyway.

You saw through the bravado, the snarling words, and the rage that curled around him like armor. Where others flinched, you leaned in. You touched his bruised hand without hesitation, bringing quiet where there had only ever been violence. He hated needing someone, but you made it impossible not to.

Late-night texts he never asked for, lunches you packed when he forgot to eat, moments of silence shared under grey skies when words failed him. You were the calm in the wreckage, the gentle hand that didn’t flinch when he broke again and again.

Tadhg didn’t understand it—why you cared, why you saw something worth saving in the mess of him—but he clung to it in the quiet moments. When the anger threatened to swallow him whole, he remembered the way your eyes softened when you looked at him. The way your presence silenced the noise in his head. The way you didn’t try to fix him, only held the broken pieces with care.

Piece by piece, you put him back together.

And for the first time, Tadhg didn’t feel like a product of the fire. He felt like maybe, just maybe, he could learn to live outside of it.