The castle was still asleep when Evan woke with a start, the damp chill of the dungeons curling at the back of his neck. The stone walls around their makeshift dormitory were silent, save for the quiet crackle of the magically warded hearth and—
A breath, small, unsteady. Then a soft whimper.
Evan didn’t move for a moment. He stared up at the uneven ceiling, arm slung haphazardly over his eyes, fingers twitching from dreams.
And then—him. Caelan.
Evan breathed in slow, dragged his arm away, and turned his head. There. In the battered bassinet conjured from some Transfiguration textbook.
Their son—his son—fist curled against his cheek, mouth slightly parted. His hair was already too long, a halo of soft gold, wild and stubborn. Evan wanted to smooth it back but didn’t dare.
“Little tyrant,” he muttered under his breath, voice raw with sleep and disbelief.
One month since everything had shifted on its axis, since he’d become the kind of person who knew how to warm a bottle with a wand flick, who could cast silencing charms with the precision of a bloody surgeon at three in the morning, who’d stopped sleeping just in case Caelan forgot how to breathe.
He sat up slowly, blanket slipping off his bare shoulders. Shirtless again. He rarely kept one on for long these nights—not because of vanity, but because Caelan had a habit of throwing up on everything Evan wore like it was some kind of rebellion.
You were still asleep on the other side of the room. Curled, finally, under too many blankets. He didn’t look long.
The first time he held Caelan—barely an hour after screaming himself raw at the mediwitches to do something while you cried and bled and cursed him—it felt like touching something too holy for his hands. He’d almost dropped him, almost ran. Instead, he sat on the floor with the baby pressed to his chest and tried not to cry while pretending he wasn’t shaking.
Caelan stirred again. A scrunched nose. A hiccup.
Evan moved. He reached the bassinet and crouched low, one long finger brushing the infant’s cheek. “Hey,” he said softly, barely above a whisper, “Don’t start screaming yet, mon monstre. I’ll get your damn bottle.”
The baby blinked—storm-grey eyes meeting storm-grey eyes. Identical. Evan cursed under his breath in French.
No one at Hogwarts looked at him the same anymore. Some with pity, some with awe. Some just avoided him like parenthood was a contagion.
But none of that mattered when he looked at Caelan. That terrifying, small bundle of power and breath and potential. That… person who somehow came from the worst night and the worst version of himself—and you.
You.
Gods, he still hated you sometimes. Hated the way you bossed him around like you had a right, the way you still looked at him like he was the mistake you regretted the least. Hated how your hair looked when you fell asleep next to the crib… hated that it made his chest ache.
He stood, finally, bottle already warming in his hand with a lazy flick of his wand. He tapped it against the edge of the stone table once. Ritual now.
Caelan made a sound. Not a cry. Something softer. Curious.
Evan smiled briefly, crooked. Private. “Of course you’re quiet now. You only scream when your mum’s awake. Figures.”
He scooped the baby up with practiced ease—one hand cradling the fragile head, the other pressing him to his chest. A rose bloomed, slow and red, beneath his collarbone—the enchanted tattoo responding to the heartbeat of the thing he feared and loved most in the world.
He pressed a kiss to Caelan’s head, which smelled of milk and parchment. Somehow.
“I didn’t ask for you,” Evan whispered, forehead resting lightly against his son’s. “Didn’t want you. Still don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”
A pause. He closed his eyes. “But I swear to fucking Merlin—I’ll kill anyone who tries to take you from me.” And he meant it. Every word.
Because Evan Rosier had never believed in happy endings. But in the silence of a stolen morning, with his son in his arms and your sleeping breath in the dark behind him, he thought—
Maybe. Just maybe…