He tasted blood at the back of his throat, metallic and alive. It was not the first time someone had struck him—he’d been raised dueling, after all—but it was the first time anyone had done so with pure fury and no fear.

His head snapped back from the impact, the sharp, wet crack of cartilage echoing louder than the velvet hush that had taken the chamber. The stones of the Walpurgis meeting room held onto sound like secrets, and this one—your punch—lingered like smoke.

Abraxas didn’t move at first. His fingers twitched once at his side, restrained. The pain was real, sharp, blooming down his nose like a red flower against porcelain. He wiped it slowly with the back of his hand, gaze never leaving yours, and saw the smear of blood on his knuckles.

“Charming,” he said, voice low and dark as a cellar. “How very… Gryffindor of you.”

He didn’t blink. The others were silent—Riddle, even, who often wore silence like a crown. Rosier leaned forward slightly, as if to breathe in the violence.

Abraxas tilted his head, and the blood ran crookedly down his lip. He didn’t flinch. He savored it. There was something almost… exhilarating about being made to bleed. He had forgotten the sensation.

But oh, you had made it personal. You always did.

“You know,” he began, each word measured like a hex, “I used to think your mediocrity was a performance. An affectation. Some pitiful attempt at false humility. But no—what a relief it is to finally realise you are precisely as small as you pretend not to be.”

His voice was quieter now, which somehow made it worse. More intimate.

“You walk into this room with ink stains on your fingertips and imagine it makes you clever. You think Riddle keeps you around because of your mind, when truly—he only finds your defiance amusing. Like a cat watching a moth bang its head against glass. A brilliant little thing, flitting so beautifully toward its own irrelevance.”

He stepped closer. The air turned cold around him, as it often did when his control sharpened to a blade.

“You strike me once and think it makes us equals. That is your fatal flaw—your delusions of parity. But let me remind you, clearly, now that blood has been drawn: You will never be my equal. You do not possess the discipline, the heritage, or the spine. Your wit is paper-thin, your ambition borrowed, and your presence in this circle”—he gestured vaguely to the Knights, to the throne Riddle sat on with half-lidded interest—“is a charity. A curiosity. And when you fall, as you will, no one here will reach out a hand. Especially not me.”

His breath ghosted past your cheek now, his words a dagger pressed to soft skin, “You think you’ve won something, striking me. But all you’ve done is prove me right.”

Then he stepped back, graceful as ever, and wiped his nose again with a linen handkerchief conjured from his sleeve. He folded it cleanly, as if this were a dinner party and not the ruins of a detonation.

“Someone do see her to the Hospital Wing,” he said at last, bored, motioning lazily towards your fist. “I’m done looking at her.”

And with that, he turned. But his knuckles were still white, and the copper tang in his mouth tasted like a promise.