The rain had begun again, soft and relentless, like parchment tearing in slow motion. The castle’s stone corridors glistened under torchlight, each flicker casting a golden net over Evan as he walked—deliberate, quiet, every step echoing his heartbeat. In his hand, a book: battered, dog-eared, a sonnet ribboned open where he had last marked a line for you. He held it like a talisman. Like a blade.

He found you where you always ended up after lessons—half-hidden near the old library window, sunlight and stormlight clashing over your figure. Statuesque. Red hair damp from the drizzle outside, curling at the edges. Those vibrant Cambridge-green eyes turned up toward the shifting sky, impatient and alight as though you’d been waiting for him all along. You were all contrast: ruddy skin and sharp wit, your posture at once imperious and loose, like a Gryffindor lion who’d wandered into Slytherin territory and decided to stay.

Evan stopped in the threshold and simply watched you. His family’s world—theirs, his—had always been veiled cruelty and cold etiquette, but you had ruined that for him. You had stormed in with your laugh, your dueling trophies, your too-wide eyes that burned with sincerity, and now he couldn’t breathe without imagining you in every corner of his life. You were supposed to be an arrangement. A name on parchment. Yet here you were: alive, warm, smelling faintly of orris root and pear, everything he’d ever tried not to want.

He stepped closer, slow, as though crossing a sanctum. You turned your head toward him, eyes narrowing slightly at his approach—half a challenge, half an invitation. That look alone undid him.

“Rosier,” you teased, voice low, like you were testing his name on your tongue. He didn’t reply. He never needed to. Instead, he slipped the Sonnets open with one pale, careful hand, reading under his breath—not loudly, just enough for you to catch it between raindrops:

“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state…”

Your lips quirked, but you didn’t interrupt. You never mocked his poetry. You let it fill the silence between you the way you let his fingers brush your sleeve when no one was looking. Evan’s heart tightened. He saw you tilt your head—impatient, amused, but listening. Always listening.

He reached for you then, fingers grazing your damp curls, the warmth of your neck just beneath. His hand lingered at the hollow of your collarbone, reverent but steady. You didn’t pull away. For all your power, all your trophies and defiance, you let him hold you like that. Like a confession.

Evan lowered his voice. “You’re late for supper,” he murmured, but it wasn’t reproach. It was awe disguised as routine. Because you—brash, brilliant, dyslexic, gambling with your essays and duels alike—had become his meal, his water, his oxygen. Without you, the quiet corners of Hogwarts felt like tombs again.

Your eyes met his, sharp and wide, and he felt it—how much he craved you. Not like a boy craves a girl, but like a man starves for absolution. You were the only thing he’d ever wanted without calculation. The only risk worth taking.

He thought of his family’s letters waiting in his dorm, their words curled like snakes on parchment, reminding him of legacy, of blood. He thought of his father’s voice telling him not to be weak, to treat this arrangement as duty, not devotion. And then he thought of you—the smell of pear and root, the paint on your fingers from your last art project, the way your laughter broke through Slytherin’s marble hush—and knew they were already too late.

Evan tilted his forehead to yours, closing the gap between storm and sun. His breath mingled with yours, soft and trembling, as though even words might shatter the moment. In his head, the poetry roared, but he said nothing. He only looked at you the way he always did: like you were a verse he’d been searching for in every book, a spell he’d been dying to cast.