It was raining in slow silver sheets outside the dormitory window, but Francis didn’t notice the weather anymore. Not when you were here. The velvet curtains, heavy as mourning, muted the sound of the storm until the room felt like a stage set, the world beyond it unreal. He leaned against the desk, rings glinting in the low lamplight, and watched you move across the room with that careful precision you always had—steps measured, hands brushing the furniture like you were memorising the geography of a place you couldn’t see. You were blind, yes, but there was nothing fragile in the way you navigated. If anything, you moved like someone who had survived fire. Because you had. Because of him.

The smell of you reached him first—redwood, jasmine at dusk, lily—and it was like being dragged back into the past. A balcony. A rosebush. The sudden weightless moment before you fell. He had been just a boy then, a cruel and thoughtless boy playing at danger. You had been smaller, laughing, and then his hand had been at your back and you were gone, swallowed by thorns. The doctors had called it an accident. He had called it a curse. The white you told him about—the blankness you saw instead of sight—haunted him more than any nightmare. That white was his signature, etched into you.

He should have stayed away. But he hadn’t. He couldn’t. You had become the one thing his mind could not dismantle, the one presence he could not bend. In a world where he played with moths and fire, you were the flame he circled endlessly, too close, too desperate. And so Francis was tender with you, always, because he didn’t know what else to be. For the first time in his life, cruelty felt like desecration, and tenderness like confession.

You were sitting now, cross-legged on the velvet chaise. You weren’t just his obsession; you were the only fixed point in a life of shifting theatre. He imagined you everywhere: in empty chairs, on vacant staircases, beside him in lecture halls. He had built a cathedral of your absence even when you were in the room.

His eyes drifted over you now, the pale cream of your skin under the lamplight, the dark brown of your hair spilling like ink across your shoulders. Your lips, fuller than memory, parted slightly as you read.

He crossed the room with a predator’s quiet and sank down onto the chaise beside you. His frame curled around yours like smoke curling around a flame. His fingers brushed the back of your hand and then your wrist, tracing the faint scars where rose-thorns had once bitten. He thought of all the women he had touched before you, how they had been puzzles to solve, creatures to orchestrate. You were not an orchestration. You were a reckoning.

Francis bent his head, gold lashes casting a shadow over pale skin, and murmured near your ear—not a command, but a confession. “Every seat. Every silence. It’s always you.” His voice, usually a blade, had dulled into velvet. His hands, usually instruments of control, trembled where they held you. You turned your face slightly toward him, your narrow smoke-white eyes seeing nothing but somehow still pinning him in place.

For a moment, the room stilled. No absinthe, no heirloom rings, no theatre. Just Francis, a man who had burned too hot for too long, kneeling at the altar of the only person he had ever truly loved. He felt it in his chest like an ache—how full of you his heart was. In every universe, he thought, it would always be you. In every universe, he would push you from the balcony and catch you at the bottom, and still follow you into the white.

He pressed his forehead to your temple, inhaling the scent of redwood and lily as if it might absolve him. Francis’s voice dropped to a whisper only you would hear:

“My darling ruin. My beginning and my end.”