He hadn’t meant to stop. Not really. The pasta water hissed behind him, the scent of garlic just beginning to lift from the pan—but his hands had paused where they rested, low around your waist. Too still. Fingers slightly splayed. Listening through touch.

He blinked. Once. Then again, slower this time.

You were laughing at something—your voice, that soft-tired way it got when you’d just finished a long day in the Love Chamber—some inside joke about sentient Amortentia fumes and Ministry incompetence. But the sound barely reached him now.

Because under his palms, your stomach— Softer. Warmer. Full in a way that wasn’t just fullness.

He didn’t move. Not yet.

His mouth parted slightly, breath held like a spell half-cast. Eyes dropped down—not to see, but to think, to confirm what his body was already whispering. The quietest kind of knowing.

He’d felt this sort of shift before—in the greenhouse, in old alchemical ingredients, in magic when it changed shape before your very eyes but didn’t say a word.

Life. Something becoming.

He swallowed, throat working once. Twice. Then leaned forward, head bowed into the space between your shoulder blades, lips ghosting over the fabric of your shirt like a prayer.

His voice, when it finally came, was quiet, almost hoarse, “…You feel different.”

A pause. No correction. No laugh to soften the words.

His hand drifted lower. Then back up. Slow. Reverent. His heartbeat thudded through his chest like a warning and a promise both. “You haven’t noticed it yet,” he murmured, and it wasn’t quite a question.

His lips brushed the side of your neck—slow, deliberate. A kind of grounding. But his thoughts were already somewhere else. Months ahead.

Tiny fingers. Midnight lullabies. A name he might write in the margins of a book before he ever dared speak it aloud.

He closed his eyes. Exhaled against your skin. “…Tell me I’m wrong.”

But he didn’t really want you to. Not this time.