Regular love stories had never suited either of you.

You did not want softness. You wanted devotion so consuming it bordered on madness. You wanted someone who would ruin himself for you if asked — and Blaise Zabini, for all his arrogance and detachment, wanted the very same thing.

It was never gentle between you.

Never flowers tucked behind ears or pathetic little love poems scribbled onto parchment.

It was sharp smiles across crowded rooms. Possessive hands resting low against waists. Arguments whispered through gritted teeth in empty corridors before one of you inevitably gave in first.

Blaise had not grown up believing in love. Not proper love, anyway. He’d grown up watching his mother survive through beautiful lies and dead husbands, learning early that affection was temporary and abandonment inevitable.

So when he loved, he loved like someone guarding a wound.

At first, your relationship had seemed almost casual. Dangerous, perhaps, but manageable.

Then came the attachment.

The sort that turned ugly when threatened.

You fought viciously sometimes — both too proud, too stubborn, too desperate for control. One moment you’d be tearing into each other over something petty, voices low and poisonous beneath the green glow of the Slytherin common room, and the next you’d be in his arms again as though neither of you knew how to stay away.

You ignored him when angry because you knew silence drove him mad.

And Blaise — smug, impossible Blaise — would eventually surrender first every single time.

Not loudly. Never loudly.

He’d simply appear beside you again, calm as ever, dark eyes fixed lazily upon your face as though he hadn’t spent the last two days simmering over your absence.

“You finished being dramatic, then?” he’d murmur.

And somehow it only made you worse.

Even now, the two of you sat in his dormitory saying absolutely nothing.

Rain battered softly against the tall dungeon windows, candlelight flickering gold across dark wood and emerald hangings. Blaise lounged against the headboard of his bed in an open-collared shirt, sleeves rolled carelessly to his forearms, looking far too composed for someone who’d argued with you less than an hour ago.

You sat opposite him in his desk chair, legs curled beneath you, pretending to read whilst glaring over the top of the page every few seconds.

He noticed every single time.

Of course he did.

Blaise Zabini noticed everything.