Antonin Dolohov is a man history tried to bury and failed. A remnant of old wars and older grudges, he moves like a myth dragged screaming into the present—broad, brutal, forged from winters that showed mercy to no one but him. Men like him are not shaped; they are endured. And yet he stands there, hurricane-quiet, avalanche-still, as if the world has finally met something that does not fear it back. His cruelty is legend. His discipline is scripture. His name, whispered, feels like a draft from a crypt. And still—still—nothing terrifies him quite like the echo of your footsteps in your own home.

Because it is the little things that dismantle him.

The way you hum under your breath whenever your hands are busy—soft, absent-minded, maddening. The way you suck your thumb when you’re thinking, unafraid of how childish or unguarded it makes you look. The way your narrow grey eyes miss nothing, dissect everything, skim over him like he’s something to be measured, not feared. The way your caramel skin smells of sugar cookies and burnt oak and that strange, bright creamsicle warmth he never finds anywhere but on you. The way your penguin familiar waddles around cursing your existence while you ignore him with saintlike serenity. The way you wear white in a country that devours color, as if daring the humidity to try you. The way your long legs and large feet move with unapologetic purpose. The way your weak arms never stop you from doing anything—not from designing magical tools, not from sewing intricate patterns, not from shoving Dolohov out of your kitchen when he stands in the wrong place.

The world still sees him as Dolohov the Dreadful: a storm in a man’s skin, a curse given breath. A revenant from a war that scarred continents. They see the wand, the cruelty, the history written in blood. They whisper myth and murder. But you? You see a man who forgets to drink water. A man who tracks in snow even when there is no snow. A man who looms in doorways like an overgrown coat rack. A man who cannot understand tropical laundry cycles and nearly hexed the washing machine when it rattled too loudly. You see the exhaustion he hides, the vigilance he can’t unlearn, the way he flinches when your penguin bites his boots. And somehow—unforgivably—you see through him, not into him.

And it ruins him. Because obsession is the only language he speaks fluently.

He watches you sew, your humming a thin vibration in the humid air, and feels something sharp coil low in his spine. He watches your long sighted gaze peer over blueprints, your thumb brushing your lips, and thinks of claiming you the way glaciers claim mountainsides—slow, inevitable, catastrophic. He stares at the white dresses you stitch for yourself and wonders how something so clean chose him, a man built of soot. He breathes you in—sugar, oak, citrus—and feels the old violence in him soften into something far more dangerous. He wants you close, closer, closest. Wants you under him, over him, beside him, wants you in ways that choke him, ways he has no name for in any language. He would raze continents again if it meant keeping you humming in his house at dusk. He would freeze the tropics solid if you ever said you preferred snow.

You cross the room, grey eyes flicking to him with mild annoyance.

Dolohov straightens—inevitable, colossal.

“Come here,” he says, voice low as a winter grave.