He hadn’t seen you in almost a year. Not outside the haze of memory or the occasional flicker of thought he never admitted to indulging.

You were just Luna’s little sister back then. Ravenclaw. Soft-spoken. With hair like moonlight caught in water and a face that looked too fragile for a world as vicious as this one.

Mattheo had spoken to you maybe twice, three times if he counted the night you pressed your palms to his ribs, muttering healing incantations as he bled all over the infirmary floor. You’d been barely fifteen then. Too young for war.

But now—now there was no youth left in any of you.

The ground in Sussex was thick with ash and screams when he saw you again. He hadn’t even known you were there until the smoke parted and there you were, crumpled beside a broken wall, half-buried beneath the rubble, your robes shredded, soaked in crimson.

Something in him fractured.

He didn’t think. Didn’t stop to explain to the other Death Eaters why he was suddenly running toward a girl. The girl who looked too much like Luna and nothing like her at all. The girl whose hands had once stopped his lungs from filling with blood.

You were alive—barely. Your eyes fluttered open the moment he dropped to his knees beside you. The smallest breath left your lips. That was all he needed.

He grabbed you—carefully, almost reverently, as if you’d vanish if he was too rough—and apparated.

The flat in Diagon Alley was too quiet when you landed inside. A place he never brought anyone. A place that hadn’t felt like anything but a hiding place until now.

You hit the wooden floor with a soft gasp, pain tightening your features. Your blood stained his shirt. Mattheo’s hands were already on you—ripping fabric, whispering spells under his breath, magic flaring sharp and urgent at his fingertips. Not like how you did it. Your healing had been soft. Gentle. His was all desperation.

“Hold still,” he muttered, voice low, ragged. Shaking.

You blinked up at him, dazed, pale. “Mattheo…?”

He froze, just for a second. His name sounded wrong in your voice. Too soft. “Yeah,” he said, pressing his wand to the gash along your side, watching the skin stitch itself beneath the glow. “It’s me.”

There were so many things he could have said. What the hell were you doing out there? You shouldn’t be anywhere near this war.

But he knew better. He knew that you, like your sister, never bent to logic. But where Luna floated through the world like something untethered, you bled for it. You chose to be there. And you paid the price.

He swore under his breath as he moved to your leg—torn open from something sharp, possibly cursed. He’d have to monitor it. Check it again in the morning.

You watched him, breathing shallow. “You were… gone,” you whispered. “No one knew where you went.”

His jaw tightened. “That was the point.”

He didn’t say my father dragged me to hell and carved his mark into my skin. He didn’t say I thought about you, once in a while, when the nightmares got too loud.

Instead, he focused on the wound at your collarbone, the way your hair clung to your face in damp strands. “I remember you,” he murmured, barely audible over the hum of his magic. “You healed me. In the infirmary. After that fight.”

Your lips parted, eyes glassy. “I remember. You didn’t say thank you.”

Mattheo huffed a laugh that sounded more like a breath of disbelief. “No. I didn’t.”

He paused, then reached to brush a curl from your forehead. It was such a small touch—but one he hadn’t let himself imagine. Not since innocence was a language the world had forgotten.

“Thank you,” he said now, voice quiet, raw. “For that night.”

And maybe, just maybe, he meant thank you for surviving, so I wouldn’t have to carry one more ghost. Or thank you for being here now, when I thought there was nothing left worth saving.

Outside, the world burned on. But in the silence of his flat, with your blood still drying beneath his nails and your breathing finally beginning to steady, Mattheo felt—for the first time in months—like something inside him hadn’t been entirely lost.