At first, it had been incidental—just the slow, accidental noticing of a girl who walked like she was trying to fold herself into the floor.

He’d seen you in the corridors, books clutched too tightly to your chest, head dipped, steps soft and skittish. He’d heard the whispers behind your back—heard them loud, cruel, shameless. Slytherins, mostly. A few Ravenclaws with their pretentious sneers. Even a scattered Hufflepuff or two, which made it worse. Made it sting in a way he knew must burn beneath your skin, even if you never let it show.

You never talked back. You just took it. Silently. And Mattheo had hated that.

He wasn’t sure what made him care. He hadn’t planned to. But once you caught his eye—that quiet, golden, trembling thing moving like light through the cracks of the castle—he hadn’t been able to stop.

And once he’d spoken to you, once he saw the way your eyes softened when you looked at him like you weren’t afraid, not of him—it had been over. Game, set, match.

But you’d begged him, gently, quietly, not to make it public. You’d mumbled something about your house—how people wouldn’t understand. How he wouldn’t belong with someone like you. That last part had twisted like barbed wire in his ribs.

Because he didn’t care. But you did. And so, he waited. For you. But patience had never come easy to Mattheo Riddle.

So today, when he saw you again—surrounded in the corridor near Charms, voice small as you tried to edge away from a group of Slytherins who smirked as they threw words like daggers—he snapped.

No, not outwardly. You didn’t want that. But there was fire behind his eyes when he watched you turn your face downward, as if your very skin was a shame to show. He could taste blood in his mouth from biting back the things he wanted to say. Things that would make it worse for you, not better. Things you had asked him not to do.

So instead, he followed you. Quietly. Not stalking—just close enough that he could reach out the second he saw you fall.

He waited until the hallway near the West Tower was clear—long-forgotten, cloaked in dim gold light through stained-glass windows, a corridor where the castle exhaled dust and silence—and then he caught your wrist. Gently. Firmly. Carefully, as if you might break.

He pulled you into the alcove with a hand at your back, the world outside slipping behind stone and shadow, his eyes darker than any curse.

“You keep running from me,” Mattheo said quietly, his voice low like thunder in the distance. “I’m not going to let you.”

You blinked up at him, startled. You always looked surprised that he was still here. Still choosing you. Like it was something unbelievable. Like he couldn’t possibly mean it.

He raised a hand and brushed your hair behind your ear, touch reverent, like you were some fragile holy thing. His voice softened, losing its edge.

“My heart is yours. Don’t you get that yet?” he murmured, almost to himself, his thumb brushing your cheekbone. “It’s you I hold onto, when everything else goes to hell. And I don’t care what house you’re in, or what they say, or what you think you are. You’re mine. You’re all I want. And I swear—” he paused, jaw tightening, voice turning fierce— “I won’t let you down. Not now. Not ever.”

There was silence between you, deep and golden and pulsing like magic. The castle seemed to hush around your stillness, like even its ghosts were holding their breath.

And when you looked at him—not down, not away—but at him, Mattheo felt something split inside him. Something warm. Something irrevocable.

Maybe you weren’t ready to show the world. But in this sliver of space, behind the hush and the stone and the shield of his words, you were his. And he’d wait. For you. For the moment you were ready to stop hiding.

But until then—he would be your shadow. Your sword. Your home.