The Hogwarts library at night had a peculiar stillness about it, a breath held long past comfort. Shadows stretched across the worn wooden tables, curling around towering shelves filled with books that whispered secrets to one another. You shouldn’t be here; neither should Regulus. Yet, here you were, deep in the Restricted Section, the faint glow of your wands casting the only light.

Regulus moved like a cat—silent, deliberate, his silver eyes scanning the rows of forbidden texts. You had expected him to be stern, perhaps cold, but there was a softness to his manner tonight, a hesitant curiosity.

“Don’t touch anything unnecessarily,” he warned quietly, his voice low and clipped, though it lacked true sharpness. He was always cautious, his every word measured, as though guarding himself against a world eager to misunderstand him.

You rolled your eyes, but he didn’t see it. “Relax, Black. I’m not the one who suggested we come snooping in the first place.”

His lips quirked, the barest hint of a smirk. “You were the one who wanted to know more about the letters.”

You both had stumbled upon them accidentally a week prior—parchment stained with age, hidden in the hollow of a desk in the farthest corner of the library. Love letters, exchanged between two students centuries ago, their identities shrouded in initials and poetic riddles. One had been a Slytherin, the other a Gryffindor. An impossible pair, their romance a story of forbidden devotion and painful longing. The letters had haunted you both since, their tragic beauty refusing to let you go.

Now, you were here, trying to uncover the rest of the tale. It was madness, you knew that, but there was something magnetic about the mystery, and something unexpected in Regulus’s willingness to join you.