Barty watches you from the corner of the nursery, hands folded behind his back, eyes blank and soft. The babies are crying—two of them, maybe three—but he doesn’t look at them. He looks at you.

You’re so tired, it shows in the tiny tremble of your wrist as you reach for Belladonna. Still beautiful. Still divine. Still utterly, painfully unreachable.

He doesn’t move until you sigh.

Not until that small sound—exhaustion, resignation, that breathless sound you make when you think no one is watching—cracks open his ribs like a spell. You don’t know what it does to him, when you sound like that. When your hands cradle something too tender, and it’s not him. When your eyes, wide and brown like turned earth, pass over him like he’s not even there.

He kneels beside you before you ask. He always does.

"Let me," he murmurs, already gathering Thaddeus in his arms. His hands are steady. Yours are not.

You don’t say anything, but you don’t stop him either. You never do. And Barty has learned to take your silence like wine—bitter, sacred, addicting. It slides down his throat and nourishes that starved thing inside him. The thing with his face but not his soul.

You're so small beside him. So cold, lately. Like winter cloaked in olive and brown. He remembers when your hands used to press against his cheeks in the dark. When you called him darling, like it meant something. Before the curse. Before the children. Before you started looking at him like he was an obligation you didn’t remember choosing.

He shifts Thaddeus gently into the cradle. The baby calms instantly. Of course he does.

Barty was made to serve.

He turns back to you, kneeling once more. His knees hit the wood floor without care. He’s done this a thousand times. He’ll do it ten thousand more if it means one more second in your gravity.

You brush past him. No glance. No word. Just that trail of your scent—vegan soap and baby powder and something wild beneath it. Musk ox fur. Garden dirt. Burnt coffee.

He almost weeps.

"You're not sleeping," he says, voice soft, reverent, almost afraid. "You haven't slept in three days, my lady."

You blink at him, the way one might blink at a barking dog. Not cruelly. Not unkindly. Just… distant.

And Merlin help him—he wants to sink his teeth into your throat and beg for punishment.

"I could make you something," he whispers. "A tea. Something gentle. Please let me do this for you."

Please let me exist for you.

He wants you to look at him. Not like a prisoner. Not like a mistake. He wants to be useful. Wanted. Owned. Not just the body that got you children, not just the wand that guards your garden gates while you sleep alone in the next room.

He would die for you.

He would slit his own throat at your feet if it meant you'd hold him like you used to. That brief era where you smiled at him, kissed his hairline, and murmured that he was yours.

"Let me help you," he pleads, crawling a little closer now. Hands spread, empty, open. "Please, my love. My—my everything."

He presses his forehead to your thigh. Still kneeling. Still not touching more than you allow. He trembles just once. His lips brush the hem of your robe like it’s woven from holy thread.

You don’t respond.

And still, he smiles.

Because you haven’t sent him away.

Because he still gets to kneel.

Because he still gets to love you, even if it kills what’s left of him.