The night clung to the castle like a secret, thick with fog and far too quiet. Hogwarts breathed in its sleep—stone and shadow. Barty climbed the spiral staircase to the Astronomy Tower with the slow, deliberate grace of someone avoiding his own reflection.

He didn’t usually come here—not when he could be in the dungeons, or scribbling in his journal. But tonight he needed air. Something cold. Something that didn’t feel like suffocating.

He pushed the door open with his shoulder and stepped into the blueblack hush of midnight. The wind curled around his coat, tugging at his rolled-up sleeves. The stars—barely visible through the gauze of clouds—blinked like dying things. Beautiful in their decay.

And then there was you.

You were sitting on the ledge, legs pulled up to your chest, wrapped in one of those oversized jumpers that had clearly seen better years. Your hair was a little windswept, your eyes fixed upward—not searching for constellations, he noted, but listening to them.

He almost turned around. Almost. But something in the stillness of you, made him stay.

He cleared his throat—not to startle you, but because silence suddenly felt too loud. You turned, slowly, and there was no surprise in your expression. Just calm recognition. Not familiarity. Just awareness.

“I thought you and Evan had some code about not haunting the same places,” he said, voice dry, bored, but edged with something—curiosity, maybe.

You shrugged. “He doesn’t own the sky.”

Barty gave a dry chuckle, stepped closer, leaned against the wall beside you. He didn’t sit yet. The sky above stretched wide and indifferent, the clouds shifting. He lit a cigarette with the flick of his wand, took a drag, then offered it to you without looking.

You took it. And something tilted.

Maybe it was the night. Maybe it was the way you inhaled like you’d done it a thousand times before. Or maybe it was the simple fact that for the first time in years, Barty saw you—not just as Evan’s little sister, the girl he’d occasionally passed in corridors and never really clocked. You were real. Here. Looking at him like you’d already taken him apart in your mind and hadn’t quite decided what to make of the mess.

“Evan know you sneak out like this?” he asked, voice casual, but his gaze was a blade sliding over your profile.

Your laugh was quiet, almost bitter. “Evan doesn’t know much about me anymore.”

He looked at you then—really looked. And something darker, warmer, stirred in his chest. Recognition. That haunted sort of ache that came from being too much for your blood and too little for their expectations.

Barty understood that.

You talked. About nothing. About everything. Books. Music. How you sometimes felt like Hogwarts was trying to swallow you whole and spit you back out into someone else’s shape.

Barty offered nothing sentimental in return—he didn’t know how. But he let his guard down just enough for something else to slip through: a joke that wasn’t cruel, a truth that wasn’t weaponized.

He found himself leaning closer, not physically, but in that dangerous way where you stop keeping track of exits. His fingers tapped the railing beside yours. Not touching. Just… hovering.

The wind howled. Time bled. The cigarette burned out. And you didn’t leave.

By the time he did—later than he meant to, later than he ever stayed in one place—there was a heat in his chest that hadn’t come from the nicotine. He descended the stairs with that strange, coiling thing in his ribs—a premonition dressed as a feeling.

He told himself it didn’t mean anything. That you were just Evan’s sister. That the conversation would vanish in the morning like smoke on stone.

But he knew better.

He knew the way obsessions began. Not with fireworks. With quiet. With stillness. With a glance held a second too long.

Something had shifted.

He might come back tomorrow.

And the next night, too.

And Barty—dangerous, theatrical, emotionally feral Barty—had the terrifying suspicion that you’d just become the first thing in a very long time that he didn’t want to destroy.