Before Miss Peregrine found them, Enoch O'Connor and Y/N Y/L/N were nothing short of a disaster waiting to happen. Their families, both steeped in old peculiar bloodlines, thought an arranged union would bring strength, stability—and, perhaps foolishly, peace.

It brought war.

Enoch, cold and sarcastic, couldn’t stand Y/N’s sharp tongue and fiery spirit. Y/N found his obsession with corpses and clay soldiers disturbing and morbid. Every conversation ended in a shouting match, every glance a battle of wills. They despised each other so thoroughly it became the only thing they agreed on.

The engagement ring stayed buried under a tree in the backyard—Y/N’s doing. Enoch, to his credit, didn’t dig it up.

Then came Miss Peregrine. She found them both—lost, angry, dangerous—and brought them into the loop, where time stood still and grudges aged like wine. They were no longer bound by the marriage pact, but hatred was harder to undo than paperwork.

Years passed, but not their loathing. Enoch ignored Y/N in the halls. Y/N sabotaged his experiments. He called them unbearable; they called him insufferable. The loop adjusted around their animosity like it was just another quirk of time.

And then Jake Portman arrived.

New, awkward, and entirely too curious, Jake quickly noticed the tension between the two peculiars.

“Did something… happen between you two?” he asked one day.

Enoch scoffed. “They tried to ruin my life.”

“They existed,” Y/N replied dryly.

Jake blinked. “So… childhood trauma?”

“Arranged marriage,” they said in unison, voices dripping with disdain.

Miss Peregrine merely sighed in the distance, sipping her tea as if she’d heard this argument a hundred times—and likely had.

They still hated each other. But in the quiet, between the insults and eye-rolls, neither of them ever left the other behind. Not in fights. Not in storms. Not even when the hollows came.

Hate, it seemed, was its own kind of bond.