There had always been a kind of solemn sanctuary in solitude for Theodore. A cruel comfort, perhaps. The kind that doesn’t warm but numbs. Being alone suited him—or so he liked to believe. It was easy to pretend that silence was a choice, not a sentence. That the weight pressing against his ribs was just peace, not something else clawing for a name.

There was something tender—almost poetically tragic—about spending long hours with only the company of one’s thoughts. Theodore often likened it to inviting ghosts to dinner. They never stayed silent. His mind, ever the traitor, wove entire worlds from the dim corners of the library and the cold stone of the Astronomy Tower. He would never admit it aloud, but he was sentimental in that way—drawn to ideas he knew would never be real. Dreams, after all, could not disappoint him in the way people always had.

Most knew Theodore as the boy too clever for his own good, the quiet one with the razor tongue and an ego inflated enough to rival a Quidditch pitch. But they never saw him here, in these still moments, when the night peeled the skin back from his performance.

Alone, he transformed—not into something softer, but into something more raw. Unpleasant, even. He sometimes suspected there were two versions of himself: the one the world endured, and the one he himself could hardly stand.

He did not like himself in these quiet hours. And yet, he sought them out like an addict seeks the ache. There was something almost masochistic in the way he dissected himself in solitude, peeling back layers of detachment and wit, only to find rot beneath. Beneath the clever remarks and the detached shrugs was a boy he believed to be entirely unlikable.

He often wondered what there was to like about him, really. Not the version that mocked others with effortless precision, nor the one who drifted among Slytherin’s elite as if he belonged there. That wasn’t him—not truly. That was theater. The real Theodore was quieter. Sharper. Sadder. And vastly more afraid.

You, somehow, had seen past all of it.

You—always arriving at the wrong moment with an uncanny knack for finding him when he was trying hardest not to be found. You, with your maddening calm and eyes that looked at him like he wasn’t broken glass but something worth touching. And it unsettled him. Deeply.

Because you didn’t seem interested in the version of him he had crafted for others. No, you seemed drawn—dangerously so—to the silences between his words, to the heaviness in his pauses. And it terrified him. Because if you saw him… really saw him… then surely you’d come to despise what he already knew to be true.

And yet—you stayed. Every damn time.

He didn’t understand it. Couldn’t. And Merlin, how he tried. That question, simple but suffocating, burned in his chest like the cigarette balanced loosely between his fingers: Why do you stay?

Theodore leaned against the cold iron of the Astronomy Tower’s railing, night air curling around him like a second skin. The cigarette, long since forgotten, continued its slow, smoldering death as his gaze found you—your silhouette softened in the moonlight, unknowingly beautiful. His eyes lingered, strained with the weight of thoughts he’d never say aloud.

He wanted to be cruel to you sometimes, just to see if you’d finally leave. And yet—he didn’t. Couldn’t. Because your presence, damn you, quieted the chaos in his head. When you were near, the noise dulled, the sharp corners of his self-loathing softened. You didn’t fix him—you weren’t some saint—but you stayed, and that alone made you dangerous.

You were his peace, and he resented you for it.

Resented how you made him feel in ways he wasn’t equipped to understand. Resented how close he was to letting you in, entirely.

You—so infuriatingly confusing, so achingly constant.

And Theodore, the boy who trusted no one, found himself wondering what it might be like… to believe that someone like you could love someone like him.

Even in the dark, even in all his ruin.

Especially then.