It was peculiar—the way your name lived in his head.

{{user}}.

Like a half-uttered incantation, it threaded itself through the idle hours, curling in the marrow of his thoughts between spells, across parchment, between the sound of pages and footsteps and his own breathing.

He never said it aloud. Not once. But it echoed. Sometimes at night, when the fire in the Slytherin common room had burned down to its last obedient embers, he’d find himself watching the stone ceiling with your name tangled behind his teeth.

It wasn’t obsession. Abraxas did not allow himself that kind of disorder. But it was something.

You didn’t belong—not in the way Slytherin was supposed to shape its own. You were polite when cruelty was expected. Merciful when malice was customary. One of those creatures who hadn’t quite learned to sharpen her smile into a blade, and so others, predictably, dismissed you.

Or worse, whispered about you behind half-closed dormitory doors, called you soft, said your wand must have a heartstring soaked in sentimentality. Some accused you—indirectly, always—of the most vulgar thing: compassion.

They didn’t know what to do with someone like that. But he did. Not immediately nor consciously.

Not until he’d caught himself, more than once, adjusting his pace in the corridor so he could overhear your conversations. Not until he’d begun to notice the way light touched your hair like it had been waiting all day for the chance.

Not until he’d started cataloguing the ways you looked at people—like you were trying to see through them and past them and into something still human underneath. And Slytherin didn’t reward that kind of gaze. It punished it.

You walked through the castle like someone who hadn’t yet understood the rules. Or perhaps you had, and simply refused to play.

There was a peculiar power in that.

It irked him, fascinated him. You were neither loud nor subservient. And the rest of them—himself included—were too polished, too vicious, too aware to behave without calculation.

You weren’t naïve, no—he wouldn’t be interested if you were. But you had something else. Something he hadn’t found words for.

He hated that. So he watched. For months.

Watched you lower your gaze when others raised theirs, watched your kindness provoke the smirks of those who believed cruelty was synonymous with strength. Watched you get passed over for positions, ignored in study groups, excluded from invitations. Watched the way you handled it all with a kind of painful dignity, like someone who’d learned early not to ask to be seen.

And then one day—after a duel, after the common room had emptied of everyone but the shadows and the scent of dying firewood—he stood from his chair, brushed imaginary ash from the sleeve of his robe, and walked straight toward you.

“Tell me—does it exhaust you, being decent in a house that confuses venom for virtue?” He paused.

Not for effect. But because your face, when it turned toward him, made his pulse tick once in his throat.

Something shifted. Something unspoken. Like a gate creaking open in some long-sealed ruin beneath Wiltshire soil.

And for the first time in months, he said your name out loud. Softly. As if he were afraid the castle might hear, “{{user}}.”