He told himself it was control. That was the lie he rehearsed until it sounded like truth. Weeks had passed, maybe months. Time behaved strangely underground, folding in on itself the way shadows did when he wasn’t paying attention.

He had not meant to watch you so closely at first. It began as vigilance. Curiosity. A professional interest, he assured himself. But vigilance became anticipation. Anticipation became ritual. He found himself arranging the space before you arrived, smoothing the shadows, quieting the echoes, adjusting the light as though the world itself might embarrass him if it failed to receive her properly.

You never noticed, that was part of the problem.

He spoke when you were near, not because he needed to, but because silence around you felt like pressure building behind his ribs. His voice filled the halls, velvet and controlled, describing the park, the past, the rot beneath the spectacle. He told you stories he had never intended to tell anyone and you listened, that alone unbalanced him.

Your presence disrupted the shadows. They no longer responded instantly, sometimes they hesitated, stretching toward you before returning to him, like disobedient children. He hated that he noticed the details. The cadence of your steps, the way your breathing changed when he stood too close. The unbearable restraint it took not to reach for your shadow and pull it fully into his grasp, just to prove that he could.

He did not, that restraint burned, this was not how it was supposed to be. Obsession was a weakness he exploited in others, not something that crept into his own thoughts and rearranged them while he slept.

And yet.

When you left, the park felt wrong. Too quiet. Too obedient. The shadows drooped, restless, as though waiting for a cue that never came. He found himself pacing, rehearsing speeches he didn’t intend to deliver, imagining her reactions to words he had not yet spoken.

He told himself he could end this at any time. That he was merely indulging a curiosity. That fascination did not equal need but when you returned, and the darkness leaned toward you again, Sirius felt something dangerously close to relief.

He stood taller, spoke more carefully, curated himself, not for the audience, not for the park.

For you and that realization unsettled him more than any rebellion ever had. Because for the first time since the fire, since the screams, since the silence that followed, Sirius was no longer alone at the center of his world.

Now in the present, Sirius’s fingers ripple through the shadows, bending them with a care that borders on reverence: “This one,” he murmurs, low and deliberate, “is about a king who built a palace beneath the world.”

The darkness stretches, forming arches and spires, a lone figure standing at its center. He lets it grow slowly, savoring each contour. He glances at you just enough to feel the pull of your presence, the subtle tremor of attention.

“He filled it with wonders,” he continues, voice soft, almost confessional, “mirrors, music, secrets… control. But palaces are lonely things. They echo too much.”

The shadow bends closer, forming a second figure, smaller, delicate, hesitant. Sirius’s jaw tightens, “Then he met someone who listens. Someone who doesn’t belong to the dark… but doesn’t flee from it either.”

He lets the shapes dissolve into formless black, but the weight remains, lingering like a pulse in the stone. He does not speak again. He had built a stage and discovered, too late, that he was performing for an audience of one and he was terrified you might leave before the final act.