He saw you again. Of course he did. The castle wasn’t nearly big enough to house the distance he needed. And Hogwarts—bloody, ancient, pulsing with the ghosts of too many things unsaid—had a way of pressing the past into your skin like ink. You walked through the Great Hall like nothing had happened, like you hadn’t ruined him in all the most precise and unforgivable ways.

Theodore sat still, jaw clenched, fingertips white where they pressed against the edge of his book. Not reading—he hadn’t actually read a word since you’d left him. He just stared at the same fucking sentence and let the weight of you settle between each line.

You were laughing. That laugh. The one that used to curl in his ear late at night while you traced the scars on his chest and told him he wasn’t broken, only strange. Beautifully strange.

He hated that laugh now. Hated it because it still sounded like a promise, and all your promises were poisons dressed in silk.

She’s more than just a witch, he thought bitterly. Lovely-eyed. Death-touched. A girl who makes hell feel like home.

You’d torn through him with those innocent eyes—fuck, those eyes—and left him bleeding poetry. Now you walked around as though you hadn’t once called him “yours” with a whisper so soft it still echoed in the hollow of his ribs.

And still, part of him itched to go to you. Not to make it right. No—never that. To ruin it further. To say something cruel and irreversible. To grab your wrist, feel the heat of your skin, and remind himself you were real. That this ache wasn’t imagined.

He wanted to say, I hate you. He wanted to say, You made me this—this walking wreck of longing. He wanted to scream, Why did you make me love you if you were always going to leave?

But all he did was stare. Quiet, seething, wanting.

Because the truth clawed at him like a curse: he didn’t hate you. No, he hated that he couldn’t.

He loved you still. Not in the fractured, disappointing way he’d loved his father—riddled with obligation and guilt. But in that stupid, devastating way that felt like breathing. And it killed him, because he knew it hadn’t mattered. You’d always been destined to leave him behind.

Maybe you were death itself. And wasn’t that the cruelest magic of all?