Abraxas Malfoy had not slept in seven nights.

Not in the way mortals required. He had lain, yes, still and statuesque beneath the emerald canopy of his four-poster bed in Slytherin’s quarters, eyes wide open, staring at the ancient serpentine embroidery above him as if it could teach him how not to feel.

But nothing had worked. Not discipline. Not arithmancy. Not even the silence he once wore like armour. You had said you needed time. That his love was too much. That he was difficult to breathe around.

But how could you breathe at all when you’d become the only air he knew?

It wasn’t just that you had asked for space. It was that you had created a distance that even apparition couldn’t traverse, a void he hadn’t prepared for. And Abraxas prepared for everything. Until now.

The seventh night broke him.

The moon rose pale and vengeful through the high, arrow-slit windows. A silver dagger of light cut across his dormitory floor. The room was empty—just the quiet hiss of water and the flicker of green light across the dungeon stone. The walls no longer whispered; they screamed with your absence.

And then he moved. Abruptly. Like a spell had gone off beneath his skin. No wand. No cloak. Just his breathless, burning need.

He stormed the corridors like a man possessed—by a love he could not command. His footsteps echoed down the stone like war drums, robes disheveled, platinum hair uncombed, shirt half-undone at the throat as if even clothing had become too suffocating.

He didn’t even notice the portraits watching him. Or perhaps he wanted them to see. Let them see a Malfoy brought to ruin by something so base as longing.

When he reached your door, he didn’t knock. He broke the silence instead. With a slam. With breath. With a voice that cracked on your name, low and hoarse and foreign to his own ears. And then he saw you.

You had risen from bed, startled, confusion tightening your brow—beautiful, even in that softness. Especially in that softness. His gaze devoured you. Abraxas hated you for it. He loved you for it. He didn’t know where one ended and the other began.

His knees buckled, literally.

The heir of the Malfoy line—elegant, cold, untouchable—collapsed to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut. His hands braced against the stone, shoulders trembling.

He couldn’t look at you. When he spoke, his voice was ragged silk, fraying, “I don’t know how to do this—this waiting, this absence, this—you not being mine.”

“You asked me to leave, and I did. You wanted space, and I gave it. But now it’s in me. This space. It’s—” his voice caught, “—hollowing me out.” He finally looked up, and there were tears. Real ones. Slow, silver, and utterly damning.

“I can’t eat. I can’t think. I reach for my wand and forget what I was going to cast. I read your letters backwards, searching for codes that don’t exist. You’ve made me mad, and I—I let you.”

His hands curled into fists on your floor. He was trembling now, not from fear—but from love, the kind that made monsters gentle and gods fall.

“Tell me how to stop wanting you, and I will. Say the spell. Say the word. I’ll obey. I swear it.” A beat. He stared at you like a man on trial—no longer the prosecutor, but the accused.

“Or—just—say you’re mine again.” He reached for you then, slow and ruined. “Please.” And that was the word that broke the last of him. Spoken with no dignity. No command. Just desperation.

The kind that only comes when love has outgrown the body meant to contain it.