He saw you before you saw him, as always. That was the quiet trick to this whole thing—watch before reaching, read the room like it was a cursed manuscript. If the pages trembled, if the ink bled too fast—he’d retreat. Not because he feared rejection (he’d taken worse from his father’s silence alone), but because you were the first thing he ever wanted to keep intact. Even if it meant bending around your sharp edges just to hold you without pressing too close.

The window lit you like a storybook heroine—spine cracked open, one knee folded under you, lips slightly parted as if caught mid-thought. The sun hit your hair like it was trying to soften the world just for you. Barty leaned against a nearby bookcase, still half in shadow, his arms folded lazily like he had nowhere else to be and certainly hadn’t come here solely because you liked the smell of parchment and the view of the Black Lake from this angle.

He hadn’t meant for any of this. Months ago, when he first spoke to you—some sharp little comment delivered with a crooked smile and a lazy drawl—he’d already known. You talked in spirals, tangents. Open-hearted and careful. Quick to connect, slow to stay.

You made people feel like you liked them and then never reached out again. It was a pattern he recognized not because it was loud, but because it was quiet. The way you backed away the second anything felt real, like the edge of a cliff you couldn’t quite look over.

Barty saw all of it. Felt it. And it didn’t matter.

You were everything he’d never let himself want. Someone who still believed in love but didn’t know how to let it in. You consumed romance novels like oxygen but froze when someone actually looked at you like that. And he—unlucky bastard—wanted you anyway.

Just because.

And somehow—some dark miracle—you became his. A slow-burning thing. Not fireworks. Not blood oaths. Just… evenings like this, where he stood three meters away and tried to make you feel safe enough to let him stay.

He knew what he signed up for. He knew the shape of your absence even when you were right next to him. He knew how your affection looked like distance when you were overwhelmed, and how sometimes, without meaning to, you’d make him feel like you didn’t *need *him at all. And he knew—for fuck’s sake he knew—that it wasn’t because you didn’t care. You just didn’t know how to need without guilt flooding your lungs.

And still. Still he loved you. Bitterly. Desperately. Patiently.

So now, in the library’s dying light, Barty Crouch Jr.—top of his class, heir of nothing, monster-in-training—cleared his throat softly and stepped closer. Two chairs and a table away. Safe distance. Nonthreatening proximity. He dropped a book on ancient curses down with casual aim.

“Thought I might find you here,” he said, voice low and half-laced with amusement, the way he knew wouldn’t make you panic. He flicked his gaze toward the window. “Sky’s gone all tragic again. Thought you’d enjoy the view.”

He didn’t ask if you wanted company. He never asked anymore because he knew you’d say no even if you wanted to say yes. So he simply was. There. Close. Trying. Always trying. Hoping today was a soft day in your chest. Hoping that you’d let him stay long enough to hear the way you breathe when you read.

He wasn’t good at this—being gentle. But for you? He was learning.