The letter arrived with the kind of bureaucratic cruelty that only the Ministry had perfected over decades of policy masquerading as reason, printed not on fresh parchment but on that soft, smudged kind they used for internal memoranda, the edges already curling as if the paper itself had tried to escape its contents before anyone had a chance to read them.
Theo recognized the handwriting on the envelope before he even opened it. The impatient scrawl belonged to a senior coordinator who had never liked him. Someone who had likely volunteered to assign him to the quietest corner of a cursed house out of spite or boredom or both. He didn't need to read more than the first three lines before his jaw started to tighten.
The directive wasn't a suggestion. It wasn't a temporary placement. It didn't even carry the cold indifference he usually preferred in bureaucratic orders. It was a command, barely dressed up as policy. Neat, clipped phrasing told him he was now expected to remain on-site with Miss Lovegood for an indeterminate amount of time. Not just guarding her from a distance, but living in the house with her. Cohabitating. Sharing a protective perimeter until the Ministry reassessed the threat level—or, more likely, until someone found a way to pass the responsibility off onto someone else.
He read the letter twice. Once standing, once seated. Not because he didn't understand it, but because he didn't trust the sensation creeping up the back of his neck. That low-bellied hum of inevitability. The quiet shift from assignment to something else. Something less structured. Something personal. This wasn't about policy anymore. This was proximity used as pressure. This was closeness as a tactic.
The next day, just past noon, under a sky the color of unspoken threats and salt-heavy clouds, he apparated to the edge of the cliff path. He had more than just his wand and his coat. The house stood groaning in the distance, crooked against the horizon, and the sea bared its teeth at the rocks below. Theo paused in the overgrown garden, standing a moment longer than he meant to.
He adjusted the strap of the travel bag over his shoulder. At his feet, a small trunk vibrated faintly with protective enchantments. And in his left hand, held without ceremony as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, was a reinforced clear carrier. Inside, nestled on a bed of hay, sat a guinea pig.
The creature was almost offensively fluffy, an unapologetically plump little ball of indignantly perfect fur, its body shaped less like an animal and more like an exceptionally overstuffed pastry that had rolled itself in cinnamon bark and honeyed cream. It blinked up at him with the serene, unbothered gaze of a creature that clearly suspected the entire world existed to provide it with snacks and admiration.
Artemis seemed to possess no understanding whatsoever of the storm-wrapped house it was about to enter, nor any real awareness of the man standing there who was already regretting this decision far more than he cared to admit. As he moved toward the door, boots crunching over the cracked stone path lined with twitching vines and half-muttering charms, he did not pause, did not hesitate, did not knock. He simply pushed the door open and stepped inside like he already belonged there, which, if he was honest, was a lie the house was very generously allowing him to tell for now.
Luna, who had been halfway through rearranging the knives above the hearth for reasons known only to herself and perhaps the fireplace, turned at the sound of the door and blinked once. It was not at the sight of his face that she reacted. She had already expected him. She had probably heard the change in the wind, probably counted the footsteps on the walk before he even reached the door. It was the animal in his hand that caught her attention, her expression flickering from calm to astonished in the space of a breath, then breaking into something that very nearly resembled delight.
"You brought a familiar," she said softly, her voice touched with something like awe, though it carried that same strange certainty she always seemed to possess, the kind of tone that made her words feel more like omens than questions. She stepped forward with an almost reverent curiosity, the kind one might show to a creature spun from the bones of dreams. "Does he speak in riddles or in rhymes?"
Theo did not answer right away. He set the carrier down on the table beside the stack of runes she had left drying in the sun, his movements deliberate, careful, as though some part of him was already second-guessing this decision. Then, with a low mutter that barely rose above the hum of the house around them, he said, "He is not a familiar. He is mine."
"So," she said, voice light but woven with something silkier, like she was already playing the opening notes of a melody only she could hear, "you have a pet?"
He didn't look up right away. He was kneeling near the base of the chair, adjusting the soft charms on the edge of the travel crate where the guinea pig had begun to fuss with a corner of straw, and his reply came low, gruff, almost distracted, but honest in the way only tired truths could be, "I like him."
That made her smile. Not widely. Just enough to register. Just enough for her eyes to narrow with that soft, delighted mischief she never tried to hide.
"So you have a soul after all."
Theo turned his head slowly toward her. Not with annoyance. Not even sharply. Just that same careful, measured movement he gave to strangers in alleys and ghosts in doorways. He was not hostile. But he was watching. Assessing. As if trying to determine what she might uncover if she kept speaking.
His mouth pressed into a thin line. Not quite displeasure, but close enough to carry its shape.
"Is there a reason for this conversation?" he asked.
His voice had settled back into its usual tone, cool and detached, smooth as stone pulled from deep water. "He's my pet. Please don't upset him."
Luna didn't flinch. She blinked once, slowly. The kind of blink cats give when deciding whether to tolerate you or leave the room. Then she took a step forward. Her gaze drifted to the carrier, where Artemis sat huddled in a nest of hay, blinking up at her with the expression of a creature who had seen too much and cared too little.
"Why would I do that?" she asked.
Her voice was soft. Almost innocent. As if she genuinely didn't understand why someone might accuse her of unsettling things, even when chaos followed her into every room and curled up beneath the furniture like a housecat with teeth.
Theo didn't answer right away.
He straightened. Brushed his palms against his trousers. His eyes remained fixed on the guinea pig for a long moment, as if trying to remember what had possessed him to bring the animal at all. As if the idea had made more sense before the house began whispering beneath the floorboards.
"He doesn't like many things," he said at last.
The words were quiet. Unassuming. But something inside them weighed more than they should have.
"And one of them is new people."
Luna tilted her head slightly, a glimmer sparking in her eyes that was too bright to be pure sympathy and far too amused to be mistaken for anything gentle. Then she stepped forward, just enough to lean down and peer more closely into the crate, her hair falling like pale waterfall silk around her cheekbones as she crouched with that strange, eerie grace that always made her seem half untethered from the ground beneath her.
"Does he have a name?" she asked, her voice soft and lilting, delicate as moonlight against glass, but her mouth was already curving in a way that promised trouble.
Theo crossed his arms and felt his jaw twitch, a muscle tightening beneath his cheekbone. "Artemis," he said flatly.
For a beat she said nothing, her face a study in serenity, but then, with the solemn air of one conducting an ancient rite, she lifted her hand and gave the guinea pig a soft, ceremonial wave, fingers fluttering as if greeting some small deity whose favor one did not dare take for granted. The gesture was perfectly absurd and entirely intentional. Without another word, she straightened, turned, and began to drift toward the doorway, moving with that strange composure that made it seem as though even the house arranged itself to let her pass.
She almost made it out without looking back. Almost.
But at the threshold, she paused. Her head turned halfway, her pale hair sliding over one shoulder, and her gaze flicked sideways to him, sharp and precise, her mouth tugging into a smile that was far too pleased with itself.
"You do know Artemis is a girl, right?" she said, light as air.
And with that, she vanished down the corridor.
Theo froze. Truly froze. It was not the kind of freeze born of anger or disbelief or even indignation. It was the stillness of a man whose brain had just misfired in slow motion, locking itself in place while the words echoed mercilessly through his mind. He looked down at the carrier. The guinea pig blinked up at him, round and fluffy and radiating the serene confidence of a creature entirely unbothered by such mortal concerns as gender.
Theo rubbed a hand down his face, slow and deliberate.
"How was I supposed to know?" he muttered to the empty room, to the carrier, to the house that was no doubt already laughing behind the walls. "They said he was a male."
Artemis sneezed.
Theo sighed, the sound long and weary. Somewhere in the corridor, faint but unmistakable, Luna's laugh rang once, bright and delighted, before the house swallowed it whole.
~
Theo began his job in the garden, though calling it that felt generous, considering the place more closely resembled a half-feral graveyard of broken hedgerows and creeping vines that curled toward him as if curious, twitching faintly at the edges of his boots like they'd never quite decided whether to strangle or shelter.
The path that led to the southern rise had been swallowed almost entirely by moss and brittle lavender stalks, the scent sharp and heavy, and somewhere beneath the loose stones, he could feel the pull of ley threads misaligned by time, dragging magic in slow, reluctant circles that weakened the surrounding field like a wound left to fester.
It was late in the day. The cliffs groaned beneath the weight of the wind. Below, the sea hissed against black rock with the restless rhythm of an old god muttering beneath its breath. Behind him, the house stood still, though not entirely. It seemed to lean westward ever so slightly, its angles wrong in ways that could not be seen all at once but could be felt, subtle and unsettling beneath the skin. He stepped past the threshold of the old garden wall, letting his fingers brush the wards that had once been laid to hold this place steady, though nothing here had felt steady in a very long time.
He knelt near the base of the eastern boundary stone, set his satchel on a patch of cleared earth, and began.
His hands moved automatically at first, chalk in one palm, thread unwound with careful fingers, charm-hammer balanced in his grip, ward nails driven into the soft rot of the fence posts that had long since surrendered their fight against the salt air. The muttered words that slipped between his lips came in a language he had only ever spoken for this purpose, an old tongue etched into his memory through repetition and necessity, a language that did not ask the world to obey but reminded it of what it had once promised.
The earth was wet from last night's rain. It clung to his knees. His palms smeared brown and green and salt when he pressed them flat against the mud to anchor the first rune deep. The magic didn't hum, not right away. It resisted, sluggish and lazy, like something half-asleep that resented being touched. But he didn't relent.
He never did.
Theo worked in silence for hours.
He moved clockwise around the perimeter, setting anchor stones in each cardinal corner, tracing lines of ash and powdered bone into the cracks between fence and cliff, whispering to the land itself until the wind began to turn in toward him instead of out. He marked sigils into the bark of the old hawthorn tree that leaned over the northern slope, and as he whispered the binding knot beneath its lowest branch, the tree shed a single leaf that landed on the nape of his neck like a benediction.
The farther he moved from the house, the deeper the magic changed.
Not darker. Not dangerous. Just older.
He could feel it through the soles of his boots, veins of magic that ran beneath the soil, cold and ancient, not malevolent but wild, the kind of raw earthbound energy that had no interest in being shaped. It did not push back. It simply waited, as though testing his intent before deciding whether to yield.
By the time he reached the western cliff's edge, dusk had settled fully across the sea, turning the water into a sheet of black glass that stretched endlessly toward the bleeding sky. He paused there, just for a moment, hand braced on a jagged rock as he squinted into the dark, the wind curling around him like fingers tangled in his collar, the chill cutting through his coat in a way that made it feel less like weather and more like warning.
The final ward went into the soil beneath a twisted root where the fence had collapsed into a scatter of rusted nails and splintered wood. He drove a copper stake deep, chanted once, twice, three times until the air shifted, until the pulse of magic beneath the dirt flared hot and clean and awake.
He leaned back on his heels, mud caked up to his thighs, hands trembling faintly with the weight of so many overlapping spells humming in his blood, and for a moment, the world was so still it felt as if the sea had stopped breathing.
By the time he finished resetting the last of the wards, Theo's body was humming with the kind of exhaustion that settled in bone rather than muscle, a deep, dragging weariness that came not from physical labor alone, but from the delicate, punishing precision of magic sustained over hours without pause, without food, without warmth, the kind of work that required more of him than he liked to admit even when no one was watching.
The dirt caked to his hands had long since dried and cracked, flaking from his knuckles like dried blood, and the chill had soaked deep into the seams of his coat, curling cold fingers around his spine as he trudged back across the broken garden path, boots sinking slightly in the damp soil, each step heavier than the last. The house rose ahead, still listing slightly to the left, the windows flickering with low light, as though the place had watched his work and now waited in smug silence, and he did not bother muttering his arrival as he stepped through the door. The wards would recognize him. They always did. He had built them that way, his own name woven into the anchor spell, just enough to keep out everything else.
He did not expect comfort. He did not expect tea. He expected silence, maybe the faint sound of the wind moving through the floorboards, maybe the hiss of the hearth sighing in the other room.
What he did not expect, what made his jaw tighten before he even fully crossed the threshold into the guest room, was her. Lovegood. Perched cross-legged in the center of his bed. His bed.
And not just perched like a trespasser or a momentary accident. No. She was settled. In his room. Completely and utterly at ease, as though the room had never been his to begin with, her pale hair draped over her shoulders in a loose, tangled braid that shimmered faintly in the low light, her fingertips stroking softly through the long fur of Artemis, who was currently sprawled across the pillow beside her like a willing disciple, and she was talking to the guinea pig in a low, murmuring tone that might have been lullaby or prophecy or something entirely between, her voice patient and sweet and utterly unbothered by the tension radiating from the doorway.
He stopped mid-step, mud dripping from the hem of his coat onto the wooden floor, and it took several long, taut breaths before he trusted his voice enough to use it.
"Do not touch him, Lovegood."
She didn't look up. Didn't stop stroking the guinea pig. Only smiled faintly and replied, voice maddeningly soft, "Her."
Theo's eye twitched. He inhaled slowly through his nose.
"I specifically told you not to upset…" and he swallowed, ground his molars together, then finished with restrained venom, "…her."
Luna didn't seem the least bit remorseful. She merely tilted her head, continued petting the guinea pig, who seemed completely uninterested in the escalating drama, and said with the smooth confidence of someone who had never once questioned her own place in the world, "She was lonely. And I'm good company."
He took a step closer. His fists clenched.
"According to who?" he asked, voice dangerously quiet, a threat coiled beneath each syllable, not because she frightened him, but because nothing about this house belonged to logic anymore, and he was too tired to pretend that it didn't bother him.
She looked at him then. Really looked. And with that same maddening calm, she answered, "According to Artemis. She likes being talked to."
Theo blinked.
He turned his face slightly toward the ceiling as though appealing to some long-suffering god, then muttered under his breath, "She cannot speak…whatever." His fingers twitched at his side, not quite reaching for his wand, not quite pulling away from the doorframe. "Please leave her alone. And leave my room. Please."
There was a pause.
Then Luna looked back down at Artemis with a final stroke of her fingers, rose slowly, smoothing her skirt with the lazy elegance of someone who had never once been in a hurry to obey, and as she reached the doorway, she stopped beside him, close enough that he could smell the faint trace of lavender oil and salt on her skin, close enough that the magic stitched into her hem brushed against his thigh like a soft warning.
She tilted her chin slightly, met his eyes, and said, with perfect serenity, "This is my house, Theodore."
And then she walked past him.
Like she hadn't just cracked something open with that single sentence and left it bleeding quietly behind her.
He stepped out of the shower with the kind of weariness that went beyond tired. It lived in the joints, in the spine, in the slow ache of muscles pulled too tight from crouching over wards and carving protection into salt-thick earth. Hours had passed like that. Bent low, breath held, sweat running between his shoulder blades. Now, even after the heat of the water, fatigue clung to him like mist. The kind of exhaustion that came from magic, not motion. The kind that settled into the marrow and stayed.
Steam curled around his ankles as he ran one hand through his damp hair. Water traced lazy paths down his chest and back, gathering at the hollow of his spine. He didn't reach for the towel. Not right away. This was his room. His corner of the house. The only space that didn't murmur when he closed the door. He had earned this moment, even if it wasn't rest. Even if it was only silence.
So when he opened the bathroom door, the fog of the shower trailing behind him in slow, heavy waves, he didn't expect to see her.
But of course she was there.
Lovegood.
In his room.
Again.
And not just passing through, not even pretending to be curious or lost. She was seated cross-legged on the floor beside the low table, talking to the guinea pig. Not absentmindedly. Not distractedly. But with the focused attentiveness of someone deep in conversation. Her head was tilted slightly. Her expression was calm. Artemis blinked up at her with his usual combination of confusion and long-suffering.
They looked like two witches at a séance. Ancient and strange. Sharing secrets over invisible tea.
Theo stopped mid-step.
Dripping. Naked. Cold now, despite the heat still clinging to his skin.
She looked up.
And for a moment, neither of them moved.
The silence didn't feel charged. It didn't feel dangerous. It just stretched, wide and surreal, until it pressed at the edges of his nerves. Until it became absurd. Until it became infuriating.
He stood there, water pooling at his feet, steam curling around him like breath, and all he could think was that this house was trying to break him in ways he hadn't trained for.
Something had to be said.
"For fuck's sake, Lovegood," he ground out, eyes narrowed, voice rough and half-wrecked from how little sleep he'd gotten, "privacy."
But she didn't flinch. She didn't apologize. She didn't look away from him or blush or stammer or even act remotely phased by the fact that he was standing there, completely naked, water still dripping off his collarbones, arms flexed with the kind of tension that made most people stop and reconsider their next breath.
Instead, she tilted her head slightly, gave Artemis one last affectionate pat, and said, with that unbearable calm that bordered on holy detachment, "I'm not interested in your cock, Theodore."
He blinked.
His entire body tensed from the sheer audacity of the statement, the dry, disinterested delivery of it, as though she were commenting on the weather.
And then she kept talking.
"Although," she added, eyes flicking downward with an infuriating hint of curiosity, "you may be God's favorite, judging by the size."
Theo turned scarlet in under a second, every drop of heat in his body surging to his face like a hex gone wrong, and he reached for the towel so fast he nearly slipped on the tile, yanking it around his waist in a motion that was more instinct than grace, hands knotted in the fabric like it was the only anchor he had left to reality.
"Lovegood," he snapped, breath sharp, eyes narrowed dangerously, "this is my room—"
She stood up slowly, gracefully, lifting something from the floor with both hands as she turned toward him, and the look she gave him wasn't mocking, wasn't angry, wasn't even particularly interested in his flustered state—it was amused, the kind of quiet, infuriating amusement that said she knew exactly how to hold a knife without ever touching the blade.
"At my house, might I add," she said coolly, as though his room were nothing more than a borrowed square of space she'd generously allowed him to occupy out of mild tolerance, and then she stepped closer, calm as moonlight, unbothered by his glare, her gaze flicking once more to the corner where Artemis sat untroubled on the pillow. "So if I decide to introduce Sol to Artemis," she said, tone maddeningly serene, "it is my grace. Guinea pigs need company. So do you."
And before he could summon a single word in reply, before his brain could untangle the furious embarrassment from the burn of half-swallowed insult and the fact that he was still dripping wet and half-hard from the shower and now holding a towel like it was a shield in a war he didn't remember signing up for—she stepped forward, gently, reverently, and placed a second guinea pig in his hands.
Small. Golden. Fuzzy as sin.
Then she turned on her heel and swept out of the room, bare feet soundless on the wood floor, braid swinging low across her back like punctuation, and she didn't say another word.
She didn't need to.
The door clicked shut behind her.
Theo looked down at the second guinea pig, now nestled against his chest, blinking up at him like this was all perfectly normal.
"Fucking hell," he muttered, towel barely hanging on, heart racing for entirely too many conflicting reasons, "what the fuck is a Sol."
The guinea pig squeaked.
And Artemis, from her spot on the pillow, squeaked back.
~
One thing became perfectly, undeniably clear by the end of the first month, not through any single revelation or thunderclap moment of clarity, but through the slow, relentless accumulation of signs that built themselves into certainty like frost forming along a windowpane, inch by inch, until the view beyond was no longer visible.
It was not something Theo would have admitted aloud, not even under pressure, not even in jest, and certainly not to her, but it was true in a way that could not be reasoned away, and he felt it with the same quiet surety as one feels gravity, or dread, or the weight of an emotion unnamed.
The house belonged to her.
The house bent toward her like light bends through glass, subtle and constant and absolute. It responded to her moods with a fidelity that was not conscious, not magical in the traditional sense, but alive. When she laughed, the floorboards held their creaks until after she passed. When she sang beneath her breath, those strange, off-rhythm tunes that felt like hymns for something older than gods, the air warmed, and the corners of the rooms softened, and the shadows tucked themselves politely into the edges of bookshelves.
And when she was pleased with him, the house responded in kind.
He hadn't noticed it at first. He was too busy counting the ward lines, anchoring symbols in the earth, tracking the fragile perimeter between this realm and whatever dream-world bled through Luna's presence like perfume. But eventually, it became impossible to ignore. The house was kind to him only when he was kind to her.
The tea would stay hot longer when he didn't correct her tone. The doors would open more easily when he replied to her questions without scorn. The runes he inscribed along the perimeter would hum louder, stronger, more stable, on the days when he let her speak without interrupting, when he let her sit beside him in silence, when he accepted her small offerings without sarcasm or tension.
But the reverse was also true.
On the days he let frustration get the better of him, when his voice grew sharp and his hands closed too tightly around nothing at all, the house would turn, imperceptibly at first, then with more confidence. Doors would stick. The wind would find its way through cracks that hadn't been there the night before. The lights would flicker when she left the room. His wards would take longer to settle. The floor outside his bedroom would creak endlessly all through the night, even when no one walked across it. Even Artemis would hide from him, nestling deep beneath her blanket and blinking at him with the cold judgment only an animal in love with her keeper could offer.
And Lovegood? She never acknowledged it.
Never pointed it out. Never smirked or gloated or offered a single verbal thread that might confirm what he already knew.
She simply went about her days with the quiet certainty of a woman who understood she had no need to enforce her reign—because the house, and everything inside it, would do that for her.
And Theo, for all his training, for all his control, for all the walls he had spent years learning to reinforce, found himself paying attention to her moods the way a soldier learns to read the sky before a storm. Not out of sentiment. Not out of affection. But survival.
Oh, and survival it was, because the woman he had been assigned to protect, live with, monitor, endure, was utterly, completely, almost religiously obsessed with animals, herbs, and books in quantities that defied logic and bordered on pathological.
It was not just that she enjoyed those things. No, enjoyment was too gentle a word, too pedestrian. Lovegood was possessed by them, woven into the roots of them, a creature whose entire being revolved around feeding, collecting, cultivating, and speaking softly to things that did not speak back, except, somehow, to her.
He could not pass through a single corridor without tripping over some half-woven herb bundle meant to ward off intrusive thoughts or hearing the faint sound of her reading aloud to plants as though they required narrative arcs. The windowsills were a chaos of sprigs and leaves and strange fungal colonies she swore were sentient. He found pressed wildflowers in the pockets of his coat and unidentified feathers stuck in the soap dish. And do not even get him started on the goddamn guinea pigs.
He hadn't had a peaceful afternoon in weeks. Not one. Not a single fucking moment of undisturbed quiet. He would settle into the far corner of the guest room with his files and his maps and the delicate runework he had to maintain by hand, a steaming cup of tea beside him that he had just poured, and then—without fail—the door would creak open with no knock, no announcement, no shame, and Lovegood would glide in like a ghost with an agenda, holding Sol in one hand like an offering and Artemis already tucked into the crook of her other arm, eyes shining with that particular kind of blissful disregard for his boundaries as she announced, without looking at him, that she was just bringing them together so they could "bond properly" and "become best friends" because "social bonding is critical to guinea pig health, Theodore, do try to keep up."
She said this every time. And every time he bit his tongue harder than necessary.
Until today.
Today, he didn't hold back.
Today, as she placed both guinea pigs gently onto the foot of the bed he had just finished making, smoothing the blanket beneath their tiny feet with a flourish that was far too ceremonial for rodents and sat beside them without so much as glancing in his direction, the silence between them stretching into something nearly theatrical in its defiance, he finally glanced up from his work with the slow, deliberate irritation of a man pushed an inch past his patience, leaned back in his chair like a prince entertaining a particularly disruptive subject, and said, voice low and dry and soaked in tired smugness that he didn't bother to disguise, "Lovegood, if you want to spend time with me, you can just say that."
She didn't blink. Didn't turn her head. Didn't even stop the lazy, rhythmic stroke of her fingers behind Artemis's ear, as if the comment had been nothing more than ambient sound, as if his presence didn't register on the scale of relevance, and her voice, when it came, was so calm and so level that it sliced clean through his ego without any effort at all, "Why would I desire someone's company who doesn't want mine?"
The words didn't sting at first. Not exactly. They landed soft, like mist, but crept in like cold, and it wasn't until a full breath later that he realized they had settled somewhere under his ribs, heavy and sharp and completely accurate. He shifted in his seat, stiffening without meaning to, recovering with a scoff, his hand flitting in an exaggerated gesture toward the scattered Ministry documents and rune diagrams on his lap like they were some kind of shield, "I'm working."
She turned to him then. Finally. But her expression didn't carry heat or malice. Her voice remained light, infuriatingly light, "You can leave, you know, right? Or, if you'd rather see your partner, he can come over."
He froze. Fully. His breath stalled. His grip tightened on the edge of the parchment in his hand until it crinkled. And for a moment, the world narrowed to the sound of his pulse kicking hard against the inside of his ears like it wanted to claw its way out. Partner. The word echoed with venom it didn't deserve, and he didn't know if she had said it to provoke him or if it was just another one of her eerie guesses, but it struck like a spell misfired at close range.
"I do not have a partner," he said, carefully, slowly, with each syllable dragged through grit and fire. "I don't have a girlfriend. I don't have a boyfriend. I don't have anyone. I'm here to work. I cannot leave you."
She blinked once. Tipped her head just slightly to the right, as though listening to something only she could hear, and then nodded with a serenity so intact it bordered on supernatural. Her lips lifted into a faint, composed smile that was neither kind nor cruel, simply present, and somehow that made it worse.
"Very well," she murmured.
Then, without flourish, without drama, she leaned down, kissed Sol gently on the top of the head like a tiny prince in need of nightly reassurance, scooped both guinea pigs into her arms with the kind of softness that made his chest hurt for reasons he did not understand and hated trying to, and walked out of the room with the unbothered grace of someone who knew the entire house would always open for her.
The door shut behind her with a soft click, the kind of sound that sounded too much like finality, and Theo sat there staring at the spot she had just vacated, surrounded by parchment and silence and the distant thud of his own humiliation still ringing in the back of his throat.
The silence returned.
But it wasn't peace.
It was the kind of silence that followed after a small earthquake, where everything might look fine but nothing would ever sit quite the same again.
He sat there, blinking at the now-empty spot where the guinea pigs had been, and tried to remember how to breathe.
This woman was absolutely mental. Completely and profoundly untethered from normality. She needed constant attention, constant stimulation, constant interaction, and he had no interest in providing any of it—except, maddeningly, she always managed to pull it from him anyway, like gravity, like heat, like something he never agreed to.
And it was fucking annoying.
~
By the fifth week, Theo had memorized the rhythm of the house at night.
It was not difficult, at least not at first. The house moved on a loop, breathing in long corridors and sighing into stairwells, its bones creaking predictably when the wind changed or when a window refused to latch properly. There were patterns, subtle and strange, but consistent enough to follow: a floorboard in the west hall that groaned not under weight but under silence, a chandelier that flickered only when passed beneath too quickly, a draft in the library that always came from the third shelf behind the alchemy books, as though the pages themselves exhaled when left alone too long.
Theo patrolled each night not because he did not trust the wards, he had laid them himself, each thread of protection woven with bone magic and precision, but because the house did not care about his work. It responded only to her, and when she slept, or claimed to, he moved through its belly like a stranger in a cathedral, alert, still, half-expecting it to shift around him like a dream.
The portraits watched him. Not all of them blinked, not all of them spoke, but some whispered too quietly to hear, lips moving behind glass, and some simply followed his movement with narrowed eyes, expressions sour or smirking or faintly amused, as though they knew why he kept walking the same halls even after the wards were settled. He ignored them. Mostly.
He carried no lantern. He didn't need one. The house glowed in odd places, pools of soft light blooming at the base of the stairs or beneath doorframes, casting his shadow ahead of him like a warning. He moved silently, boots muted by old charms and layered rugs, wand tucked into his palm more out of habit than fear.
He had just passed the second archway leading into the drawing room, the space chilled and quiet in that particular way reserved for rooms too old and too filled with memory to ever feel entirely empty, its fireplace long since gone cold, the embers dulled to a memory, and the enchanted painting above the hearth half-lost in a dream, snoring softly beneath its crooked frame, when the sound reached him. It was not loud. Not deliberate. It came like breath against a windowpane or the memory of a footfall long after the walker had gone, soft and barely there, so faint it might have been imagined had he not already learned the difference between what was real and what the house made real.
He heard the press of bare feet, the delicate creak of old wood shifting under no visible weight, and a sigh so light it could have been the house itself settling deeper into its bones, and he didn't turn. Not right away. Not because he didn't care, but because he already knew who it was. He didn't need to look. Because she never tried to hide.
She followed him the way she always did, like something elemental, like mist rolling in at dawn or the tide reaching for the edge of the shore, her movements unhurried, her posture unbothered, her pace drifting just slow enough to seem incidental, and yet never quite far enough to be unintentional.
She didn't speak. She never did when she did this. There were no greetings, no explanations, no declarations of presence. Just the soft repetition of footfalls behind his own, a steady echo half a beat too late to be mistaken for coincidence, trailing him through the corridor at a distance too far to invite conversation and too close to be dismissed.
Her steps made no sound, and yet he heard her. Or perhaps it wasn't his ears at all. Perhaps it was the house, ever-watchful, ever-whispering, tilting itself toward him in quiet conspiracy and murmuring along the walls that pulsed with old knowing, she's here, she's watching, as if the house could feel her gaze and decided, as always, to share it with him.
He walked a little faster now, with the quiet frustration of a man who knew he would be followed regardless, and she, without effort or even visible thought, matched his pace in that way she always did, unhurried yet perfectly in step, like her body had memorized the rhythm of his stride long before he'd noticed.
He came to a stop near the window that faced the sea, the old glass warped with time and memory, waves of imperfection catching the crooked light from the moon, which sat just above the cliff like an eye half-lidded in judgment or sleep, and the corners of the window were furred with salt, trapped there like sorrow, crusted like old tears that no one had bothered to wipe away, and he stood there, staring at the sky, at the edge of everything, longer than he needed to, not because he was lost in thought, but because standing still gave him a reason not to face her just yet, and his breath stayed even, his pulse annoyingly calm despite the way tension prickled just beneath his skin.
"Is there a reason you're following me?" he asked eventually, the words low and restrained, a blade dulled only by exhaustion, and still sharp enough to cut, voice clipped and even, as if each syllable had been measured carefully before being released.
Behind him, there was a pause that stretched a second too long, enough for the air to thicken, to shift, the house tilting just slightly toward the moment, as if holding its breath for the answer.
"I wasn't following," she said at last, and her voice was light, not playful, not teasing, but soft in that bone-deep way that settled between the ribs and hummed there like a lullaby, like something ancient and familiar murmured in the dark before sleep, and there was no flippancy in it, only the strange, steady calm she always carried like a second skin. "I was walking."
He turned then, slow, precise, as though unwilling to give her the satisfaction of anything so quick as a reaction, and she was already looking at him, eyes wide in the moonlight, unblinking in that way that always made his breath catch for reasons he would never admit, and her hair was loose, flowing in soft waves over her shoulders, catching the silver of the night like it belonged there, a tangle of light and shadow that framed her face like something carved from memory, and her nightdress was simple and thin and colored like dust clinging to a dying star, the hem whispering against the floor as if she moved without weight, and her arms were bare, always bare, the pale skin marked by faint ink that pulsed gently in the glow, runes that seemed half-awake, half-listening.
"Walking behind me," he said, quieter now, but still with that edge, the weight of correction folded neatly into the words.
She stepped closer, slow and thoughtful, hands tucked behind her back with the serene posture of someone who had never once been hurried in her life, her expression unreadable, her tone effortless. "You patrol like the house is a cage."
"It's my job to keep it safe," he replied, eyes not quite meeting hers, like safety was something he could claim without choking on the taste of it.
She smiled then, but it wasn't warmth or mockery. It was something gentler, something older, as though she were humoring him, as though the question she asked next was only half for him. "Safe from what?"
And he didn't answer, not because he refused, but because the answer didn't exist, or if it did, it was buried too deep to touch, and whatever words might have risen in his throat dissolved there, swallowed by the house and the night and the cold, watching moon.
The house wasn't dangerous. Not in the way most places were. It was just… full. Thick with things that didn't like to be seen, and things that liked to be seen too much.
And she, as always, moved through the space not as a guest or an intruder or even a companion, but as someone whose breath the walls had memorized, whose silence was stitched into the seams of the floorboards, whose presence bent the very architecture toward ease and warmth and belonging, as if the air itself parted slightly when she walked so as not to impede her passage, as if her existence belonged more to the bones of the house than to the world of the living that fluttered nervously beyond its edges.
She took another step forward, slow and deliberate, her bare feet soundless on the cold wood, each movement so quiet it might have been imagined had he not already begun to measure his awareness by the pulse of her nearness.
"I like the way you move through it," and her words lingered for a breath too long before continuing, "like you expect it to hurt you."
He didn't meet her eyes, didn't soften his stance or temper the edge in his tone, only muttered under his breath, jaw held tight with resistance he could no longer properly name, "I don't expect anything."
Her response came quieter, but not gentler, and it was the gentleness itself that made it cruel, because she said, "Liar," with a kind of patience that turned his bones to stone.
The quiet between them didn't bristle, didn't sting, didn't explode into the kind of shouting match he was better trained to handle. Instead, it settled around them like snowfall, full of breath and softness and the ache of something unspoken, something that swelled instead of broke. He should have told her to return to her room, should have asserted again that he didn't need anyone watching him patrol hallways that bent toward her like supplicants, should have reminded her that he liked his space quiet and empty, untouched by the scent of salt and lavender that followed her like a second skin, but his tongue stayed heavy behind his teeth.
Because she was already turning, already stepping away from him and gliding further into the corridor, her pale silhouette catching the dim light like a memory on the edge of fading, no longer following him but leading, and the house, unrepentant, treacherous, always hers, responded to her movement the way trees respond to wind. The sconces along the stairwell bloomed to life one after the other in slow, obedient sequence, each flame warm and gold and beckoning, as if the house itself recognized her as sovereign and bowed in silent devotion.
Theo watched her, silent and still, his thoughts as knotted as the string around his wrist, then turned and kept walking, not because he had anywhere left to go, but because forward motion was the only answer he had left to give the house that no longer listened to him, and the woman who never had to try to be heard.
Because if he allowed the silence to fill the space between them, if he let it speak for him in place of words he refused to say, he was no longer certain what it would reveal. He did not trust what it might pull from beneath his ribs and pour out into the dark.
~
He woke to the sound of whispering. It was so soft at first that it barely rose above the beat of his pulse or the fading edge of the dream he had just escaped. It was more breath than voice, more thought than sound, curling at the edges of awareness like the chill of an open window in a room that should have been closed.
It was not a voice in any ordinary sense, not the kind of sound people meant when they said they heard someone. It was deeper than that, older, a presence made of breath and stillness and memory, brushing lightly against the inside of his mind like an idea that did not belong to him.
There were no creaking floorboards. No whisper of wind beneath the door. No shift of weight or disturbed magic to explain it. Yet it was close. Too close. As if the house had chosen not to speak through its walls or windows, but through him. As if it had woven its words through his thoughts with an aching, reverent intimacy that turned the air in his lungs to ice.
She's hurting.
Those two words, no louder than a breath caught on a memory, struck him harder than a scream, cold and unyielding and impossible to ignore. He shot upright, the motion violent and half-conscious, his body reacting faster than thought, breath caught somewhere between ribs and throat, his pulse hammering with the urgency of something primal and deeply known. He spun toward the sound even though it had not come from any direction he could name, wand already in his hand before his feet touched the floor, every muscle coiled tight, every instinct drawn sharp with the kind of focus born not from logic but from the deep, unspoken recognition that something was wrong, deeply wrong, and the wrongness was hers.
But there was no one in the room. No attacker, no specter, no trick of light or illusion of sound. The corners were still shadows. The paintings were still asleep. The night pressed quietly at the window like it always did, heavy and damp with mist, and for three full seconds he stood perfectly still, chest heaving, wand raised, until understanding settled like a cold coin dropped into the center of his spine.
The house had spoken to him.
Not through Lovegood's voice. Not through the ambient murmurs of ancient enchantment laced into its walls. But directly. Intimately. Personally. It had reached inside him and woken him, and that realization bloomed with a kind of terrible finality.
He was moving before the next thought fully formed, feet bare, breath still uneven, limbs caught somewhere between control and urgency, the wards flickering faintly beneath his steps as he passed over each rune-etched plank of the corridor, crossing through the seam of the house that separated his room from hers.
The air changed the moment he crossed the invisible boundary into her side of the home. It thickened. Dipped. Slowed. As though the magic here breathed differently, older and more fragile, like a bruise that hadn't quite healed. He could feel the presence of the house still watching, still aware, and as he approached her door, the hinges offered no resistance, swinging open with the eerie smoothness of something that had already expected him to come.
She was there. Curled tightly on her side, body folded in on itself, back to the room, knees drawn in and arms wrapped beneath her chest like she was protecting something precious or hiding something broken. Her silver hair fanned out over the pillow in a tangle of moonlight and motionlessness, and there was no candlelight, no illumination but the dim, watery glow of the moon through the fogged glass of her window. It painted her in shades of silence, in layers of blue and silver and something so vulnerable he nearly forgot to breathe.
He could feel the pain before she spoke. Not a sharp pain. Not a scream. Something gentler, sadder. The ache that lives in the breath of someone who has long since grown used to hurting quietly. The kind of pain that doesn't demand attention, but waits, folded neatly into the corners of the body, into the creases of a night like this, so quiet it became sacred.
"What's wrong?" he asked as he stepped into the room, his voice lower than it should have been, barely audible over the sound of the house itself breathing around them. "What happened?"
She didn't lift her head. Didn't look at him. Only pressed her face deeper into the cradle of her elbow and murmured with a softness that tried to dismiss but could not quite hide, "I'm okay, Theodore."
But she wasn't. And he knew it. Because the house had told him. And he had listened.
The lie was transparent, too soft to stand on its own, and he didn't hesitate. He knelt beside the bed and slid his arms beneath her in a single, fluid motion, lifting her as though she weighed nothing at all, and when her body folded into him without resistance, without protest, he felt the shape of her pain pressed beneath her skin like a storm drawn out over hours. He held her tighter without meaning to.
She made no sound as he carried her through the corridor, one arm hooked beneath her knees, the other wrapped firmly around her shoulders, her breath quiet against the hollow of his throat, and the house responded to each step he took, lights brightening slightly as they passed, temperature warming degree by degree until the air no longer stung. He moved into the kitchen without ceremony, setting her down gently on the long bench near the hearth, the fire leaping higher the moment she settled beside it.
"I'm making tea," he said without waiting for her permission, his voice still carved from frost, but his movements precise and practiced as he moved through her kitchen like someone who didn't want to belong to it but had learned its map by heart.
He was already pulling down the ceramic jars she kept tucked behind the mismatched mugs, already reaching for the small vial tucked like an afterthought into the farthest corner of the highest shelf. The vial was dark, amber-glassed, filled with a blend of pain relief potion she'd brewed herself weeks ago and then promptly forgotten. Of course he'd noticed. Of course he remembered.
"I'm also giving you something for the cramps," he added, his tone clipped and dry, but not unkind, the way he always sounded when he was trying very hard not to be gentle.
"I'm fine, Theodore," she said again, the words soft but stretched too thin to stand.
He didn't answer her right away. Didn't turn. He just stood at the counter with his back to her, pouring boiling water into the teapot with a focus that looked like silence but felt like worry. "Well," he said eventually, his voice quieter now, less brittle, almost conversational. "The house told me you were hurting."
That made her pause.
He felt it before he heard it—the stillness that settled behind him like held breath, too quiet to ignore, too loud to be mistaken for anything but surprise. And when he glanced over his shoulder, just briefly, just enough to check without making it obvious, she was already watching him with those wide, moonlit eyes, her expression unreadable beneath the blanket he hadn't seen the house lay over her.
"It happens every month," she said after a moment, barely louder than a breath, the confession pulled from somewhere raw but familiar. "And it's—"
"I know how cycles work, Lovegood," he cut in, not cruelly, not mockingly, but with the kind of dry reassurance that tried not to sound like concern. He turned back to the teapot, checking the steep like he'd done it a thousand times, and maybe he had, in his head. "And I know I'm supposed to be understanding. Attentive. Gentle. Gently relieving your cramps. That's what I'm doing. You're awfully pale."
She didn't laugh, not even a smirk, but her resistance quieted. Her silence softened. She didn't reach for a rebuttal this time.
"It will pass," she said quietly, not with finality, but with that same weary distance people used when they meant to say this is how it is, not this is what I want.
He walked to her without hesitation, the mug in his hand warm and fragrant, steam curling up in gentle spirals that seemed to glow against the dim light of her room. The herbs had steeped perfectly. He could smell the ghost of wormwood and marigold, the gentle edge of white willow bark, and the faintest hint of mint—fresh and wild and soft, the exact kind she once told him made her feel like her mother was nearby. He hadn't forgotten. Not one word. Not one flavor. Not one detail she gave away like it was nothing.
"This will help," he said as he approached, and this time there was no edge in his voice, no scoff folded into his tone, only something quiet and stubborn and real.
He held the mug out to her with one hand, and when she took it, she didn't look at him, but she didn't resist either. Her fingers curled around the porcelain like she trusted it. Like she trusted him. Or maybe just the tea. But it was enough. And he stayed standing there beside her, not hovering, not pacing, just standing, arms crossed lightly as if to keep himself in place, watching her sip the first slow mouthful, the steam trailing across her cheek like breath. And for just a moment, everything in the room slowed. Quieted. Held its shape.
She didn't thank him. She didn't need to.
And when she rose a few minutes later to return to her room, pale and slow and wrapped in silence, she found her bedding already changed, the sheets warmed with a charm he hadn't taught the house, the pillows fluffed, the scent of crushed lavender on the air. The temperature had risen by three degrees. The runes above her headboard glowed softly in the darkness.
She didn't say anything.
He didn't mean to stay in the hallway.
He didn't intend to linger outside her room, not like a ghost, not like a man too affected by something he should have already pushed aside. He told himself he was just waiting. Just making sure the potion took effect. Just listening for any sound that might signal pain or fever or something worse the house couldn't fix. He told himself it was duty, the kind that came with his assignment, the kind that made sense. And maybe part of him still believed that. Maybe a smaller, quieter part already knew it wasn't the whole truth.
The door was cracked, just enough for the firelight to spill out in a faint golden line across the hall. The soft scent of the tea still lingered on the air—mint, lavender, wormwood. He stared at the floor where the light fell. His heart was quieter now. Slower. Not calm, not really. Just waiting.
And then he heard her.
Not loud.
Not even certain she meant it to be heard.
A breath. A whisper. A thread of sound that wove itself through the doorway and caught on the air like silk caught in thorns.
"Thank you."
He didn't move. Didn't breathe for a moment. The words settled into him with a strange finality, soft and heavy, as though they'd been meant for something larger than just the moment. She hadn't said it for effect. She hadn't said it to be acknowledged. She had said it because she meant it. And for reasons he didn't want to examine, it hit harder than anything she'd said to him in weeks.
He stood there, rooted, eyes on the narrow sliver of light, and behind it, the house responded.
The runes in the hallway pulsed once. A breath moved through the walls. The floor beneath his feet seemed to settle, as if pleased. As if she had done something right, and now he was being rewarded for hearing it.
He swallowed hard.
The instinct to walk away was sharp and immediate. He had always been good at retreating before things grew too close, too complicated, too real. But something in him stayed.
Because the house had spoken to him earlier.
Because she had taken the tea.
Because the way she had looked at him—pale and pain-drenched and open in a way that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with trust—had cracked something in him that had never quite been whole in the first place.
He leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, and let himself listen.
Not for danger.
Not for noise.
But for her.
And for the first time since he arrived, he realized, truly realized, that she might not be the only one who belonged to this house.