Mattheo had barely ever noticed you.

Six years of sharing the same air, the same corridors and classrooms. And somehow, your presence had evaded him—like a whisper lost in the wind, like the last flicker of a candle just before it died out.

You were there, yes. But you had always been quietly there. A ghost in the back row. A shadow behind a textbook. Always perched on the edge of things, watching life unfold like it belonged to someone else.

He remembered the first time his eyes really found you.

Not in the way they wandered lazily over the classroom out of boredom. Not in the way he scanned the room to size up who’d make for decent conversation or entertainment. No, this time, his gaze paused. Froze, actually.

It was in Potions, of all places—Slughorn droning on about Amortentia, its silvery steam curling like a lover’s breath in winter. And you were sitting there, three stools down, chin dipped, fingers curled tight around your quill like it was the only thing keeping you grounded. Eyes locked to your parchment as if the ink were sacred scripture.

You didn’t fidget like the others. Didn’t giggle. Didn’t look up. And that stillness—it gripped him.

Your name didn’t surface in his mind, not immediately. That annoyed him. He’d remembered the exact color of the bruises he gave a Ravenclaw two years ago in a corridor fight, remembered how Blaise liked his tea and which day Theodore’s hands trembled when he wrote. But you? Six years and you’d gone unnoticed like fog over the lake before dawn.

You weren’t invisible. You chose it. That was the difference.

There was something deliberate in your silence. Something almost arrogant about the way you kept to yourself—not out of fear or rejection, but as if you’d measured the world and found it wanting. It unsettled him. Intrigued him, in the most unexpected way.

After that day, he began to see you.

Noticed the way you never sat too close to anyone, how you always had one hand curled beneath the table, as if hiding a tremble—or a secret. Noticed how you smelled faintly of ink and pine, how your robes were always meticulously neat, even if your hair rebelled in small, soft tendrils. Noticed how you never looked up when people passed you, like their attention meant nothing—and maybe it didn’t, because you had never once tried to earn it.

He found himself wondering what your voice sounded like when it wasn’t answering a teacher’s question. Wondering what your laugh would sound like if you ever gave someone the privilege of hearing it. Wondering what kind of thoughts brewed behind those eyes that never met anyone’s for long.

Mattheo Riddle, the boy born of fire and raised in shadows, who could read a person with a single glance, suddenly couldn’t get a grip on a girl who refused to be seen.

And just like that—quietly, suddenly, irrevocably—he wanted to know you.

Not in passing. Not in fragments. But completely.

And if that meant burning down your silence brick by brick, he would. Slowly. Carefully. With the same focus he gave when he carved the edge of a blade or kissed the side of a neck.

He’d make your mystery unravel.

And in doing so, maybe, just maybe—He’d finally meet someone who didn’t fear the ruin he carried in his chest.