Four house tables stretched beneath the enchanted ceiling, hundreds of students scattered between them, forks clinking, conversations buzzing, absolutely nobody aware that the entire energy of the room was about to shift.

Then Theodore Nott walked through the doors.

And everything stopped.

Not dramatically. Not obviously. Just a subtle drop in temperature, a pause in laughter at the Slytherin table, a slow turn of heads as people noticed something was wrong before they even knew what.

Theodore’s stride didn’t falter. He walked straight toward the center of the Slytherin table, where the usual crowd sat. Draco. Blaise. Lorenzo. Sebastian. Quinn. Lenora. Pansy and Daphne on either side of—

Her.

Y/n.

She sat perfectly still between Pansy and Daphne. No tapping fingers. No impatient sigh. No sarcastic smile at something Lorenzo had said.

Nothing.

And somehow, that nothing was louder than anything she could have done.

He already knew something was wrong.

He stopped just before Y/n’s seat. Not too close, not too far. The kind of distance someone takes when they know they no longer deserve proximity.

Not one person.

Wonderful. An audience.

She didn’t look at him.

That silence made everything worse.

No, no, no.

Never start a confession with those four words.

The Great Hall didn’t gasp.

The Great Hall didn’t whisper.

The Great Hall fell so silent that a fork hitting the stone floor somewhere across the room echoed like a gunshot.

Nobody breathed.

Nobody spoke.

Every pair of eyes slowly turned toward Y/n.

She didn’t move.

Not even an inch.

Oh…

That wasn’t calm.

That was the terrifying kind of silence that comes right before absolutely everything falls apart.