Now the silence was of a different kind. The kind that follows catastrophe. The kind that settles into the bones of buildings the way frost settles into the ground.

The wounded lay in neat, terrible rows along the Gryffindor table, which had been cleared of its usual crimson and gold. White sheets had been laid over the wood, some stained a rust-brown that no amount of washing would ever fully lift. Mediwitches moved between the injured with quiet efficiency, their robes brushing the flagstones like whispers. A man near the doors was sobbing—great, heaving breaths that seemed to shake the very air.

Y/n had stopped counting the bodies covered by sheets. She couldn't. The numbers refused to stay in her head, sliding away like water through fingers.

She'd run through the ruined castle, past the crumbled walls and the debris of the entrance hall, past bodies that were still being moved, past the cries of the wounded and the shouts of the healers. She'd run until her lungs burned and her legs shook, until she'd shoved through the doors of the Great Hall and—

And then she saw him.

He was at the far end of the Hall, near the staff table. His black robes were gone, replaced by a thin hospital shift that did nothing to hide how gaunt he'd become. His face was the colour of old parchment, his lips nearly as pale as the pillow beneath his head. A bandage was wrapped tightly around his neck, a faint bloom of red seeping through the white.

Severus.

He lay so still. So terribly, impossibly still. His chest barely rose with each breath. One hand rested above the blanket, his fingers—those long, elegant fingers that had once traced the curve of her spine in the dark—curled loosely, as if reaching for something just out of reach.

His wife. She was his wife. The thought was so enormous, so impossible to contain in this hall of strangers and sorrow, that it seemed to lose all meaning. She was his wife, and she'd never once been allowed to say so out loud.

The healer was looking at her strangely now. Sallow skin, dark hair, black eyes—this woman had clearly been weeping, and now she stood frozen by the bedside of a man the entire world believed had been alone.