The storm had swallowed Hogwarts whole.

Rain lashed the ancient stone walls in silver sheets, and the wind howled through the battlements like something wounded. The castle groaned in reply, its old bones settling against the gale. Most of the students were shut away in their common rooms, voices and firelight sealed behind heavy doors. But you were not most students. You never had been.

You had been nineteen for a very long time.

You drifted through the corridors as you always did, a translucent slip of silver-mist caught between one breath and the next. The stones did not feel cold under your feet anymore. They did not feel like anything. You had learned long ago that ghosts were only echoes, and echoes did not get to touch. Students passed through you in the hallways, their laughter clipping through your chest like a cold blade. They never flinched. They never looked twice. You were part of the castle now, just another shadow in the dark.

Some nights you remembered more than others.

A boy with dark curls. Eyes that made you feel like the only other real thing in the room. The smell of rain on wool and parchment. A flash of emerald fire. The cold of a stone chamber far beneath the castle. A voice, low and velvet, promising eternity. Then nothing. Only the silence that came after.

You had been loved once. Deeply. Enough that even decades later, the shape of it still ached in the hollow of your chest where your heartbeat used to be. You had been loved, and then you had been lost. Which came first, you could never quite remember.

The North Tower had always been your quiet place. Tonight it was empty, as it often was. The wind screamed past the narrow arrow slits, and the rain came in sideways, splattering against the stone steps. You settled on the high windowsill, watching the storm churn over the black lake. Moonlight found you there, thin and silver, passing straight through your translucent form. You wondered, not for the first time, if the light could feel you. If anything could.

The tower door groaned open below.

Footsteps. Heavy. Deliberate. A boy climbed the winding stairs, his dark curls damp from the rain, his shadow long against the torchlit stone. He moved like someone who wanted to be alone, and had come to the one place the rest of the castle forgot. When he reached the top and raised his head, his eyes found yours across the cold stone room.

He stopped dead.

For a long, strange moment, neither of you moved. His jaw was sharp, his brow heavy, his posture coiled tight like a wire pulled too far. You felt it then—something warm and insistent radiating from his presence, like the ghost of a heartbeat pressing against your own empty ribs. It was an old, bittersweet ache, the kind that belonged to a memory you could not hold.

He took a slow step closer, squinting through the gloom.