Chapter Text
The year weighed down like a curse — not loud, not violent, just constant. Like wearing shoes filled with stones, each step slower than the last. The corridors of Hogwarts, once chaotic with teenage hexes and shouting matches, had turned eerily calm. Not peaceful — nothing about it felt like peace — but quiet, the kind of quiet that made the hairs on your arms stand up. Prefects no longer patrolled with urgency. Teachers rarely raised their voices. It was as if the entire school had been put under a muffling charm.
It felt like an asylum, Euijoo thought, and not the healing kind.
"You’ve got to stop."
The words broke through the haze like cold water. Euijoo looked up, slow and exhausted, from the Marauder’s Map splayed in front of him, its surface ink-stained and soft from overuse. His eyes were ringed with shadows, his mouth slightly ajar like he’d forgotten how to close it.
"What?" he rasped.
Maki stood across from him, his brow furrowed, voice low but firm — the kind of careful tone he used when he was worried and already bracing for Euijoo to ignore him.
"You’re obsessed, mate," Maki said gently. "You’re on that map every free minute, scanning every hallway, every tower, every hidden corridor like you think he’ll suddenly appear and explain everything. What are you waiting for, honestly? To bump into him? For him to... what? Say sorry? Tell you you were right?"
Euijoo didn’t answer. He stared back at the map as though it might offer him an excuse. But it was just parchment now, silent and unhelpful.
Maki sighed and pulled out a chair, dragging it close. “I’m not saying you’re wrong to care, okay? I get it. But this—” he gestured to the map, the dark hollows under Euijoo’s eyes, the untouched plate of food nearby, “—this isn’t helping you. And it’s not going to help him either.”
Euijoo blinked slowly. “If something happens... and I’m not paying attention...”
“Then something happens,” Maki said, not unkindly. “But you can’t hold the whole war in your hands, Euijoo. You’re sixteen. You’re not a general.”
“I’m not trying to be a general,” Euijoo muttered. “I’m trying to stop a friend from becoming something he can’t come back from.”
Maki looked at him, and for once didn’t try to argue, so he simply said, “I know.”
Euijoo closed the map slowly, fingers trembling at the edges, and looked up at Maki with eyes that were sharp and dull all at once — worn down, too tired to spark but still flickering with a stubborn kind of fire.
"I'm fine," he said, flat and dismissive.
But none of them believed that. His friends could feel it — the twitch of his shoulders when footsteps echoed down the corridor, the way his eyes darted whenever a crowd shifted, the constant vigilance. It wasn’t focus anymore. It was paranoia.
“He cares.”
The words came a few days later, quiet, nearly lost under the whistle of wind as Maki and Euijoo trudged together across the frosted grounds. Their coats were buttoned up to their necks, hands jammed into their pockets. Winter was arriving hard and fast, biting through wool like teeth.
Euijoo didn’t look at him. His voice was frayed, bitter with exhaustion. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I know—” Maki hesitated, then pressed on, “I used to know Nicholas. And I don’t believe he’d really hurt anyone. Not fully. Not where he couldn’t come back from.”
Euijoo shook his head, jaw tightening. “This isn’t about school anymore, Maki. This isn’t about pranks or fights in the corridor. There’s something going on. I know it — I can feel it, and it’s real. And if we just sit back—”
He broke off, his breath clouding in front of him.
Maki didn’t interrupt. He just looked at Euijoo with quiet concern, and not for the first time, it felt less like he was arguing and more like he was watching someone unravel — a friend slipping into the space between determination and delusion.
And Euijoo, for all his certainty, could feel it too — the unsteady edge of something he couldn’t name.
Exams had started to lose their meaning.
What once loomed with anxiety and pressure now felt like a distant, almost absurd concern. More and more students were skipping classes. Some had already dropped out. Maybe their parents had pulled them from school; maybe they'd left of their own accord — to prepare for the real world, the one that didn’t come with marks or House Points or N.E.W.Ts. The world where war wasn’t an abstract fear but a pressing certainty.
Euijoo knew the truth no one wanted to say out loud: the war wasn’t on the horizon anymore. It was already here, inching its way into every shadowed corridor, every owl post full of bad news, every empty seat in the Great Hall.
And they were just kids. The adult world was still out of reach, but the consequences weren’t waiting.
One night, as he buttoned his pajama shirt with slow fingers, Euijoo glanced around the dormitory, quiet with the hush that came after curfew.
“Oi, where’s Fuma?” he asked, casually at first.
There was a beat of silence before Taki, sprawled on his bed, rolled onto his side to look at him.
“I think he’s not here.”
Euijoo frowned. “What? Not here as in... not in the dorms?”
Taki shook his head. “Not at Hogwarts.”
“What?” Euijoo blinked, confused. “What do you mean?”
“Lots of seventh-years have left,” Taki said softly, like the words might carry too far. “They’re of age. They’re worried more about staying alive than passing Transfiguration.”
It struck Euijoo like a punch, that hollowing kind of clarity. The space where Fuma used to read, always sitting near the fireplace; the absence of his laugh in the common room — they weren’t temporary. They were deliberate. Permanent.
He stood frozen, his hands still on the last button of his shirt, as Harua entered from the bathroom, rubbing at his damp hair with a towel.
“They’re scared,” Harua added quietly. “Their families want them home. Some of them want to fight."
Euijoo didn’t know what to say to that. There was nothing to say. Just the soft rustle of the castle breathing around them, and the distant sense that things were shifting beneath their feet — like the stone foundations of Hogwarts itself had started to crack.
Hogwarts is the safest place, Euijoo kept telling himself, the safest place.
But even those words had started to feel empty.
One night, lying in bed with his back against the headboard and his wand casting a faint glow, Euijoo stared down at the Marauder’s Map. His eyes, bleary and rimmed red from too little sleep, blinked in disbelief. Nicholas was alone. More than that—he was outside the Slytherin common room. Wandering.
Euijoo didn’t think. He just moved.
He didn’t offer Maki an excuse, didn’t pause to explain where he was going. He could feel Maki’s eyes on his back as he slipped out the dormitory door, robes thrown over his pajamas, footsteps quick and quiet against the stone floor. The map guided him steadily, the flickering ink of Nicholas’ footsteps pulling him down corridors and staircases until—
The prefects’ bathroom.
Euijoo hesitated, his hand on the door. Then he pushed.
Nicholas was standing at the sink, gripping its edges like they were the only things anchoring him to the earth. He was murmuring to himself—low, unintelligible words that echoed off the tile. Euijoo saw him first in the mirror: tousled hair, dark circles, a look of careless exhaustion that didn’t suit the Nicholas he remembered.
It hurt, somehow, how far gone he looked.
“Why are you here?” Nicholas’ voice, hoarse and sharp, sliced through the air. He hadn’t turned, but somehow, he’d known.
Euijoo stepped in, cautious, keeping distance between them. “I should be asking you the same thing.”
Nicholas turned to face him, his sneer brittle, almost automatic. Up close, he looked worse. Washed-out. Unmoored. Like something had come loose in him and he didn’t know how to fix it.
“Nicholas…” Euijoo breathed, the name coming out quiet, laced with a concern he no longer had the strength to hide.
“Stop,” Nicholas said flatly.
Euijoo swallowed. He was suddenly, viscerally aware of the reason he’d come. Nicholas was hiding something. He had to be. Something important. Something dangerous.
But now, standing in front of him—Nicholas looking like a storm barely holding its shape—Euijoo felt the weight of doubt settle in his chest.
“I know you’re hiding something,” Euijoo said, voice steady and stern, though his insides twisted. “I’ve been watching you—”
Nicholas flinched. His hands twitched at his sides. For a moment, Euijoo thought he might reach for his wand—but he didn’t. Instead, Nicholas looked away, jaw clenched, as though weighing the weight of his own silence. When he turned back, his eyes were guarded, fortified behind walls Euijoo recognized all too well.
“You have no idea,” Nicholas murmured, voice low and raw. “You have no fucking idea.”
Euijoo winced at the venom in his tone, but didn’t back off. He bit the inside of his cheek and held Nicholas’ gaze. The tension between them was suffocating. Hatred, grief, longing—it all pressed in, heavy and invisible, choking the air between words.
“Then tell me,” Euijoo said, voice softening. “Tell me what’s going on. I—”
“No,” Nicholas hissed, fists clenching tighter. His whole body was trembling now. “…no.”
But Euijoo, stubborn as ever, stepped forward again. He never knew when to shut up, probably his worst trait. Nicholas twitched at the motion, flinching ever so slightly, and Euijoo saw the shake in his hands.
“You’re afraid,” Euijoo murmured, reading him like a map, like he’d always been able to.
Nicholas’ face twisted—anger, or something dangerously close to grief. “You think this is fear?” he snapped. “You think I’m just wandering the halls having some sort of emotional episode?”
“I think you’re in over your head,” Euijoo said, calm despite the tightness in his chest. “And I think you don’t want to be.”
Nicholas scoffed, bitter, exhausted. But he didn’t deny it.
“My mum says the Ministry’s watching your family,” Euijoo went on. “Says Aurors have died. This isn’t just about your father anymore. It’s bigger than him. Bigger than you.”
Something cracked, quiet and terrible, behind Nicholas’ eyes. His hand twitched again, and Euijoo instinctively braced—but Nicholas didn’t draw. He didn’t lash out.
Instead, his expression crumpled in some private, devastating way.
“Do you think I don’t know that?” he whispered, and his voice was grave, low, and laced with something close to despair. “Do you think I sleep at night? Do you think I’ve got choices? You don’t know what they’ve done, what they’re doing. You don’t know what they’re asking of me.”
Euijoo’s breath caught in his throat.
“Then tell me,” he said again, desperate now. “Let someone help you.”
“I can’t.” Nicholas shook his head, and now he was trembling—barely, but enough. As if holding everything in had started to crack him open. “You don’t understand. If I tell you—if anyone knows—my father—”
Euijoo stepped closer again, and this time, Nicholas didn’t flinch.
“And after that, what?” Euijoo said quietly. “Will your father be okay? Will you be okay?”
The question hung heavy in the air between them, weighty and sharp. Nicholas met his gaze, eyes wild and bloodshot, and for one terrible second, Euijoo thought he saw tears—just a glimmer, just a moment. But then Nicholas blinked, and it was gone. The moment slammed shut, like a door he’d never meant to open.
“Go back to bed,” Nicholas said, voice flat, cold, as practiced and lifeless as a memorized spell. “You don’t want to be part of this.”
“I already am,” Euijoo replied, steady despite the ache rising in his throat. “You made me part of it the moment I met you.”
They stood there, locked in that moment, the silence stretching out between them. Somewhere beyond the walls, the castle groaned with the wind, old stone shifting like a breath in the dark.
Then Nicholas turned his back.
“Just get out. Please.”
Euijoo stayed a moment longer, unsure if he wanted to scream or reach out. But then he turned, footsteps slow and echoing, and left.
His heart thudded in his chest all the way back to the dorm, and the image of Nicholas trembling at the sink followed him like a shadow that wouldn’t let go.