#coded

Some said it with fear, some with fascination, most with venom.

By the time he was fifteen, he had grown into it the way one grows into shackles—heavy, inevitable, unshakable.

He played the part they gave him. Arrogant. Cruel. Dangerous. It was easier than trying to explain that he hadn’t asked to be born into a prophecy he never wanted.

So he leaned into it, wore it like armour. If they thought him a monster, then let him be a beautiful one.

Until her.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed her before—Hogwarts wasn’t that big, after all. He knew her face, her laugh, the way she always walked too quickly, like she was afraid of being late to her own life.

But it was in Defense Against the Dark Arts, of all places, when she first broke the script.

The professor had paired them off for spellwork. He expected the usual: fear, nerves, trembling wand hands that only steadied once his smirk cut deep enough.

Instead, she met his gaze levelly, her wand arm steady, her lips quirking like she knew exactly who he was and didn’t particularly care.

“You’re overextending,” she said after his first spell, her tone maddeningly casual. “That’s why your cast keeps wavering.”

Mattheo blinked, half a second too slow. “Excuse me?”

She only shrugged, demonstrating with her own wand, the spell flying true and clean. “Like that.”

And then she went back to practicing, leaving him standing there with a retort strangled in his throat.

No fear. No trembling. Just… correction.

The audacity of it.

The fascination of it.

He told himself it was irritation when he began noticing her more often.

The way she chewed her quill in class. The way her fingers tapped restlessly on the edge of the table. The way she always seemed to hum under her breath when she thought no one was listening.

He catalogued them like sins, each one another reason she should have annoyed him. But he remembered them all anyway.

And it infuriated him.

Because Mattheo Riddle did not get distracted. He was the distraction.

It wasn’t until late November, when he found her in the Astronomy Tower past curfew, that the truth settled like a weight in his chest.

She was leaning against the stone railing, the night sky spread behind her like spilled ink, stars sharp enough to cut.

“You’re going to get detention,” he drawled, stepping into the cold air.

She turned, a small smile tugging at her mouth. “So are you.”

He huffed, smirking despite himself, and joined her at the railing. Silence stretched, broken only by the whistle of the wind through the tower spires.

Finally, she said, “You don’t have to keep playing him, you know.”

His brow furrowed. “Playing who?”

“Your father.” She didn’t look at him, her gaze fixed on the stars. “Everyone else might only see the name. But I’ve seen you laugh. I’ve seen you care. That’s not him.”

The words lodged in his chest like glass.

He had been called many things in his life—monster, snake, Riddle’s boy.

But never not him.

For a moment, he forgot how to breathe.

And when she finally turned to look at him, really look at him, he realised he didn’t want to be invisible to her. Not ever.

Mattheo Riddle was many things. Dangerous, arrogant, his father’s son.

But in that moment, with starlight crowning her hair and her voice still echoing in his chest, he wondered if maybe—just maybe—he could be something else.

Something she saw.