War, Love, and Riddle //Mattheo Riddle x OC

Chapter Twenty One - Godric's Hollow

Mattheo had never known how to sleep peacefully.

For most of his life, sleep had not been rest so much as surrender, a place where his mind dragged him back through rooms he had survived but never truly escaped. Nightmares had followed him since childhood with cruel devotion, bringing him back to raised voices, cold floors, blood on his lip, magic used as punishment, and the constant fear that one day he would look into a mirror and see his father staring back. He had never understood when people spoke of dreams as something soft, something wistful, something worth chasing after waking. Dreams had always felt like another form of haunting to him.

Then Emma Potter had happened to him.

She had slipped into his life like sunlight through a cracked window and ruined him completely. Nights with her had changed everything. With Emma curled against him, her dark hair spilling over his chest and her body warm beneath his hands, sleep had stopped feeling like a battlefield. The nightmares had gone quiet. The ghosts had retreated. For the first time in his life, Mattheo had been able to dream of something other than survival. He dreamed of a cottage tucked into the middle of nowhere, of rain against windows, of Emma barefoot in a garden she would insist was not excessive even as it swallowed half the property in flowers. He dreamed of waking beside her every morning and falling asleep with her every night, of a future so gentle it almost hurt to imagine because nothing in his life had ever taught him to believe he could keep gentle things.

But the night after Emma tore Harry and Ron apart with wandless Ancient Magic, peace abandoned him again.

He barely slept. Each time his eyes closed, he saw it happen all over again, the tent flashing with pale blue-white power, the air bending around Emma's scream, Harry and Ron thrown apart as though some invisible hand had decided violence would not touch her or anyone she loved while she still drew breath. It had been effortless. Terrible. Beautiful. The kind of magic people wrote myths about before fear turned those myths into warnings. And then she had collapsed into him, fading faster than she ever had after training, her body going slack in his arms as though the magic had reached inside her and emptied something vital out. Mattheo lay awake with one arm wrapped around her waist, counting the rise and fall of her breathing while dread gnawed at the base of his skull. The more she practiced, the easier the magic answered her, but the easier it answered, the faster it took from her. That was the piece they were missing. That was the part none of Ellery's pages had explained. Ancient Magic did not only move through Emma. It fed on something.

The realization made him sick.

Not because he doubted her strength. He had never doubted Emma Potter a day in his life. She was the most extraordinary witch he had ever seen, and that was not love making him blind. If anything, loving her had made him more aware of every impossible thing about her. He had watched her feel magic before it formed, watched her reach into the hidden veins of the world and pull power from places everyone else walked past without noticing. He had watched her bend forces older than wands, older than curses, older than the rotten ambitions of men like his father. Emma had always been brilliant, but lately, watching her train, watching the bluish white wisps curl around her hands like the world itself knew her name, Mattheo had begun to understand something that terrified him more than any nightmare ever had. Harry was not the one who would save them.

Emma was.

And if Mattheo had learned anything from war, it was that the world loved to devour the people it called saviors.

Waking her the next morning felt cruel. Emma slept heavily beneath the blanket, her face softened by exhaustion, lashes dark against her cheeks, one hand resting near his heart as though even unconscious she had reached for the place that beat only for her. Mattheo brushed a strand of raven hair from her face and leaned down to kiss her forehead, lingering there because he hated being the one to pull her from rest when she had so little of it. "Come on, love," he whispered against her skin, his voice low and rough from the sleep he had barely managed to find. "It's time to go."