Mattheo Riddle - Imagines/OneShot

Longing

Word Count: 731

━━━━ ◦: ✧✲✧ :◦━━━━

There was something devastating about the way she breathed.

Mattheo Riddle had lived in the presence of darkness. He'd tasted power and dipped his hands in sin. He'd known pain, fury, triumph, and silence so loud it rattled the ribs. But nothing—nothing—compared to her.

Y/N.

She was the most unbearable thing he'd ever had to survive.

Every moment she made—so simple, so stupidly mundane—was like a dagger pressed beneath his skin. The way she pushed her hair behind her ear when she was concentrating. The way her voice lifed slightly when she was excited. The way she walked like the ground existed solely to keep her dancing across it.

She didn't know what she did to him. He was sure of it. If she did, she wouldn't keep smiling like that. Wouldn't keep laughing, or humming in the hallways, or sitting in the Great Hall like she wasn't his greatest affliction.

Mattheo was not the poetic type.

But she turned him into something ugly and soft and yearning.

It was maddening.

No matter how far he tried to stay from her, his eyes betrayed him. They always found her. Always.

She was everywhere.

Her presence lingered in the corridors like a perfume only he could smell. He saw her in every mirror, heard her name in every quiet lull. Even the air he breathed felt stolen from her lungs.

He didn't love her in the way people wrote about in fairytales. No—he loved her in a way that felt like drowning. Like obsession. Like if he could just hold her once, properly, the ache in his chest might stop ripping him apart from the inside.

She was a drug. The kind that burned on the way in and killed you slowly after.

He watched her across the courtyard now, sitting under the sun with her friends, books in her lap, fingers delicately twirling her quill like she was composing music instead of notes. He swore even the sunlight bent itself toward her. Her skin glowed with it. Her smile held it captive.

Mattheo's heart thudded violently against his ribs.

He needed to look away.

He didn't.

"You're staring again."

The voice beside him was casual—Blaise, of course—but Mattheo didn't react. He couldn't. His eyes were on her. Always on her.