𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲 𝐊𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐬

Amid the chaos of Voldemort's war, Severus Snape and Bellatrix Lestrange circled each other like predators, mistrust thick between them. She hated his cold detachment, the way he slithered through the Dark Lord's favor without spilling blood as she did. He loathed her recklessness, her shrill zealotry masking deep insecurity. Yet, they were often thrown together in missions fraught with peril, their survival dependent on a reluctant partnership.

One night, when meeting in hogsmeade and having a sweet moment in the share of Snape's cloak and a dark and annoyed look between them, there, beneath the hatred, something sparked-a recognition of shared exhaustion, of darkness they could never escape.

As the war wore on, they began to see each other more clearly. Bellatrix noticed the pain in Snape's eyes when he thought no one was watching, the weight of secrets that seemed to crush him. Snape saw the cracks in her fanatical devotion, the fear she hid behind her vicious smile. In stolen moments-tending wounds after battle, trading barbed words over strategy-they began to connect, though neither would admit it.

Their love was a dangerous, unspoken thing, built on a foundation of mutual disdain and grudging respect. In the end, it was not tenderness that bound them but the shared knowledge that, in this war, there was no salvation-only each other, fleeting and fragile amid the wreckage.