Sirius looked down at Ren.
This was the boy who had dragged him out of the crystal. The one who had willingly thrown himself into the suffocating depths of an ancient ruin, fought back a tide of absolute corruption from within the door's mechanisms, and purged the rot from his own veins.
This was the boy who had stubbornly clung to consciousness, bleeding from his eyes and ears, until there was absolutely nothing left to fight.
Now, wrapped in the quiet stillness of sleep, the crushing weight of the world had momentarily lifted from his features. With his face finally relaxed, stripped of the agonizing tension of combat, he looked exactly like what he was beneath it all: a very young man. He looked barely older than the infuriating kid Sirius remembered leaving behind in the forest what felt like only hours ago.
Slowly, Sirius shifted his gaze toward Luna.
And his curse, the suffocating, hyper-tuned empathy he had spent his entire life failing to turn off, showed him the truth.
