conjunction
AUTUMN
It begins like this.
It is after dissection. The second one, which is always better than the first, because the first was taken up by safety and ethics briefings, largely reminders, hammered in over and over again. I don’t know why I’m so hungry echoes around in the café. It’s because of the formaldehyde, he could tell them, but he doesn’t. He has learned, very early on, the difference between idle musing and true hunger. This is the kind of thing that gives lesson more than one meaning; juxtaposing the awareness of your own stomach with the still-new impressions of scalpel on skin makes you aware of humanness. Or humanity, depending on how you got here. Everyone here has coughed up either a chunk of credit or sob stories or both—it’s the only way you get into med school, these days. Accordingly: in this crowd, now, this mood, the best recourse is for Tom to be silent. Innocuous. The only better option would be to flirt, network, but he’s still thinking about scalpels and donor-body organs, not quite up to stuff of the living yet.
In any case, Tom is busy watching someone watch him.
Black-haired green-eyed boy whose family name is engraved on the golden plaque by the entrance to the library (Malfoy, Malfoy, Malfoy, Nott, Patil, Patil, Potter, Potter, Prewett). Tom’s dissection group earlier today. Slim notebook in front of him that could be anything, really. The wrong type for studious, though; and his pencil movements are wrong.
Blueberry muffin. Table by the entrance, back against the wall. The boy is still at it. Quick looks; not furtive, almost assessing, disarming if Tom could be disarmed. Tom looks back. The boy has a particular kind of face, aside from the greenness of his eyes. The kind of look that’s inherited. Not movie-star beautiful, but not forgettable, if he did forget things.
Tom is movie-star beautiful, that much he knows. Knowing people's expectations and perceptions is useful for... plans. Structure.
By the time his blueberry muffin (stale, bland) is nearly crumbs, the boy has worked up the courage to come over. Or whatever it is he needs to work up; courage seems fitting for his type. Tom, himself, would rather a well-concocted plan. But the boy has green eyes and long legs and drops into a seat with a kind of brash nervousness, and it is not only the knowledge of his last name that unfurls the polite-charming-almost smile across Tom’s formaldehyde-hungry-soft mouth.
In lieu of the greeting which a polite member of society (medical students, if you’re in the right university, seem to count themselves high society even) would offer, the boy slides a sheet of paper across the small table. Even before the contents are visible, Tom knows he was right about the boy not having been studying: the texture too thick for even the most luxurious Moleskine, the torn-off edge jagged in a way of—
The sketch.
Tom doesn’t look movie-star beautiful in this one, though it isn't, that is to say, unflattering. His hair is ruffled, the waves offset by wind and bluster and smudged graphite. There is no mysterious hint to his mouth that he prefers in his most presentable façades. His eyes, lightly-coloured graphite, are a shade off, even in black and white.
He looks, in the sketch, like he supposes he does now: caught unawares, off guard. Human. Inferior? But not quite: the sketch has something precise to it, something almost complimentary other than the near-perfect symmetry of Tom’s face that the boy, at least, did catch. And the pencil lines, despite the haste in which this drawing must've been done, are deliberate.
The top right corner is dated in a tiny scrawl, down to the hour, and signed ‘H.P.’; he already knows what the letters stand for, but looks up—mysterious-tiny-smile slowly unfurling, natural, just a tinge—and asks, “H.?”
Green-eyed black-haired boy with a pencil smiles back, just a tinge, and says, “Harry.”
WINTER
It’s not that he doesn’t have the time.
A full scholarship for one of the world’s best medical schools comes with its pressing schedule and academic-social-professional demands. And he has his own responsibilities as well; plotting, mainly, or sleep. Studying. Toeing that line of memorable, respectable, competent, desirable. Tom is very good at many things. (Has to be.)
So believe him when he says time management is one of them, and he… could, ostensibly, have the time for Potter.
And he does, once somehow wrangled into an agreement that involves their shared dissection group, information about whether Dumbledore actually hates him, and Tom’s textbook-turned-journal that somehow ended up in lost and found. (He suspects a Weasley.)
But still. It doesn’t sit well with Tom, this… thing. And it rankles even more that it doesn’t sit well, because even by an objective analysis method, there are benefits. Potter’s last name. His popularity, bolstered by his social circle, bolstered, again, by his last name. The fact that he’s aiming to become a medical illustrator, which makes him, if not safe, then safer: less direct competition, even.
(He told Tom that the first time they met; something about ‘drawing skills’ and ‘perspective’ and ‘anatomy’. It could’ve been a come-on; that last was practically ripe for a pickup line.)
Except that Tom has to sit, mostly still, in a mostly-private apartment in student housing, for the green eyes to run over him and the dextrous fingers to move over the sketchbook which seems, frankly, obnoxiously large for drawings not even required for grading—but the hands don’t shake, not even once, not even when Tom said Potter should’ve aimed for surgery, instead, those are surgeon’s hands, pianists’ hands—and he swears, sometimes, that when Potter’s eyes flick down-and-up from jaw to ear to temple, there are air currents brushing against his skin.
The dust motes floating in the air by the neatly-made bed, by the pictures of younger-Harry with two grinning men, or three grinning men and one redhaired woman, tell him there aren’t.
Neither of them should have the time for this. But there’s Tom’s half-open textbook on the chair, propped up at an angle where he can read, if he wants to, without moving from the prescribed angle. There’s, apparently, some kind of exercise or skill of technique, with anatomy or perspective or both, that Potter’s practising, pen and ink and pencil. And watercolour. Watercolour! There’s no discernable reason to do this, even if Dumbledore, the last time they met for a review of his scholarship grant, was slightly more tolerable.
There is a look in his eyes, sometimes. Potter’s eyes, he knows, are one of the most distinguishable features in that already-well-known (at least to the faculty)’s face; Tom has never remarked upon them, knowing that that method, if for some reason he should ever need to compliment Potter, would be a blade used to bluntness. Tom is no artist, besides. But there is something about that green when in juxtaposition with the pupils, the perfect round dark circles that dilate, just slightly, if the room is dim (which it never is), or if Tom positions himself a certain way.
He does that now: leans back on his elbow, head tilted back, looking down along his nose, just to see whether the pupils will dilate more.
They don’t, but only because Potter is finishing up with his sketch of the craniofacial structure.
There is still more of his body to go, and more sessions left, and Tom cannot be sure whether he wants the precise drawings to be more or less—true, at all, if he could even describe them as untruthful. They aren’t beautiful as Tom is in the mirror, but they are still, undeniably, him, with the eye of someone learning to cut people apart and look beneath their skin, still bloodless yet, and—well.
The drawings have a certain quality, something that, perhaps, he’s reading too much into, having associated the sketching with the pose (and Tom, even if he'd never admit it, has always enjoyed being admired), and the look of green eyes flickering between paper and flesh: concentration, in some cases, is only another word for vehemence.
SPRING
The truth is that Tom has started thinking of the leaves outside his window as iris-green.
Not because of the flower, and that, quite possibly, is a problem.
He mentions it to Harry, once, the problematic nature of spending one’s time like this; the frivolity of it, the simplicity. Relaxation, he argues, should be like holidays, or narcotics: saved up as currency, and then spent in amounts large enough to mean something. Enjoyment is only enjoyable when you gorge yourself on it after periods of starvation. (He doesn't say: how else do you measure it up against the ensuing shame, otherwise?)
Harry, examining the curve of his wrist and the faint blue-purple lines in his palms, laughs. “Art for art’s sake,” he says, green eyes iris-green, and attempts, in a horrible French accent, “L’art pour l’art.”
Tom allows himself a laugh, too, only half because it’s expected.
The other half is because he’s predicted this response (down to the movement of Harry’s mouth squeezed into the form of an anglophone trying to imitate what they think French sounds like; not that he’s spent a lot of time thinking about said mouth in question), and so he says, “I knew you would say that,” a little smug.
Harry turns Tom’s hand over. It’s his right hand, calloused from writing. The same hand last night, under his sheets, steady, when his breathing was ragged and he was thinking about the purse of lips; the up-down flicker of eyelashes; the inhale that trembled the air, faintly, by his ear, when he was being positioned—Tom makes Harry position him every time, through sheer wilfulness, and Harry’s hands never shake, and Tom’s always left coming away with faint impressions of skin on skin, left to wonder whether the tactile impressions make it into the lines on the page.
Tom’s hands never shake, either; he will make them surgeon’s hands, or perhaps he’ll go into neurology. But last night he was thinking only of the way someone might, just possibly, close their teeth on the skin over someone else’s sternocleidomastoid, and after—after, he went to the library, not the medical one either; he’d thought about finding some point of contention but the correct response, here, is not to fight, if only because it would reveal his hand, the deliberation behind it.
"—but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem's sake," Tom says, and he watches Harry’s head whip up in something that, if he were a person to reach for courage instead of cunning, he would call delight. The pencil is dropped in haste—still carefully off the paper, of course—and Harry’s grip slackens on his wrist. He ignores the phantom heat lingering behind.
“Is that Poe?”
Tom inclines his head, just so, the better to show off the angle of his cheekbones and jaw. The very, very slight dilation of Harry’s pupils is gratifying enough for his admission. “I had to look it up.”
Harry’s laugh is an incredulous, breathy, bright thing, and it hangs there in the space between, even when the moment breaks and he ducks his head back down to the sketchbook, careful-but-bold lines spiralling out across the ivory. Tom stays late that day, so that he can move on to his left hand, just for a complete collection, of course. There is a certain symmetry in the tableau, there, in the late-afternoon light: two dark heads at a table, looking at hands, on hands, on hands.
INTERLUDE
Harry didn’t necessarily want to become a doctor.
Well—sort of. To rephrase: he didn’t really want to go to med school (even if he does want to live up to his parents’ legacy). It’s not just about the hard work and long hours; there’re dozens of students who have and who most definitely will shed blood, their own or yours, because learning medicine apparently breeds a toxic environment, somehow—to generalise, of course, but then again, he doesn’t think he’ll get much further than general practise, these days.
He wanted to go to art school, but there was some issue with trust funds or such, and the art scene is probably toxic in its own way, also, not just because of the acrylic paints—though he does miss those. Acrylic paints. And Sirius and Remus. (Sometimes he wonders what they'd think of Tom.)
Medical illustration makes up for all these things in some way, of course. There’s a certain structure to it, and yet, if you know your stuff well, there’s still room for whimsy. And frankly, maybe he can do with a little structure these days.
Tom, he knows, approves thoroughly of structure, and disapproves thoroughly of… whimsy. But he must not disapprove that much after all, given the dozen different sketches, hands and head and joints and, yes, the back (and Tom does have a very nice back, vertebrae and all); somewhere along the line the sketches have evolved a style of their own, not strictly medical illustration anymore, not with that little bit of—
Well. He doesn’t quite want to think about it.
Scholarship students here, in this course, they tell you, are the worst. Not because of a lack of funding—well, in another sense, because if they lack funding, they tend to make up for it in bravado or insidiousness—but because of the kind of status the offer’s sheer selectiveness offers them. Not even his yearmates with the most money, or legacy, or both, can even begin to touch Tom. Which is why Dumbledore keeps an eye on all of them, of course, but that’s a different kind of thing altogether.
Harry doesn’t want to think about any of this, because his heart, sometimes, feels too big for his chest; when they have small group practises together, or when he glimpses him at lecture, or at night, in his bed, close-dark-warm-aching, his heart battering against his ribcage, trying to burst him open. His sketchbook is probably some kind of flat paper Frankenstein, trying to splice together all the parts of Tom and papier-mâché him into something within reach—it’s far from the best he’s drawn, too raw to be polished for any standard of medical illustration, and yet stuck in the region of not real enough: the only thing his drawings are succeeding at, really, are a depiction of the own hand who made them.
They feel like a confession. We are all defined by our desires: even you, especially you.
He would say something, but the drawings aren’t finished yet. If he’s going to bring Tom art, he’ll have to make it irresistible. Even if that means pouring himself onto the page to what feels like a dangerous extent. Because isn't there something thrilling in laying yourself bare, not knowing whether the ground beneath your feet is stone or sand?
SUMMER
All the first-years attend the end-of-year medical society ball, paid for by probably a good chunk of the Malfoy donations, and reflecting as such.
Faculty mingle with alumni mingle with everyone but the harried graduating students. Networking is easy; Tom works the crowd with ease borne of practice and, perhaps, if he were admitting things in a not-brave way, a little spite.
Tom has not seen Harry Potter in two months, ever since their last session (and if he could, he would underline-bold-italicise that word in his mind, to imbue it with as much or as little salaciousness as he wanted). And there are roast pigeons on offer in the buffet. He’s never had pigeon in his life. He would try them, but there are probably specific forks or manners or something to do with pigeons, and what does one do with the bones later?
When he looks again, after two glasses of champagne and three alumni, both of his problems have coalesced, there, just by the far wall. Dressed up, very nicely, too. He throws back a third glass.
Their eyes meet.
Tom recognises that awkwardly-large rectangle under Potter’s arm. The damn sketchbook. Always. Is he seriously intending to—what, sketch Tom here, now, at this bloody dinner party with too many forks? Or maybe he’s going to show them to someone—possibly Dumbledore, they’ve always been close, with the history and legacy and all—and that thought rankles, and it rankles that it rankles, because Tom isn’t Tom in those, he’s some sort of unguarded, Potter-softened fragment version of himself, cut open with a scalpel and scattered over paper. It would be an indecency to show them to someone else. Not explicit, exactly, but revealing all the same. An admission of the way he let Potter see him, of the secret want, of wanting to be wanted by—
He strangles the thought before it can breathe.
He hasn’t even seen those drawings in full, yet, himself. That’s excuse enough, so Tom marches, politely and innocuously, over to Potter, and says coolly, “What did you bring that here for?”
Stupid, to feel a hint of unease at the startled look on Potter’s face. Even worse to feel relief when he wipes it away and asks, mildly, “What got up your arse tonight?”
It is entirely foolish and ridiculous, when Tom thinks well, maybe you could, before floundering for a response and snapping, “Nothing. Goddamn roast pigeons in the buffet. Nothing.” He snatches the sketchbook, making sure nobody is within proximity to catch even a glimpse at the pages, and slides his fingers under the cover.
The tiny spasm of apprehension when he flips it open without ceremony is just idiotic, and he quashes it with vengeance.
And then his eyes focus on the page.
It’s him. Almost.
Side profile, pencil, grey on white. The slope of the jaw, the line from the brow to the nose. The mouth, perfectly straight, the tiniest tilt of his chin. His hair and eyelashes. Lovingly rendered, he thinks, before he can stop himself.
Harry looks at Tom look at Tom.
He flips through the sketchbook, faster, thick paper and pencil and pen and watercolour—sketches of him, him, above-skin and below-skin; some aren’t even recognisable as him, just drawings of what look to be correct anatomy, generic even—but there, those are his hands and neck and face, and every drawing, even those of his elbows and knees and back, are carefully dated and signed, and labelled: model: T.R., and he feels cross-section skinned, his innards pulled into the open air and interspersed with the ghost of hands and laughter on his skin.
Harry, wisely, does not say a thing regarding the drawings. Instead: “What’s wrong with pigeons? Have a thing against roast birds, do you?”
They’re in a little bubble of silence, somewhere between a pillar and the end of the buffet table and the doors, and Tom almost-slams the sketchbook shut but at the last moment can only bear to be gentle, and he thinks jesus fuck. Harry must read the look on his face, because he inclines his head, and Tom, for once, follows. If only so he can stage a murder in somewhere private, for plausible deniability.
"Do you know how they farm most birds," he says once they’re out by the bushes, because he cannot open another vein of conversation, he cannot say any of the dozen things in his head or do them or—"do you even—if you’re rich, you eat birds like foie gras and pigeon and"—he thinks, briefly, of Harry’s horrible French accent, l’art pour l’art, the way he said it, the ways one has to be to say it—"I don’t know, ortolan, that French delicacy—they force-feed them millet, fatten them up, drown them in brandy—"
“Is this about animal cruelty, or, what, excesses of wealth?” Harry says, looking, infuriatingly, half-amused and half-dry, definitely imitating Tom or, god forbid, Granger, possibly from their ethics class last semester.
“Both,” Tom spits, because he’s still holding the sketchbook, and there are roast pigeons and he cannot, cannot, admit to the way he feels himself peeled apart and scattered over those thick pages, bone and skin in graphite. “It’s about hedonism.” This drawing thing is hedonism, he wants to say, if only to hear exactly how ridiculous it would sound, out loud. If only to see the look on Potter’s face. “They eat ortolan not even with an unnecessarily small fork, okay? They consume it whole, in one bite. Everything including the bones, except the beak. And you know what they do first? They’ve hidden their faces underneath a napkin, some kind of tradition, but the point—stop laughing at me—they’re supposed to hide their faces and obscure their vision, because of the utter decadence of the damn bird. To hide your conscience from God.”
Tom realises three things then. One: he’s gripping the sketchbook like a shield, to keep himself from gesticulating wildly, but it’s now pressed up nearly against Harry’s chest, well beyond any semblance of personal space. Two: he should not have had that many glasses of champagne. And three: Harry’s eyes, and therefore his mouth, are very close, irises very green in the setting sun. He’s taller than Tom remembers, just a handspan shorter, and somehow, he’s tilting his head back and managing to look down at Tom along his nose, something Tom often does himself, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, everything about this is hedonistic and irritating—
“If you didn’t believe in God, then, would you still hide your face?” he says, and Tom cannot, for the life of him, read the look in his eyes, because he isn’t brave enough, and for all kinds of cunning, he has no plan for this, none at all.
And. And and and. God. Faces. Hiding. Desire veiling you as a second skin, and the darkness close all around. Want emptying his stomach, lining his veins; veins, drawn onto paper. Hunger, you see, is gauche.
“How can desire ever be anything other than shameful?” Tom spits back, drawing himself up to his fullest height, which only has the effect of making their proximity more intimate.
And there it is: the flicker in the face, the eyes, the unreadable readable look. The recognition. Why are you fucked up that way, that look says.
But instead of pity, there's hunger.
“The sweetest honey / is loathsome in his own deliciousness.” Harry’s voice is clear in the evening air, and very low. He murmurs the words as if he likes the way they feel in his mouth.
Instead of pity, there's hunger. Like a dare.
It’s like he’s shoved a roast pigeon down Tom’s throat, the way he says it. He recognises this tone. The promise of seduction, of making people want, want you, and yet: the not-quite-agreement, Shakespeare of all things. This boy is tempting-artistic-pretentious-well-read, unbearable unbearable unbearable.
Tom has only ever wanted—the polite thing, to not admit your wants—to be smart, competent, play it safe, follow his rules. He’s not supposed to be this human thing of hunger, of want, spilt split across pages; wanting to be touched, to be wanted—and now how is he supposed to look at Harry with anything but unabashed desire?
“Why did you ask to draw me,” Tom says, only half a question, “when you’re—your drawing's nearly already without flaw?”
“Nearly.” A huff of laughter; infuriating, laughing when—when this. “I don’t know. I suppose I wanted to. But really, why did you let me?”
Infuriating. Unbearable. A neat turnabout more brave than cunning. This boy. Tom cannot stand it.
His fingers close around Harry’s collar and just-slightly-askew tie before he realises it, and Tom lowers his head, the tiniest distance, almost none at all, there and then gone—and then he’s kissing Harry Potter.
He has quick reflexes; there’s the tiniest moment of—not surprise, exactly, but an instant where he freezes—before he’s kissing Tom back, the sketchbook pressed between them, crushing.
The only consolation for Tom is that this moment, had he planned it, would be picture-perfect: sunset in the gardens, two boys in suits, beautiful. Mouths pressed close, Harry’s hands in his hair, on his nape. Seconds passing like minutes.
When they pull away, breathless, Tom says, “L’art pour l’art is apparently eurocentric bullshit, by the way.”
“I know.” Harry grins. “But Poe wasn’t wrong, exactly: that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this—than this, which is a poem, and nothing more—written solely for the poem’s sake—but would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls…”