something the oracles did not foresee

one: seventeen, slytherin dormitory

Albus doesn’t know what time it is. Late enough that they depend on the amber candlelight resting on Scorpius’ bedside table to illuminate the draughts board, but early enough, still, that the milky moonlight glow atop the lake trickles through the depths of the current to shift in streaks of silver past their window to the great unknown. It used to be a strange sensation, Albus will admit, knowing that they were sleeping underwater. Waking up in the dead of night to the uncanny feeling of being watched, only to roll over and see, through the tinted glass, a shadow of the Squid in the lake hastily fleeing the scene of an unknown crime.

He knows he can move and peel open his drawer to tell the time from his pocket watch, one that he believes used to belong to his grandpa, bronze with a gold face and a rusty chain with a couple of loose links. But to do that would be to turn away from the beautiful boy sat opposite, all blond hair and porcelain skin bathed in the candle’s incandescent golden glow, and the thought of looking anywhere other than at Scorpius makes Albus feel a little ill.

They’re seventeen and much removed from the trials of puberty, but in spite of that Scorpius continues to look a little lanky, as if his legs are too long for his body and he hasn’t quite grown into the contours of his torso. But that’s part of the charm, Albus supposes. The way jumpers swallow him whole and the way he tries desperately to push shirt sleeves up to the crook of his elbow but, within mere moments, they trickle back down his skin to rest, over and over, perpetual against his wrist bone. Scorpius is in an old Slytherin jumper, one Albus believes to have been part of Draco’s school Quidditch uniform, and a pair of patchwork shorts they found in a charity shop a short walk from Albus’ house in Oxford. To put it simply, Scorpius looks a little like the picture of peace and a lot like a figure from Albus’ dreamscapes. Of course he isn’t going to look away.

“Have you finished your History of Magic essay?” Scorpius asks. He doesn’t look up from the board, fingers still hovering over the various counters as he tries to determine how to beat Albus. He won’t, obviously, because Scorpius cannot play draughts to save his life. But he detests not being the best at things and so, even six years into their run of life together, he continues to try and beat Albus.

Persistent and unsuccessful; an endearing combination of traits.

Albus hums. “Just about, I think,” he says, reaching over to grab his glass of lemonade. “I’m probably going to read over my conclusion to make sure it makes sense, and I’d still like you to do a grammar check on it if you aren’t too busy.”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say,” Scorpius says, finally moving a piece and hence, finally, looking up at Albus. He smiles, a little bit of his teeth visible as the centre of his lips separate. Albus’ insides shiver like a willow tree whisked by a serendipitous breeze. “I still need inspiration for mine.”

“So you’re saying you’re going to copy me?” Albus asks, taking a quarter of the time Scorpius did to make his move. He already knows how this game is going to end; he has pretty much every possible route planned out in his mind and, amongst the armada of options available to him, not a single one ends with Scorpius winning.

Scorpius rolls his eyes. “No,” he drones. He reaches his arms over his head to stretch out exhaustion in his muscles. The jumper lifts with the movement and the material doesn’t drape back to its original position afterwards. It hitches, instead, just above Scorpius’ hipbone, a perfect triangle of skin painted honey by the waning candlelight to his side. Albus knows Scorpius sees him looking, but surely Scorpius knows that Albus knows he knows, so he doesn’t worry about being spotted; it’s a rotten little complicated situation they find themselves in these days, but it bothers only everyone else other than themselves. They’ve been this way their entire life, they’re used to it by now. “I’m saying that in return for kindly and lovingly acting like your own personal dictionary, you’re going to let me use your essay for inspiration just so I can figure out what my third and fourth paragraphs are going to be.”

Albus tilts his head to the side. “And if I say no?”

“Then Professor G will finally find out you don’t always know the difference between there, they’re and their and you will no longer be his favourite student.”

Albus flicks a counter at him, one he’d won a few passes ago. Scorpius laughs, ever so feverishly the picture of joy. Little lines beside his eyes and the tiniest dimple known to mankind carving into the left-hand side of his face. His lips are all tacky, the product of a few too many late night lemonade glasses, and as he lifts a hand to ruffle up his hair Albus thinks he could paint him from memory. The exact way the muscles in his face contract when he smiles, frowns, talks. The shape his eyes take as he spirals through the kaleidoscopic array of emotions he can possess. Albus knows him the way you remember the route back to your childhood home. As if you could be dumped in the middle of town and still somehow, some way, make your way to that rotten old front door.

“Of course, S,” Albus says, eventually. He watches as Scorpius nudges a piece forward, unknowingly opening himself up to a problematic sequence of play. Albus often wonders if Scorpius really is that bad at draughts or if he’s often just distracted, but he’s never summoned the care to ask. He simply enjoys these nights too much to risk putting an end to them by potentially exposing Scorpius’ undying hatred for Albus’ favourite board game. “You know I’ll always help with History of Magic stuff if you want me to. You basically single-handedly tutored me through my OWLs anyway. It’s the least I can do.”

Albus cares about his studies now. Some of them. Peculiar how it works, really, that when students get to pick which subjects they study – ones they care about and have a desired interest in – their results will often get better. Albus trudged through the first five years of school in a manner which concerned almost everyone around him, especially after that incident in his Fourth Year. Albus got it, of course, he would probably be worried about someone he knew if they almost ended the world and were almost murdered by the spawn of the worst Dark Wizard to ever exist. But he was fine. Mostly. Fine in the ways that mattered. A few nightmares here and there were manageable. He trembled nowhere near as close to the precipice as all of his teachers and family members seemed to think he did. He just didn’t care that much about school. But now, better mentally and feeling a little more like he belongs in this magical world, he’s getting there. He cares.

“I think it’s really late,” Scorpius says. He has a scar that winds itself around his chest like a piece of twine pulled taut against his skin. It starts at the very edge of his left hipbone before encircling his body in a jagged little track, once the brightest red colour Albus thinks he’s ever seen but now a dull pink, mostly around the outer edges. He can see it at this moment, the beginning part, right where Scorpius’ jumper is still hitched. He’s seen all of it – a lot – but it’s usually in moments like this where it upsets Albus the most. When it’s just there, teasing. A constant reminder of its existence, and the way in which it got there to start with. “We have class tomorrow.”

“You have class tomorrow,” Albus clarifies, draining the remaining teaspoon or so of his lemonade. “I don’t have class until the afternoon.”

Scorpius rolls his eyes. “That’s still tomorrow.”

“Not the same tomorrow as your tomorrow.”

“You still have to come down and get breakfast with me in the morning, so why argue?”

Albus smiles. “I’m not arguing.”

Then Scorpius says, “You look really kissable right now,” and something in the air changes. Only ever so slightly, like one butterfly somewhere fluttering its wings, but it happens. Albus knows, Scorpius knows. The way they look at each other, eyelash shadows overtop their cheekbones and the candle flame reflection all over their irises, it says it all.

Albus tilts his head to this side. His hair, tangled curls he keeps meaning to get on top of but can’t commit enough to actually do, does that thing Scorpius seems to enjoy where it drapes over his forehead, covers a bit of his face from view. Scorpius drums his fingers over the board. Albus knows where this is going.

“I do?” Albus asks, deliberately nudging one of his counters into a square that opens up a chance for Scorpius to take it, just to see if he notices.

Scorpius nods. “You do indeed,” he says, and as he leans over towards the board Albus expects him to steal his counter but he doesn’t. His fingers, instead, brush the annoying little curl out of Albus’ eyes, tucked behind his ear and out of the way. It’s a little bit electric and, strangely, not at all unfamiliar to Albus these days.

“Well… we do that now, right?” Albus asks. He finds himself acutely aware of just how late it is, how the emptiness of their dormitory almost echoes around them. The shadows feel more pressing, their sole candlelight acting a little like a shield from whatever else is out there. “Or, I guess, we’ve been known to before.”

Scorpius kisses his teeth. He moves a piece, doesn’t take Albus’ counter, and Albus doesn’t know if the mishap is deliberate or not. “I didn’t think you’d enjoyed that in the past,” he says, all soft around the edges but there’s something a little stringent about it.

“What in Merlin’s name made you think that?”

“You never reciprocate any of them,” Scorpius says. Albus thinks back over them all – there have been a few by now – and, yeah, perhaps Scorpius has a point. The time in Albus’ bedroom when they were doing schoolwork back in their Fifth Year Christmas break, that had been Scorpius. Before Slytherin Quidditch practice, when Albus was heading to the library while Scorpius’ end goal was the pitch. That was Scorpius. The first time, on the Hogwarts Express at the beginning of their Fifth Year as they both craned over the same book of crosswords to solve together. Yeah, that was him, too.

They no longer lament over the semantics of the whole ordeal. The fact they’re friends who kiss each other sometimes, who often fall asleep in the same bed after talking all night and righting the wrongs of the world. They’re already the embodiment of Icarus, still healing from the burns of their first turbulent downfall. The thought of upsetting the order of the universe even more by trying to define the very undefinable spark that exists between them is a non-starter. Something that crosses their mind on occasion but never ends up being acted upon.

Life is too short and time is too precious to wonder why instead of simply enjoying the how.

“I’m shy,” Albus says. He feels the burn over his cheeks and hopes the low lights hide it from view. He’d look away to save himself some more, but that feels a little like admitting defeat and, also, he still really doesn’t want to look anywhere other than Scorpius. His hands are tied, what can he say?

“You lie, Albus Potter.”

Albus kisses him then; for the first time ever, apparently. Leaning over the board, unbalancing the counters, to kiss him in the dead of twilight. He’s all spearmint toothpaste and freshly washed sheets and it’s as if Albus is drowning in a bottle of Amortentia. Scorpius does that thing Albus dies for every time, lets his hand start at the top of Albus’ jaw and then glide all the way down the side of his neck before taking the softest of holds on the front of Albus’ shirt. Albus doesn’t know why Scorpius does it, but he’s never had the urge to ask. It’s deeply endearing and is one of Albus’ favourite things in the world; why would he even need to ask?

In pulling Albus closer Scorpius knocks the draughts board awry. The counters clatter to the ground, as does Albus’ wand. Were there anyone else in their dormitory they’d probably flinch apart for fear of having woken them. But they’re alone – always have been in this room of theirs – and the only thing the noise disturbs is the dust bunnies beneath the furniture and the likely presence of a few spiders lurking in the corners.

Albus waits for Scorpius to let go before moving back ever so slightly, looking up at him, getting lost in his favourite shade of blue. A cerulean sea; it takes him miles away.

“You know, for a Prefect, you’re so incredibly irresponsible,” Albus teases, leaning back as he watches Scorpius reach down to pick up all the counters. “It’s, what, past midnight? And you’re up at this crazy hour fraternising with your roommate instead of getting your eight hours before class tomorrow. What would the First Years ever do if they found out?”

Scorpius cranes closer to balance a counter on top of Albus’ head, nestled among his tangled curls. “I’m sure if the First Years spent seven years being tormented by your beautiful face they’d understand.”

Albus chances another kiss to the corner of Scorpius’ mouth before he goes back for the rest of the counters, Albus scooping up the ones left on the board and separating them into the two distinct colour piles. They chance upon a peaceful lull, ones that are comfortable these days. To be silent with each other is really just to be loved, after all, and Albus would take measures of wordless time with Scorpius rather than any time with anyone else.

Scorpius has the rest of the counters collected, and in his left hand he spins Albus’ wand between his index and middle fingers. Albus – lovingly – rolls his eyes, simply watching as Scorpius holds the wand in his hand and gently pokes Albus’ dimple with it. They just look at each other then, Scorpius holding Albus’ wand and Albus completely complacent in everything. Scorpius’ face is as familiar to Albus as the landscape of his childhood. He knows everything about it, the story behind every single scar and the slit in his eyebrow and that an out-of-date apple-flavoured Bertie Botts bean is the reason his front tooth is ever so slightly chipped.

Scorpius pokes Albus’ other dimple. “Imagine I do that and it accidentally casts a spell,” he says, handing the wand back over now he’s had his fun.

“Yeah, imagine. You Stupefy my face and I’ll hex you to within an inch of your life, Scorpius Malfoy.”

“Yeah, sure,” Scorpius mocks, freeing his ankles from the discomfort of his suddenly twisted socks cutting out his circulation. “You love me too much for that.”

Albus rolls his eyes. Again. He reaches behind him and sets his wand back on his bedside table, right next to a framed photograph of him, his siblings and Scorpius on holiday last year in Italy. “Set up the board, you troll. I’ll let us pretend you won that one, by the way.”

“I won’t set it up until you say it back,” Scorpius says, juggling the counters between the palms of his hand.

Albus glances over at him. “Say what?” he asks, just because he adores hearing Scorpius say love.

“You know what,” Scorpius says, as slow and deliberate as anything. “You’re not getting it out of me again.”

Albus leans over to brush a speck of dust off the top of Scorpius’ cheekbones. He has a startlingly sharp complexion, one inherited directly from his father, and in this waning, low light the contours on his skin are sharp as knives. “I thought we didn’t keep score in this re… between us.”

Scorpius looks at him. In a way Albus recognises, loves, feigns beneath. “Albus.”

“I love you,” Albus says. “You know I do.”

Scorpius shrugs. “Doesn’t mean I don’t like hearing it,” he says, tending to setting back up the board again. He deals out the counters with ease, all soft motions and smooth skin and more of those fading scars spreading like branches around his wrists. Albus has matching ones, of course, an unwanted reminder of the Fulgari curse from that day on the Quidditch pitch.

He knows, deep down, that the scars are vulgar things. Things that shouldn’t exist, that he should want to wipe from his skin once and for all. And, to a certain extent, he does. Because they ache on occasion, especially during exams, and the two of them often get time extensions because their wrists simply fight back in protest if they write for too long. But sometimes, like now, the light catches them in a specific way, and Albus notices how utterly identical they are. Trees – real trees – are all unique, they all have a different set of branches and you will never find two specimens with the same distribution of leaves. But the ones on their skin are the same. Wholly and eternally the same. And it’s like seeing a part of their souls reflected on their skin, tattoos without the ink. A reminder that, back then, it was the two of them against the world.

It still is now, of course, it’s just a little less violent.

“Okay,” Albus says. It’s all gentle and soft and he leans over to kiss Scorpius again, just for good measure. “I love you. Will do so for the rest of my days.”

Scorpius nods. “Good,” he says. “One more game, then?”

⚡︎

two: eighteen, the burrow

Someone has strung fairy lights between the trees in the back garden. There’s a little marquee at the bottom, right opposite the Burrow’s back door, where Albus’ grandmother and uncle have been preparing and setting out food all evening, refilling trays that have emptied and pestering the guests to make sure everyone has everything they need. This is a celebration, after all, and the Burrow has never looked as nice as it does right now. Perhaps during his Uncle Bill’s wedding, maybe, but his family don’t really talk about that much. Albus has seen photos of the garden all dressed up, of his Uncle Bill and Aunt Fleur in their wedding attire. He’s even seen moving photos of his dad and Aunt Hermione dancing, too, but if you mention it in passing they always find a way to change the subject.

A lot of Albus’ life has been like that. And, probably, most of his friends as well. Definitely for Scorpius, Albus knows that much. It’s peculiar; so much of family folklore is established through the handing down of stories, through sitting around the dinner table at Christmas and as your grandparents reminisce about the years gone by when your dad brought his first girlfriend home, when your parents got engaged, all those sorts of things. When those events are underscored or, usually, completely overtaken by mass tragedy, it becomes a little difficult to pass them on. Telling stories about people who are no longer around doesn’t quite have the sort of charm required for a Christmas dinner table tale. Albus finds himself wondering a lot about the stories that were lost amongst all the tragedy, the families who were perhaps wiped out and now their life is nothing but scarce memories in the distant thoughts of strangers they sat by on the bus that one time.

Anyway. Tonight is a celebration. NEWT and OWL results came out earlier today – everyone important to Albus passed, of course, including himself – and weeks ago, in advance of the apparent obvious pending success, his grandparents had offered to host a party in the garden to make the most of things. This is, after all, the last time he will see some of his school friends. He doubts whether he will have the same connection with his cohort that his parents had with theirs; they haven’t had quite as much trauma to bond them together for years down the line.

Polly and the gang are somewhere in the marquee filling their plates again; Albus can see her bright hair and hear Yann’s laughter from a mile away. He knows he should go say hi at some point, ask about their future plans and all pretend like they will definitely show up to the hypothetical yearly reunions at the Three Broomsticks. Lily and her friends are on the other side of the garden, sitting on tapestry blankets laid out beside a fairy ring. She still has two more years of school time delusion to get through, though her student years have been ever so slightly easier than Albus’. He knows what NEWT subjects she wants to take – whichever ones get her closer to Magical Creatures – and he can tell even from over here how passionately she is talking about the gnomes that lurk in the thickets that outline the property.

Albus, for what it’s worth, finds himself at the drinks table. His jeans – some slouchy fit, charcoal coloured nonsense he found at that famed old charity shop down the road – feel a little too tight, which is a little oxymoronic when you think about it. He tucked into them a random white t-shirt and threw on a cardigan he hadn’t realised was one of Scorpius’ Quidditch ones until he’d already left the house and Flooed over to the Burrow. It’s comfortable, though, and under the fairy lights you can’t really see the embroidered logo, so Albus thinks he’s going to get away with it.

“You look very miserable considering this is a party for you.”

Albus looks up from his empty glass. “For me?” he asks, watching as James pours himself a fresh drink from one of the unlabelled bottles to his left. “It’s for everyone, Jamie. Actually, scratch that, I don’t think it’s meant to be for you. What exam did you pass this year?”

James doesn’t bite, of course. He never does. He’s too well versed in the politics of their brotherly relationship to even entertain the idea of letting Albus think he has an effect on him. It’s always been James who manages to get under Albus’ skin, never the opposite way around.

They love each other though, they really do.  

“Where’s your date then?” James asks, topping off his glass with a cherry and a paper umbrella. Albus doesn’t think the concoction floating within there is anything close to a cocktail, but it’s really none of his business.

Albus groans. He knows he shouldn’t, he really shouldn’t, but he hasn’t inherited the same level of foresight as his brother. Albus does, and always will, bite. “What date?”

“Scorpius, duh.”

“He’s not my date. He’s just…” Albus starts, but even he doesn’t have an adequate ending to that sentence. He doesn’t think there is a word in the English language to accurately describe what Scorpius is to him. They’ve reached a peculiar fork in the path of life where ‘best friend’ doesn’t really feel like enough anymore. He’s sure that in some other beautifully romantic language Albus would never be able to master there is something that would capture the charm, but he is none the wiser at this current moment in time.

“He’s your date.”

“Fuck off,” Albus mutters, grabbing a fresh can of something from a cooler beneath the table. As he pops the tab a little bit of foam dances over his fingers, a spill that only worsens as he decants the contents into a plastic cup.

James rolls his eyes, eating the cherry off the toothpick he holds between his fingers. “I don’t understand why you’re embarrassed about this,” he continues, seemingly unable to read the room. “It’s not as if Lils and I haven’t brought people we’re dating around here before.”

“I’m not embarrassed, James,” Albus says, perhaps a little too quickly. But when something is as aggressively incorrect as that statement, there’s no way he isn’t going to jump the gun. “We just aren’t dating.”

“Then what are you?”

Albus, ever so exasperated, shrugs his shoulders. He tilts his head to the side and tries to glance around James for some sort of respite, but no immediate openings show themselves to him. And so he is forced, yet again, to stand there and toss over in his mind the intricacies of a situation that he has pondered every day for the last seven years of his life. A situation he doesn’t particularly enjoy discussing with other people because of how frequently they are stuck in their own preconceived ideas of the truth that they refuse to actually listen to him, the one who is enmeshed in the fire of it all.

“We’re… we’re just, like, best friends. I don’t know how else to explain it to you. Not that you care anyway, you just want to try and find something to gossip about when you walk away from the table,” is what Albus settles for. Not as nonchalant as he was going for, but hey. He’s ever so slightly tipsy, he can’t be expected to maintain high levels of articulation in times like these. “You can call it what you want, James; I know you’re never going to be satisfied with the answer I give you.”

“Because your answer is always a cop out.”

“I don’t understand why you think that part of my life is any of your business anyway,” Albus says. “Believe it or not, big brother, I quite frankly don’t give a fuck if you think the answer I give you is a cop out. You should try being less invested in your younger sibling’s love life.”

James raises an eyebrow. “Love life?”

“I will hex you, James. I don’t care if it gets me in trouble.”

James reaches over and ruffles up Albus’ hair. “I thoroughly enjoy watching you try to pretend like you two aren’t glued together at the hip.”

“I never said we weren’t,” Albus states, defiance in his eyes as he and his brother stare at each other. James has always resembled their mother more; if you were to dye his hair ginger he’d probably look the picture of Ginny Weasley in her early twenties. He has the freckles and the eyes and the same crescent moon cheekbones as her. Albus is a Potter through and through, something he used to perceive as misfortune back in the day.

But he’s ever so slightly more mature these days. He’s better than that now.

“Um, hello?”

They both break eye contact and look to the side. Look at Scorpius, arriving with a plate full of food enough for two, who glances between the brothers as if he’s intruded upon some secret rendezvous he isn’t meant to be privy to. Albus smiles, steps around the table to stand next to him. He takes a mini sausage roll from the plate and tosses it into his mouth and, just like that, everything seems okay again.

“Hi, Scorpius,” James says, prodding an ice cube in his glass with the bottom end of the paper umbrella. “We were just talking about you.”

“Aren’t you always?” Scorpius asks. He hardly flinches as Albus picks up his own paper umbrella and tucks it behind Scorpius’ ear. “I fear you two have more conversations about me than I do.”

“We’re your number one fans,” Albus says. He hooks a finger through Scorpius’ belt loop, decidedly ignoring the way James’ gaze follows every single step of the motion. “Well, I’m your number one fan. I think James comes in second place.”

James looks back at Albus, stares right through him. The simple exchange perhaps says more than any of the preceding conversation did, but James manages to take the hint to leave. “Alright, I’m off,” he says, picking up another glass for safekeeping. “Have fun, you two. I will be pestering Mum about letting me borrow her old broom for next season if you need me.”

He walks off, haphazard and barely in a straight line, and when he is far enough removed that the air begins to settle again it’s as if the two of them mentally count to five before daring to talk. Scorpius spins on his heel so he’s facing Albus, and Albus chances an opportunity in the motion to kiss his jaw.

“You okay?” Scorpius asks.

Albus hums. “Yeah,” he says. “Missed you.”

“I was gone barely five minutes.”

Albus shrugs, kisses him properly just because he can. Perhaps, if he were to observe the two of them from an outsider’s perspective, he would understand why James is so insistent that they’re dating. “Five minutes is probably a lifetime somewhere in this universe.”

“What did James want?”

Albus rolls his eyes. He finds a vacant spot on the table a few paces away and hops onto it, waiting for Scorpius to take his rightful place between Albus’ legs before continuing. Scorpius holds the plate between them, the side with the mini sausage rolls on pointing towards Albus, and with two straws in Albus’ cup they share sips of the ghastly beer he chose without really paying attention to the label.

“Just the usual. Being irritating and invasive and hashing out the whole you-two-are-totally-dating mantra all over again,” Albus says, gently tapping his shoes against the side of Scorpius’ legs as he talks. “I don’t think he’s ever going to let up. Which is unfortunate for him, because I don’t think he’s ever going to get the clarity he so clearly desires.”

Scorpius hums along, nods in the right places. Albus hadn't, until now, noticed how nice he looks this evening. Tapered black corduroy trousers, a terribly simple white mock turtleneck and an oversized denim jacket chucked overtop. It’s indicative of the exact sort of intricately pieced together though effortless looking fashion sense that Scorpius has always had, one Albus has never quite been able to copy and master. Tie it all together with the way the peculiar humidity is sending his hair a little frizzy and, really, Albus would go as far as to say he’s the best looking person here at this party.

Objectively, that is. Because Albus always thinks he’s the best looking person everywhere. But tonight he’d put money on it being factually correct, too.

“Him and everyone else, honey,” Scorpius says. Honey. Albus can’t remember when he started saying it – only recently, the last few months or so – but it’s sticking, it seems. “Your Aunt was in the food tent. It’s why it took me so long to escape, she was dead set on interrogating me for as long as possible.”

Albus smiles at that. “Which one?”

“Angelina.”

“Ah,” Albus says, the two of them bumping noses as they go for their respective straws at the same time. Albus backs off a little, lets Scorpius go first, but they’re both still impossibly close, Scorpius’ hair dusting over Albus’ cupids bow the entire time and Albus’ breaths staining every possible inch of Scorpius’ skin. “Yeah, she’s a chatterbox these days. I’m certain she already knows everything there is to know, though. She and Mum talk about the kids all the time.”

“She wanted to know where my first placement is going to be,” Scorpius says. He rests a hand on Albus’ thigh to balance himself, and Albus almost proposes they go sit down somewhere together, though it doesn’t seem like they’ll maintain this sort of privacy if they do that. “I’m surprised your mum didn’t tell her that.”

Albus shrugs, trying to not let the hesitation colour his face but he knows he failed. It’s in the way Scorpius raises an eyebrow, rubs his thumb into the side of Albus’ kneecap. Everything is instinctive, it’s some wordless language they’ve built up over years of companionship.

“Your mum doesn’t know either, does she?”

Albus sighs, perhaps a little too dramatically. But he’s a Potter, it is in his bloodline to be overdramatic sometimes. “I don’t like thinking about it, much less so talking about it,” he says. “It’s not really the sort of thing I’m bringing up over the dinner table. Besides, it’s your news to share, not mine.”

“It’s only Paris.”

“It’s a different country.”

“We can Apparate.”

Albus scoffs. “Fat chance you’re getting me to attempt intercontinental Apparation, Scorpius Malfoy,” he says. “Unless you think you’d fancy an aggressively splinched version of me falling on your doorstep. Actually, scratch that, you’re training to be a Healer. It might be good practice for you to deal with that.”

Scorpius kisses Albus to shut him up, partly because it’s faster and more effective than telling him to be quiet but mostly because Albus enjoys it too much to fight back. “You talk too much.”

“You like my voice.”

“I love your voice,” Scorpius corrects, reaching up to retrieve a tiny leaf from within Albus’ hair. “Are you really that concerned about me going away?”

Albus bemoans, but Scorpius ignores it. “Do we have to talk about this right now? We’ve gone over it time and time again.”

“I know we have, and I thought we were on the same page,” Scorpius says. He reaches to the side of Albus to grab the carton of orange juice, topping up the cup with a half measure of it mixed with some sort of spirit he finds elsewhere on the table. “The page being that yes, it’s in Paris but that yes, it’s also only a month at a time and then I come back for a week to regroup at St. Mungo’s.”

Scorpius is wanting to become a Travelling Healer, something Albus didn’t even know existed until Scorpius brought it up about a year ago, at the end of their Sixth Year, sitting in the common room a few days before the Hogwarts Express was due to take them home for the summer holidays. The whole thing is very self-explanatory. It’s a Healer who travels from place to place to learn the local medicines and methodologies of these foreign countries while also exchanging their own England-based knowledge, too. Apparently – according to a very excited Scorpius back on that late summer’s night – certain countries are more advanced in different branches of Healing, and the benefit of a Travelling Healer is that they gain all this knowledge to bring back to the English departments and, hence, hopefully improve the overall quality of medical care here, too.

Albus had nodded as Scorpius explained it but, deep down, all he could really think of was the distance. To go from being essentially one unit, sharing a room and a space and a life and coexisting in the tightest of parameters, to being separated for four week long stints… the thought made Albus feel a little sick. And they’ve spoken about that aspect, sure, but only in watered down amounts. Albus hasn’t entirely confessed how much he loathes the idea of Scorpius being away, but part of him thinks Scorpius senses it anyway. There’s no need to say it when it’s obvious. It takes all his strength to not ask Scorpius why he’s so desperate to leave him, but Albus knows nothing good would come from a question like that. So, somehow, he resists.

“I dunno… it’s just going to be weird going from having you all the time to having you in one week intervals,” Albus says. He runs a finger over Scorpius’ jacket collar, pressing down the tip which is creased and curling right at the seam. “It’s, like, an entire reframing of my whole life and routine.”

Scorpius hums. “You still have me all the time. Just because I’m not here doesn’t mean I’m not yours.”

Albus rolls his eyes. Affectionately, of course. “You know what I mean,” he murmurs. “It’ll be weird not being able to do this all the time.”

Scorpius says nothing back. Albus knows he’s feeling it too, the weird sort of ache in the depths of his soul. Because it will be strange, it will be as if the tectonic plates beneath the surface are starting to shift in uncomfortable directions. Like some fucking typhoon of the heart, or something. Albus kisses his cheek just to lighten the mood and, in return, Scorpius swipes a fingertip of chilly condensation residue from their ice cold cup down the bridge of Albus’ nose.

“You’ll be too knee-deep in Ministry archives to miss me that much,” Scorpius says when the second hand on Albus’ pocket watch has completed two whole revolutions around the clock face. Somewhere within the food marquee Albus hears his mum laugh, then his dad, then a few of his uncles and aunts. Yann walks past with Karl, Albus spots them in his peripheral vision, both topped up on drinks. Noses turning red, eyes a familiar sort of glassy. Everything goes on around them as if nothing really matters, as if they aren’t even there at all. “You’ll probably get lost in one of those underground vaults and completely forget about me.”

“As if I could ever forget you,” Albus says. “You’re like an annoying gnat, S. I’m lying there at night, trying to sleep peacefully, and you buzz past over and over again. Just when I think it’s calm and quiet, buzz, you come back.”

Scorpius flicks his forehead. “Strange how you say that, since when I’m usually there right next to you at night if I even dare move an inch away you’re the one wanting to pull me back,” he says. “But hey, that’s fine. You’ll get your peace and quiet when I’m all alone in Paris, miles and miles and miles away.”

“That’s deeply unfair,” Albus deadpans. “To use my own sadness against me.”

“I’ll miss you too, Albus,” Scorpius says, setting down the paper plate when it is void of all contents. “If it makes you feel any better.”

Albus smiles. Kisses him, too. “It does.”

The sky is a delectable shade of navy blue, though right beyond the horizon over the tops of the trees there is a blemish of a golden sunset blurring the edges. The stars are all out in full force, mimicking the garden fairy lights in the way they form constellations up there in the great unknown. Albus used to want to paint the lines between the stars like a dot-the-dot puzzle, usually so he could have a permanent fixture of Scorpius in the sky above. The air is alive with a light breeze delicately whistling through branches and flirting with the tablecloth edges. It rakes its way through Scorpius’ hair and Albus watches the strands fly across his forehead.

“I think we should dance, Albus. This is meant to be a celebration.”

“We are a melancholy pair. It’s on brand for us to be lethargic in the corner,” Albus counters.

Scorpius ignores him. Grabs his hand and gently pulls him off the table, both feet on the ground. “We can be melancholy tomorrow morning, honey. Merlin knows you will, anyway,” he says. “We both passed our NEWTs with better grades than were expected and are about to start the rest of our lives. Forgive me for wanting to enjoy this transitional little moment while I can.”

Scorpius gets them situated on the dance floor tarp, something Albus’ grandpa had put down to try and preserve the integrity of the grass beneath it. Albus isn’t sure when his grandpa started taking such care of the lawn – Merlin knows the kids used to tear it to shreds playing Quidditch and football back in the olden days – but it’s endearing to see how he’s used old tent stakes to hammer the tarp into place, even more so to see the number of people making the most of its existence.

Scorpius spins Albus under his arm, chancing a kiss when they’re facing each other again. Albus is a few inches shorter than Scorpius ever since his growth spurt in Fourth Year, and so is destined to a life of looking up at him. But in times like this, he doesn’t seem to mind so much. Times when Scorpius looks all happy and his lips are tacky with the aftermath of the concoction Albus mixed for them, when his shirt is damp from the heat and the material begins to turn a shade of see-through Albus loathes the thought of other people seeing.

Not that anyone else is looking, anyway. It’s a pointless task to stare someone down who only has eyes for one other person in the entire room. Like speeding down a one-way street, you’re only going to hurt yourself in the long run.

“You’re so pretty,” Albus says, not intending for it to come out as a whisper but when you’re standing beside the charmed sound system put together by a bunch of wizards, even your loudest shout is going to pale in comparison. “It’s almost annoying.”

The corner of Scorpius’ mouth quirks up in Albus’ favourite way. Having the power to make someone smile in certain ways – to know the nuances of all their emotions and the ways in which to get them there – is almost as intoxicating as the alcohol in Albus’ bloodstream. He loves loving Scorpius, knowing him like the lines on the palm of his hand.

“Annoyingly pretty?” Scorpius asks. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

Albus raises an eyebrow. “You let other people call you pretty?”

“I can’t control what people say to me, honey,” Scorpius says. Someone, back at the drinks table, drops a glass. The smash isn’t quite as loud as it would be on hardwood floor, but it’s noticeable enough that everyone else around them takes pause, glances over, laughs. “But – just in case it somehow wasn’t abundantly clear by now – the only person I ever want to call me pretty is you. The only person I try to look pretty for is you.”

To that, Albus smiles. The breeze picks up ever so slightly and he shivers, pulling the sleeves of the cardigan down over his hands. It seems, in doing so, he finally draws Scorpius’ attention to the cardigan, to the embroidered emblem placed over where his heart would be beneath his skin. Scorpius kisses his forehead; Albus thinks this qualifies as being in love.

“You don’t have to try. It’s your natural state,” he says, eventually. Order has restored and the music is a few beats louder. The Weasleys have no neighbours for a good mile or two, and so there is no worry about being nuisances with loud music for all hours of the evening. Even if they did have neighbours, of course, they’d just cast a few spells to isolate the sound to their own property. Amazing, really, how little problems are completely erased with a flick of a wand.

Scorpius kisses his teeth, taking another sip from their shared drink. Albus thinks he uses the wrong straw but, in hindsight, even thinking they needed two straws was a rookie error. Quite wasteful, actually. “You’re being soppy,” he teases, tapping Albus’ dimple. “Anyone would think you were a besotted husband of twenty-five years and not, in fact, an eighteen year old Hogwarts graduate.”

“I can be many things all at the same time,” Albus says, offering a spin on his heels to embellish his statement. “I’m trying to think of animals that bond for life but my head is a little fuzzy, so I’m struggling.”

“Pretty sure I read somewhere that Atlantic Puffins stick together for life,” Scorpius supplies, always a walking encyclopaedia.

“Yeah?”

Scorpius hums. Nods. Steps to the side when someone – a Fifth Year student Albus doesn’t recognise but who must be a friend of Lily’s – drunkenly stumbles over a crease in the tarp. “But that they often are separated at sea for months on end, though they always come back together at their nesting site when they need to.”

“You’re a fountain of knowledge, huh?” Albus asks.

Scorpius smiles. “I’m an intelligent little Atlantic puffin,” he says. “One of my many skills.”

“I fucking love you, Scorp,” Albus states, throwing a kiss to his cheek for good measure. “In case you didn’t know.”

“I know.”

And then they dance for a while. Dance is putting it politely, if one is to be honest. Though the two of them are gifted at many things, it’s not in their DNA to be good at dancing. Lily had explained it to him once, that dancing is easy if you just let the music be the guiding force and, hence, let your body run loose. Letting loose, however, doesn’t come naturally to Albus. He had, after all, spent the better part of his teen years acutely aware that people were watching him all the time. How can someone ever expect to let loose when they know someone is always observing? But then, sometimes, times like this, Albus manages to get by. Even if people watch the two of them right now, haphazardly bumping into each other and spilling droplets of their sour concoction over the cup’s rim, Albus doesn’t really care.

He knows people are curious – have been curious since the two of them were fourteen – but he’s learned to take it more like a compliment. How deprived their own lives must be of the purest sort of love that they find it notable how two teenage boys thoroughly enjoy spending time together. It’s quite sad when you put it like that, Albus thinks.

His dad comes over to fix the crease in the tarp. He tries, at first, to pull it taut at the edges, but when that proves insufficient he pulls out his wand from his inside jacket pocket and whips the plastic into submission with a charm. Purple sparks, ones that splash on the plastic and, as they disappear, so does the crease they were challenged to remove. It’s only by watching his dad, smiling at him and seeing as he restores his wand back to where it belongs, that Albus feels the noticeable space in his own back pocket.

“Oh, fuck,” Albus says, letting go of Scorpius to desperately pat around every single pocket on his being. “I think I’ve lost my–”

Scorpius has it in his hand, spinning it between his fingers as he loves to do. Albus has never mastered the art of it; his attempts usually end up with the wand flying somewhere in the distance and just about avoiding taking someone’s eye out.

“Oh.”

“It fell out your pocket on the drinks table,” Scorpius explains, rolling the wand along the expanse of his palm. They managed to get their wands restored after the incident in the Owlery Tower. A replacement core and a little woodwork had both of them looking as good as before. Scorpius got to retain his tally marks, and Albus’ thumbprint grooves on the base of his wand within the cherry blossom buds remain exactly as they have all along. “Figured I’d put it next to mine for safekeeping.”

Albus scoffs. “Safekeeping?” he asks, gently poking Scorpius’ side where he knows he’s most ticklish. It doesn’t have quite as dramatic an effect through the layers of clothing, but Scorpius still flinches a little and looks at Albus like that, so it isn’t a complete waste of time. “I’m not four years old, babe.”

“You misplace things when you get drunk,” Scorpius explains, again. With the wand back in his pocket, alongside his own, he curls his fingers around Albus’ wrists. Albus wonders if it’s to keep him upright or to stop him from going back for another attempted side poke. Probably, he thinks, a bit of both. “As evidenced by what just happened.”

“I’m not drunk,” Albus lies. Unintentionally, of course, but it is a lie.

Scorpius smiles. “Yet,” he says, lifting their joined hands to kiss Albus’ knuckles.

“I’m not getting drunk,” Albus persists, gently kneeing Scorpius’ shin when he looks at him with a disbelieving raised eyebrow. “Scorpius, I’m not.”

Scorpius leans down, a boastful movement granted to him by his slight extra height, just to say, “The smell of your breath tells me otherwise,” and with him right there Albus sort of wants to kiss him. Knows Scorpius wants him to do it too, because otherwise he would’ve straightened back up and restored his posture after he finished speaking.

Except he hasn’t, and they’re both still eye to eye. Albus looks from Scorpius’ ocean eyes to his tacky lips and back up again. He could, he probably should, but it’s a little more fun if he doesn’t.

“Careful, people might think you’re trying to court me if you get too close,” Albus says instead, freeing one of his hands so he can brush Scorpius’ hair out of his face, make it so there’s nothing in the way of how they see each other. Brightly, as if the northernmost star in the sky would pale in comparison. “Wouldn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea.”

Scorpius, at last, stands back up straight. He lets go of Albus’ other hand and drapes his arms around his shoulders instead, still anchoring them together – as always – but releasing a little bit of the pressure that had been building, staining their skin in the form of rose blush blemishes on their cheeks. “Trying? I thought I’d crossed that border when we were sixteen.”

Albus smiles. “Well, that’s a secret between me and you, isn’t it?”

“Wouldn’t they love to know, huh?” Scorpius says, gesturing vaguely with a free hand to everyone else in the garden. People Albus had, quite honestly, forgotten existed. Everything fades to nothing when the two of them get set in their ways. When they’re so completely on the same wavelength Albus often finds himself thinking that they’re the only two people on the planet who really understand the meaning of life.

(The meaning is each other.)

Albus tuts, grins, kisses the corner of Scorpius' mouth. “Tell me about it.”

Scorpius holds up the empty glass, one straw misplaced and the other all warped and soaked through. The paper umbrella is still in Scorpius’ hair, and Albus would quite like to slip another one in there, too. “Do you want a refill? I’ll look after your wand.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

⚡︎

three: nineteen, malfoy manor

The Malfoy Manor has more rooms than Albus can count, but one he had never been in until very recently is the attic. Once you find your way through the entry hall and have walked the marathon length distance through the first sitting room – there are multiple, something Albus had to pretend wasn’t mind-boggling the first time he came over back during that summer between their Fourth and Fifth Years – you come upon two staircases, one which curves and takes you to the second floor and another, more rickety, on the right-hand side which takes you to Astoria’s library. If you take the curved marble one the odds are you will end up getting lost, but the rickety library staircase is as safe a haven as any.

Albus hadn’t even noticed the roof hatch the first few times he had come into the library. Granted, he very rarely ever came in here when he and Scorpius were teens running amuck about the place. A lot of the books are covered in dust and to the side of her rocking chair, still dressed with the patchwork blanket she’d been made as a baby, the last book Astoria had been reading sits untouched. The tassel bookmark hangs limply from its permanent place about three-quarters of the way through the hardbound book and her pair of reading glasses are dusty all over the lenses, too.

This isn’t a room the Malfoys come in often. When you lose someone you love there is often the looming fear of retaining as much of them as possible for fear you could forget everything you had ever known about them if you dismantle the way their legacy lives on through the things they left behind. Albus doubts that will happen here, of course. There is so much love for Astoria existing between Scorpius and Draco that they could charge her memory until the sun itself burns out, but grief is laden with anxiety, the horrible sort that is completely unfounded and makes it hard for you to see sense sometimes. Moving her glasses or putting her book back on the shelf isn’t going to destroy their memories of her, but it will, Albus supposes, indicate that the space she once took up is no longer hers.

Anyway, if you reach up with a fire poker and hook the curved edge over the roof hatch handle you reveal to the room a ladder. Albus knows Draco comes up at least twice a year to retrieve the Christmas decorations and to put them back, but the only other person who really uses the ladder these days is Albus. It feels a little like trespassing, if he’s honest, somewhat sneaking into Scorpius’ mother’s room and shuffling about in the attic looking through boxes that don’t belong to him. Scorpius still doesn’t know he does this – and Albus can’t tell you exactly why he struggles to mention it in the letters they send each other – which perhaps only adds to his awkwardness about the whole ordeal.

But it wasn’t his idea to start with.

“You know, Albus,” Draco had said, walking back to the Manor after they’d dropped Scorpius at the train station on the eve of his Healer induction. It hadn’t quite sunk in yet, that day, that things were changing in very real and scary ways. “My dad was a very… troubled man. He did a lot of things that – at the time – I knew were bad but, over the years, I’ve become privy to more things that I realise are quite unforgivable.”

“I mean… a lot of people did a lot of bad things back then,” Albus said.

Albus noticed a wry smile on Draco’s face, right out the corner of his eye. “You don’t have to make excuses for someone who was investigated for his crimes and is now dead, Albus, although it is very like you to be so optimistic,” he said. Albus often wondered what his dad would think if he knew he thought of Draco as a fatherly figure, too. That he has almost as many, if not more, affectionate and complex conversations with Draco as he does with his dad. “I discovered, over Christmas, that my father partook in the illegal practice of smuggling and thieving documents from the Ministry after the War had ended. Documents that were tallying up families lost, wizards who had used unforgivable curses, other things like that. Documents the Ministry intended to use during the follow-up court cases taking place to charge and imprison Death Eaters.”

“But…” Albus stuttered, ever so aware of the Muggles they passed as they walked. “I thought your parents were pardoned?”

Draco sighed. “They were, which is, I assume, how he was able to get away with it. They supplied evidence against certain wizards – ones they didn’t really like – but hid ones that would incriminate their closest friends. Old habits die hard, I suppose,” he said, just as the two of them got back within sight of the Manor’s iron gates. “All this to say, anyway, that I know of this because I found, in the attic hidden beneath boxes of baby clothes and old broomsticks, piles of these documents. They’re all bound and tied together with twine. Some of them are incredibly faded, but others are readable. I really didn’t know what to do with them when I found them. Then I remembered, hey, I happen to know an archivist working for the Ministry who might be interested in transcribing them.”

“Really?” Albus asked.

“Really,” Draco said, holding open the front door for Albus to walk through. “They’re a part of history that I can’t stand the idea of being missing. Please feel free to come whenever you want. You know the way to the attic, right? Through Astoria’s library?”

Albus nodded.

“Perfect,” Draco said, holding out a hand to take Albus’ coat from him. “Plus, you know. This house for three is now a house of one. I think I’d get a little lonely without someone else lurking in these halls sometimes.”

And that’s how he finds himself here, in a pair of ragged cargos and one of Scorpius’ oversized jumpers he’d left behind in his bedroom drawers, sifting through pages of old documents in the Malfoy Manor attic. He’s an archivist these days. Training, of course, but he thinks he’s doing well. He’d discovered it was a potential career when he visited his dad at work a few years ago. They were travelling in the elevator when Albus eavesdropped on a conversation two other workers were having about the document vaults and how transcribing the old undesirable pamphlets was taking far too long.

Albus had asked his dad about it at dinner that night and, as chance and life would have it, now he is here.

It’s a lot of reading old books and piecing together bits of information, cross-referencing family genealogy files and trying to put in order a huge chunk of history that was thrown amuck. When the only important thing is survival, it’s understandable how documenting history can fall to the back of one’s mind. Albus considers it a strange privilege to be a small part of the greater whole that works to make clear something that is seemingly so foggy for so many people.

He’s been up here for a few hours. He stayed the night yesterday, too, having come straight from the Ministry to the Manor. The two of them – Albus and Draco – happen to share one very big trait: desperately missing Scorpius while not wanting to be the one to pin him down here when he has bigger aspirations elsewhere. But they also get along in other ways, too. Draco is a keen gardener, having picked up responsibility for the vegetable patch after Astoria passed away, and Albus happens to know a thing or two about tending to crops having spent countless summers at his Aunt and Uncles home at Shell Cottage, pruning tomato saplings and plucking green beans when they’re perfectly ripe. They both read a lot, they don’t particularly care for Quidditch anymore and, most fascinating to Albus, they both love clocks and pocket watches.

Albus is knee deep in a box of magical memorabilia when he starts to tire slightly. Programmes and dormant charmed knickknacks and other Quidditch World Cup slogans stuffed atop a box which, in the deeper layers, houses handwritten minutes taken at various Death Eater meetings hosted in the Dining Room right below Albus’ feet. He flicks through the programme, eating dust whether or not he wants to, and he gives a cursory glance to the minutes sheets, but the thought of it feels ever so slightly sickening for this late in a summery day. Hot air rises, after all, and Albus is all but sweltering.

“Albus?” it’s Draco, of course, shouting up through the hatch. Draco, Albus has learned, isn’t too keen on heights. He isn’t a ladder person, which is somewhat amusing considering that to reach the tops of most cabinets in this high ceilinged building you really do need a set of steps. Or, luckily for Draco, a wand. “You okay up there?”

“Yeah,” Albus shouts back down. He stands up and brushes down his cargos, grimacing at the bundles of dust and grime that tumble off his kneecaps. “Just all musty, as always,”

He hears Draco chuckle, can imagine the tight-lipped smile over his face. “Alright, well. I’ve just made some tea if you’re interested. It’s in the back sitting room – I know you like that one more than the front room.”

“Thank you, Draco,” he says, at once busying himself with tossing the Quidditch items back in the box. He can come back to the minutes on a different day, one where he feels a little less sad in his soul and more equipped to shoulder the burden of these crimes from years gone by. “I’ll be down in a second.”

It takes him only a few more moments to get himself in order. He has his sleeves pushed up to the bend in his arm, and with both feet back on solid ground he releases the hatch and folds the ladder back up to the ceiling. Astoria’s library is cool in comparison to the rest of the house, even with the bay window splattering sunlight all over the floor. Albus could read into it if he wanted to, imagining up reasons why a room which should be warm has a slight chill to it, but that feels like a rather unproductive task.

He, instead, stretches out the cricks in his back and heads down the rickety stairs to his favourite sitting room, the one with the French doors that open into the garden. He plans to make a beeline for the teapot, sitting prettily on the coffee table to the side, until he sees him standing by the window, and all plans go out like a candle pinched between fingertips.

“What the fuck?” Albus asks, though his tone – surprised and moderately stunned – morphs the sentence into more of a statement than a question. “Why are you here?”

Scorpius, for what it’s worth, shrugs. Smiles. Stands there with his rucksack hitched over one arm, what Albus recognises as one of his own lightweight jumpers tied around his shoulders, and the cuffs of his crisp cream trousers rolled up two turns. Preppy, Albus thinks. Outrageously preppy.

“I feel like I could ask you the same thing. Is this not, after all, my childhood home?” Scorpius counters. The sun hits him in the most delicious way, catching mostly his left side and painting him butterscotch while, on the right side, forcing the contours of his cheeks to really show up. His hair is a little longer than Albus remembers, all frizzed at the roots and the slightest shadow of a curl teasing the ends. It happens in humidity, Albus has noticed over the years. Scorpius somewhat transforms in the sun; he’s like an opposite werewolf.

Albus doesn’t answer the question. Not yet, anyway. “Merlin, I’ve missed you so much,” is what he musters up, and without even really thinking about his movements he’s crossing the space, tripping slightly over the rug edge, and throwing his arms around whatever part of Scorpius’ body he can find.

It happens to be his shoulders this time, Albus’ own hands interlinked behind his neck. Scorpius’ skin is still warm, a splattering of redness across the tops of his cheeks and down the bridge of his nose in what Albus sees as being days’ old sunburn. Scorpius helpfully drops his rucksack, deploying his now free arms around Albus’ waist. He lifts him a few centimetres off the ground, all but squeezes out every breath Albus has left in his bones.

“How did you even know I was here?” Albus asks. It’s all muffled, what with how his face is pressed deeply into the shelf of Scorpius’ collarbone. Not that Albus is complaining, of course; this happens to be one of his most favourite places to be.

Scorpius places him back down, holds him still but at an arm’s length so they can look at each other. Seagrass into cerulean. Scales balanced again. “Went to your flat, you weren’t there. Went to your parents, you weren’t there. They said if you weren’t at the Ministry, which I knew you weren’t because you never work on the weekends, that you might be here,” he says, stealing the first kiss of the day. It takes Albus by surprise, the way Scorpius is all cherry and mint, and he momentarily loathes the warmth he feels blooming over his own cheeks in response to the casual form of affection. Betrayed by his own body this early into the day, how utterly mortifying. “Which was, by the way, a very strange thing to hear. But, hey. It was true! Here you are.”

Albus nods. Moves one hand to brush a flyaway eyelash off Scorpius’ cheek. He presses a kiss to the same spot of skin right afterwards, too, just for good measure. “Oh… Yeah. Your dad has been letting me in the attic to look through some old files,” he explains, feeling a little bit shy about it all of a sudden. After all, skulking about your best friend’s attic while he isn’t even in the country is a little bit strange when you think about it. “For work. I’ve been coming over every now and then to try and work my way through it.”

Scorpius appears unbothered though. He’s still smiling, still looking at Albus as if seeing him for the first time all over again. “He mentioned that when I got here. You know, it’s a little weird walking up the front door and having your dad ask what you’re doing home, rather than being pleasantly surprised to see you unexpectedly,” he says, all the flavours of sarcastic and tepid and pleased that Albus loves so much. “So you hang out in my attic when you can’t hang out with me?”

“Don’t act so surprised,” Albus rolls his eyes. “My life is boring without you.”

It appears to Albus as if Scorpius has no plans of letting him go. And there’s something about it – the way Scorpius’ thumb attaches itself to the spot just above Albus’ hipbone as if the two segments are magnets drawn to each other – that makes Albus ache. The part of his body that lies dormant whenever Scorpius is gone, the bit that feels drawn to someone, feels the tendrils of desire and want and love deep in the pit of his stomach, aches as an underused muscle does. Aches with the promise of life, of meaning.

Albus likes the Manor the most because he doesn’t feel the need to check the window reflections before rocking up onto his tiptoes and kissing Scorpius for however long he wants. Draco doesn’t lurk about the background like the Potters do, he seems content to accept things as they are without wanting to worm his way into the binding of the book. Albus’ family – though he loves them – are incapable of doing just that. Perhaps because the family is so large, they’re so used to there always being something to talk about. Some gossip to share over dinner at the in-laws' house.

When you’re a family of three, dwindled horrifically down to two, you perhaps appreciate that secrets and privacy are fundamental in keeping things stable. Because if you cross a boundary and lose each other you could very well end up with nothing left at all.

“How are you here?” Albus asks again, hoping for an answer with substance this time.

Scorpius shrugs. He does, at long last, finally let Albus go. “National holiday in Spain this weekend. Figured I could come home for a bit and see you. See Dad,” he explains. With distance between them again Scorpius looks at him properly, all the way down and all the way back up again. His gaze lingers on the embroidered S in the middle of Albus’ jumper, his touch so sickeningly delicate Albus hardly notices him tracing the letter’s outline with his thumb. “Have you been staying over?”

“Sometimes”

“Where?”

Albus looks at him because he knows it will make Scorpius smile. Eyebrow cocked and dimple like a crater in the heart of his cheek; a look Albus knows Scorpius loves. “Take an educated guess, babe,” he says.

“Ah, of course,” Scorpius muses, kissing his teeth as he unwinds the knotted sleeves around his shoulders and drapes the jumper over one arm. With bare shoulders Albus sees how thin the material of Scorpius’ shirt is, how through the fibres he can make out the impression of the scar snaking its way up his torso. “I knew you liked the peacock hutch a little too much. You smell earthy, too.”

Albus flicks his nose. “I think you’ll find that’s the smell of must and dust and possible mould,” he says. He pinches the bottom of his shirt and wafts the material back and forth, all of a sudden feeling the warmth of what – from the lower levels of the house – is turning out to be a blissful summer’s day. If the motion catches Scorpius' attention, too, the flash of skin as Albus fans himself, then that’s none of Albus’ business. “I thought this entire house would be immaculate, so imagine my surprise when I got up there and a whole colony of spiders had moved in. Rent-free, by the way.”

Scorpius softens. All but beams at him. He takes a hand to Albus’ chin and tilts his head up. Albus doesn’t think it should be humanly possible to feel as much love as he does for Scorpius sometimes, so much it’s like it takes over his entire bloodstream. “I’ve missed your face,” Scorpius says, intending on leaning down to kiss Albus, but he is met halfway, just for good luck. “I feel bad that I’m getting in the way of your work.”

Albus scrunches up his nose. “Not really work. This is optional extra-curricular, I guess,” he says. Perhaps it’s the heat boring through the French doors, or perhaps it’s that he’s spent the better part of ten minutes being pressed up against someone else’s body, but something has him feeling outrageously warm all of a sudden, sticky in a displeasing manner. “If you give me, like, ten minutes to have a shower and wash the cobwebs off I’ll be much better company.”

“Course,” Scorpius says. He brushes Albus’ hair back from his forehead and kisses the skin beneath, crouching to pick up his rucksack when he’s satisfied with his work. “I’ll go humour my dad and pretend he’s the reason I came all the way home for the weekend.”

Albus has all the clichés. He has a box of clothes underneath Scorpius’ bed and a shelf of toiletries scattered along the en-suite sink. Toothpaste, a clunky box of floss that is probably expired but he doesn’t know if that’s quite a thing. He meanders about this place with the sort of ease one only does when they know exactly where everything is and how everything should be. He knows to shoulder barge into the bathroom door because the hinges often stick in the same way he knows to turn the shower on before you even undress because it takes a while for the water to heat. He knows he has a bottle of shower gel in his little section but he always goes for Scorpius’ because he knows where it is, knows that smelling like that brings him comfort, knows Scorpius won’t mind.

There’s a nonchalance about it. A teaspoon too much, sometimes, and Albus often wonders if he’s taking it all for granted. Taking advantage of being wanted, being welcomed. But then, on the other hand, he knows that’s just the antsy part of his brain speaking. Knows there’s not a single reality within any and all universes where his presence isn’t wanted here. There’s a mug in the downstairs cabinet with his initial on the front and a spot on the coat rack always vacant for him.

There is no opportunity for him to take it for granted because there is no limit to the Malfoys’ love for Albus.

And so Albus showers. He uses Scorpius’ body wash and he draws a smiley face in the mist over the mirror so when Scorpius next uses the bathroom it’ll reappear, an invisible ink message between the two of them. He puts on a pair of shorts he found in the chest of drawers and throws a vintage Harpies t-shirt overtop, the very ends of his hair still weeping as he steps out of the bathroom to the sight of Scorpius lying on his bed. He’s tossed the windows open, curtains beckoned back and forth by the breeze that whips through the holes in the lace, and his glasses are low on his nose while he reads over the backlog of letters that await him every time he comes home, perhaps so engrossed in the words he doesn’t even notice Albus is there until he collapses on the bed next to him.

They lie like perpendicular crossroads, Scorpius straight down the bed while Albus, at a ninety-degree angle to him, has his head resting on Scorpius’ chest, legs bent so they don’t dangle off the edge of the mattress. It takes no time at all for Scorpius to tangle a hand in Albus’ hair, twisting curls around his fingers and watching as they spring into life when he releases them.

Albus looks at him for a bit, perhaps still disbelieving that he’s here, then waits for Scorpius to drop the final letter before taking his free hand and twining their fingers together. “You’re tan.”

“You’re damp.” Scorpius takes their joined hands and kisses the back of Albus’ knuckles. Albus imagines Scorpius must taste the soap, the fragrant leftovers of his own body wash nestled into every crevice on Albus’ skin.

“Like, really tan,” Albus reiterates. He shifts his body ever so slightly to the side, to an angle where he can look at Scorpius without craning his neck and, at the same time, hear the breaths all but ricocheting through his lungs.

“Is there a problem with the tan, Albus?” Scorpius asks.

Albus rolls his eyes. “No, Scorpius. There is most definitely not a problem with the tan,” he says. There’s a patch of burnt skin just above Scorpius’ wrist bone, delicately surrounded by a pale rectangle where his watch usually rests. There’s the scar, too, all the little branches fanning out over his skin, overlapping the navy impressions of his veins. The scar strands stand out even more right now, milky white against the sun-kissed backdrop they reside on. Albus can’t help it, the compulsion to kiss and wish away the sunburn as if his magic can manifest in forms of love and not just flicks of a wand, and so he peppers the patch of sunburn with them, Scorpius’ skin all tangles of aloe vera and sun cream and evaporated hints of vanilla. “I like it. Who would’ve guessed you developed freckles when you’re overexposed to the sun for a while.”

Albus, lying right over his ribcage, is privy to the knowledge that Scorpius’ heart stutters a little, speeds up. The palpability of how his touch gets to Scorpius feels more magic than the sort that runs in his veins. His real magic often feels weak, a little worthless. But this; this sort of stirring, the subtle way Scorpius tightens his grip on Albus’ hand: this all feels worthwhile. “Merlin, you’re touchy,” Scorpius says, and if someone were to ask Albus he’d say Scorpius sounds nervous. “Anyone would think you’ve missed me.”

Albus props himself up on one arm. He watches as Scorpius sets a pillow behind himself, frowning at something as he shifts his weight to try and get more comfortable. It’s strange how in any composition they seem to fit against each other. Always a slot where the other can rest perfectly. Albus can’t think about it too much or it makes him feel a little woozy. “You’re gorgeous and I haven’t been able to kiss you in a month. Give me my five minutes of being clingy before I go back into vermin mode.”

“Vermin mode?” Scorpius repeats, everything tinged with a shade of pure elation. Albus would assign a rose gold hue to it, he thinks, something valuable but touchable and something you never want to lose. “I’d rather keep this version of you all night, if I’m allowed to make that request.”

Albus hums. “I suppose so,” he says. “Only because I’ve missed you.”

Scorpius frowns again. Not at Albus, of course, but at something neither of them can see. Albus releases all pressure, sitting perfectly upright as Scorpius shuffles about again. His t-shirt is askew at the neckline and for a moment he’s all collarbone and tan lines and Adam’s apple and all Albus can do is clear his throat, look away, think about the spiders up in the roof awaiting his return.

“I swear my bed used to be more comfortable than this,” Scorpius mutters. He arches himself off the mattress to smooth the covers beneath him but, in what is a complete surprise to both of them, unearths Albus’ wand at the end of it. “Ah, that adds up. Why do you never look after your wand?”

Albus shrugs, reaches over to the bedside table to grab the bottle of lemonade Scorpius had smuggled back from Spain. “I just don’t use it that much. Just because I passed Charms and Transfiguration doesn’t mean I enjoy doing magic in day to day life. Why do you think I chose the paperwork Ministry job instead of the practical one?”

Albus swigs from the lemonade, all sorts of fizz and zest, and when he looks back to Scorpius he is doing that thing he always does. Spinning Albus’ wand around his fingers, rolling it up and down his palm. Scorpius possesses a fascination for Albus’ wand that Albus has never been able to define. As if he sees in it something humane, something with a life and a soul. It’s how he imagines some people feel when they look at a piece of art – the Mona Lisa, for example – but can’t muster up any thought other than the generic. As if there’s something they’re missing.

“I’ve always loved your wand,” Scorpius says, gently poking Albus’ dimple with the end. It takes Albus back to Hogwarts, to sitting opposite each other in the library at that odd time of the day when they’re both losing interest in textbooks but can’t summon the will to move. When they’d topple into playfulness, gently kicking each other’s shins under the table and scrawling doodles of goblins in the margins of the other person's Potions book or, in Scorpius’ case, playing with Albus’ wand. “It suits you so much.”

Albus pulls Scorpius up by his collar to kiss him; sometimes when he gets lost in a daydream of times gone by he feels the need to ground himself in the here and now. When he mulls over the sweetness that his life has turned into he often forgets that it’s real, that Scorpius is real. That they made it out of the pit they both found themselves in as clunky teenagers. It sometimes feels too much like an artist’s impression of his childhood dreamscapes; the fact it’s his reality often leaves Albus a little breathless. “How in the world does a wand suit a person?”

Scorpius takes a moment to settle himself. He doesn’t lie back down this time, perhaps not wanting to sever the direct line of electricity that teems between them. Doesn’t want too much space between them. “Don’t be facetious, Al,” he murmurs, still holding Albus’ wand as if it’s a precious artefact. Something that, were Albus to find it in the archives, he would think he struck gold. “How do you think the whole the-wand-chooses-the-wizard philosophy works if not because the wands suit the person they belong to?”

Albus shrugs, just to be annoying. Sue him, he enjoys listening to Scorpius talk. The soft sandpaper nature of it, the way he still cracks even though they are years removed from the time when their voices dropped. It’s like a shooting star reminder of the version of Scorpius that Albus first felt love for. He’s still the same in many ways but, much like the wand trickery, the voice breaks almost make Albus feel as if they are stuck at the day they twined into one. The day they realised what life was really worth living for.

“It’s not, like… an arrogant-looking wand,” Scorpius continues, pressing the wand into the curve of Albus’ waist where he’s most ticklish. “Don’t laugh, you troll. You’ve seen some of the wands that passed through the Malfoy lineage. There is such a thing as an arrogant-looking wand. Even mine is – the curvature on that thing is almost embarrassing sometimes. It just looks like something that someone who thinks they’re good at magic would conjure up. Yours is so natural. Nice. It has a built-in grip with the blossom bud-like bits on the handle but you use them as a stress reliever instead of a vice for spell-casting. It completely fits your personality.”

Albus nods, slow and deliberate. He finds himself in one of those odd moments where everything feels doubly tangible; Scorpius’ breaths fanning over his cheeks are a little like fire, the weight of Scorpius’ free hand tapping over Albus’ knee, the love hovering around them burns tenfold. “Or, hear me out here,” he says, overlapping his hand around Scorpius’ on his wand. Fingertips find the grooves between the cherry blossom buds all over the bottom, find the valleys of delicate skin between Scorpius’ knuckles. “Maybe you’re reading a little too much into it.”

Scorpius rolls his eyes. He pokes Albus once more for good measure and dodges the kiss Albus tries to place on his cheek. “You know what, next time I won’t save your wand from breaking. Be clumsy for all I care, snap it again. Go into debt buying a replacement from Ollivander’s while I sit back and laugh,” Scorpius says, swatting at Albus with a pillow as he tries to keep up this façade of disinterest.

Albus fights back, of course. Trawls his way through the pillow hits and the playful dodges until he manages to get his hands on Scorpius’ cheeks, thumbs all over the gentle plateaus of his temples. He kisses him as firmly as possible and he knows, when Scorpius drops the wand in favour of taking a hold of Albus’ shirt neckline, that he’s won.

“You’re cute when you pretend to be whiny,” Albus says, emphasising cute because he knows it’ll get under Scorpius’ skin. When they get into this rhythm – these times where the words bounce back and forth with ease and everything slots together like perfectly carved jigsaw pieces – it’s like they could sit here until the clocks run dry and the sun burns them out of the solar system. A type of effortless that feels like fortune, a specific type of love that has its own pulse. “It is the most unnatural emotion on you. Ever. You’re too polite to ever actually be annoyed about things. If both our wands were rolling towards a cliff you’d probably save mine first.”

“Well, duh,” Scorpius says, tangling his fingers in Albus’ hair again. By now the strands have dried, his curls have settled and his cheeks, once rosy from the too-warm spray over his skin, have returned to their natural olive state. He kisses the corner of Albus’ mouth; Albus firmly believes it is the single most intoxicating feeling to be desired by someone as much as you desire them, to want and be infinitely wanted back. “A wand is an extension of a person’s soul. Of course I’d save you before anything else.”

Albus pushes himself off the bed and heads over to the window. He fixes where the curtain has caught itself on an orchid stem, turning the plant pot so the other side can get more direct sunlight. The windowsill is a culmination of Scorpius’ entire life in the form of knickknacks. A few photo frames, mostly of him and Albus or of his parents, interspersed with rocks they pick up on beaches they visit, snow globes and keychains. Scorpius keeps, in an antique music box with the inner mechanism carved out, every birthday card he has ever received. The one on the top, always, is the last one with love, Mum and Dad scribed on the bottom line. Underneath, always, is the one when Albus signed off love, A for the first time.

Albus thinks a lot about love sometimes, the different forms of it. Used to wonder if he could compete with the love Scorpius has for his parents before realising that they are completely incomparable things. It stemmed from insecurity around the fact he never met Astoria, from nights where he would lie awake wondering if Scorpius would ever come to a revelation that his mother wouldn’t have liked Albus and, therefore, decided he couldn’t be with him anymore in any capacity. Albus nipped it in the bud quickly, though. If there’s one thing you learn how to do when you become deeply involved with someone who has experienced detrimental levels of grief by the time they turn thirteen, it’s that involving yourself in their sadness is the most selfish and unproductive thing in the world. However many maybes and what ifs Albus thinks about Astoria will never compare to the innumerable ones Scorpius does. The key difference is that Scorpius’ musings have roots in reality, in loss and things he will never get back. Albus’ are pure fantasy.

(It helps, too, that when Albus mustered the courage to mention it to Scorpius, figuring that voicing the issue would be a more mature way to steer away from any potential building resentment, Scorpius had said “My Mum loved you because I love you, doesn’t matter that she never met you.”)

Albus spins on his heel and looks at Scorpius. Cross-legged on the edge of his bed, Albus’ wand on the bedside table adjacent to the empty glass of lemonade. He walks himself back over, stringing his arms around Scorpius’ shoulders and standing between his legs, just for the momentary pleasure of being the one to look down at Scorpius.

“If I pose the question sweetly, will you stay over tonight, too?” Scorpius asks. His fingers toy with the drawstrings on Albus’ shorts, tying the strands into a bow, then a clove hitch, then finally into a bow-line knot.

Albus’ laugh is airy, easy. “You don’t even have to ask, babe,” he says, kissing the top of Scorpius’ head. “I have no plans of going anywhere. I sleep substantially better when you’re here.”

“I love you,” Scorpius says. His touch is all over Albus, ghostly remains of his fingertips on every single available sliver of skin. Each one is like a little blot of pins and needles, a numb, simmering buzz in his bloodstream that he can’t quite shake out.

Albus kisses him properly this time, wonders how he’s gone yet another month without being able to do so. How they’ve been doing this for a while now, over a year at this point. Twelve months of four weeks apart, one week together. It’s perplexing, really. Albus wouldn’t say he gets used to being away from Scorpius, feeling like an unmoored boat beating against the current, but rather that the emptiness becomes a familiarity he endures. But then, in times similar to these, Scorpius comes back and Albus realises how much better it is like this. “I love you,” he counters, thumb trickling over the angles of Scorpius’ jawline. “Even though your dad has usurped you and has claimed best friend position in your absence.”

“Has he fuck,” Scorpius scoffs. “If you’re best friends with my dad the same way you’re best friends with me then I really do not want to know what you get up to when I’m not around.”

“Ew, Scorpius,” Albus grimaces, going to walk away but Scorpius has a hold of him and pulls him back onto the bed. The mattress feels softer with Scorpius around, better. The way it’s supposed to be. Like sleepovers when they were younger and would play draughts until it turned four in the morning and they realised what a terrible situation they’d gotten themselves into. Trundling downstairs the day after to breakfast with sleep in their eyes, Draco looking at them with a sort of gaze only a knowing parent can master.

“What?” Scorpius asks, faking innocence and having found a way to sit over Albus’ legs, locking him in place, looking down at him. “You’re the one who started it.”

Albus tuts, throws his eyes back. He tries his best to play the part of scornful lover, but then he gets a waft of Scorpius’ cologne and it’s as if he’s being held ransom once more. “My best friend in the sense of makes-me-tea and bakes-ginger-biscuits-because-he-knows-I-like-them,” he explains, reaching up to grab Scorpius’ shirt and twang it back against his skin. “Not in the sense of kissing-when-we-have-time and soul-crushing-amount-of-love-always-want-to-be-around-and-touching-him sort of way.”

Albus leans up to kiss him again, with a little more intent this time. They’ve been beating around the bush a bit too much today, in Albus’ opinion. It’s been burning between them, the morsel of distance that they dissolve for a few seconds at a time, far from long enough to satisfy the languid burn riddling the pit of Albus’ stomach.

And Albus’ current attempt works for a little bit. Only a little, much to his dismay.

Because then Scorpius gently pushes him back down, raises an eyebrow. His smile is all lopsided, disbelieving. Albus doesn’t think he’s ever seen a prettier sight. No other wonder in the world can compare to Scorpius Malfoy in a state of happiness. “Pretty sure other best friends don’t do any of the second set of things you described,” he says, toeing that great old divisive line Albus loathes about labels. Scorpius knows, but Albus knows, too. Senses the humour in it, the way it’s a thinly veiled tease rather than a deliberate attempt at aggravation.

“Then they’re just not as close as we are,” Albus states, hopefully underscoring the conversation with a red line that puts a pin in it for now. Scorpius looks at him with a sparkle in his eye, a knowing smile loitering somewhere in there. “Are we done chatting for now? Can I kiss you again or are you going to keep interrupting me?”

Scorpius hums. Albus would call him irritating and flick his nose but even he has the foresight to know that would only push him further from his goal. “You sure you don’t want to keep talking about my dad?” he says, the frivolous goading settling over Albus’ skin as a sheen, a tackiness that lingers and builds. Albus thinks he could kill him; Scorpius is, after all, trying to do the exact same back. “I thought that was something of–”

Albus kisses him. Again. “Shut up, Malfoy.”

(He does.)

⚡︎

four: twenty, berchtesgaden national park

The first time Albus goes out to visit Scorpius on one of his placements something between them shifts. Not that there is much further for their entanglement to go – they are knee deep in every sort of intimacy two people can expect to experience within their lifetime – but there is something within the very fundamental composition of their friendship that ticks up a gear when Albus goes out to Germany.

Winter. Southern Germany. Scorpius is set up in a shoebox flat on the precipice of the magical community, close enough to the local hospital that he can get to work with ease but still within touching distance of Muggles. Of normality. The bed in his room is a small single, tucked up against the wall with a radiator hanging at the foot, but the sofa in the living room transforms into a pull-out double bed they deign to use instead. With enough pillows and blankets and aided by the help of a flame Scorpius conjures up to hang next to the wall like a lifelike sconce the bed becomes habitable.

They spend the first night exploring the local area, traipsing between pubs in both the magical community and the Muggle one. The municipality is set within a landscape Albus imagines was plucked from a work of art. It is hidden within the Berchtesgaden Alps, the mountains looming over in the distance like dormant mythical creatures waiting to rise in the dead of night. He assumes in summer the forests are as rich a Kelly green as one could picture, the paths that curve through the thickets deckled with fine cobblestone and outlined in margins of fallen leaves. All the buildings possess spires and the roads all steadily incline in a pattern that burns the backs of Albus’ calves, but with one finger hooked through Scorpius’ belt loop he has no choice but to push on as he is guided from building to building, momentarily drowning in a wash of warmth as they tend to endless pints poured by jovial landlords before the bitter chill reinstates itself in every muscle when they brave the outdoors again.

Everything is topped in a blanket of snow, the houses all as picturesque as a Christmas card. Trees light the windows, fairy lights are strung between the lampposts. Albus nearly slips a few times but Scorpius is always there to bring him back upright; somehow, throughout the months apart, it had skipped Albus’ notice that Scorpius was strong now. His sleeves hold their place when he pushes them up his arms, he no longer has to charm the lids of jam jars to unseal themselves; all those sorts of weaknesses have faded into memory.

They get back to Scorpius’ flat just after one in the morning. At the door Scorpius shucks off his coat and does the same to Albus, reaching around his shoulders to unloop the Molly Weasley original scarf coiled around his neck. Albus seizes the opportunity to kiss him there and then under the tiny lamp light, back against the wall and everything. He thinks he would kiss him to death were it not so cold. Albus’ fingers are still through Scorpius’ belt loops and, once he comes to, Scorpius soon has an arm around Albus’ waist while the other holds onto the coats.

“Well, hello to you too,” Scorpius says when he gets the chance. He hangs the coats and their scarves and locks the door before he forgets, though his hand never leaves its rightful position in the valley of Albus’ spine. “What’s that for?”

Albus shrugs. Reaches up to touch a stray snowflake in Scorpius’ hair, melting it between his fingertips. “I just love you,” he says. “Felt like we hadn’t done that in hours.”

They find a record they know from the landlord’s collection to spin and set the volume on low, nursing mugs of hot chocolate as they all but hibernate within the mound of blankets they have donned the bed with. The distance between them is all but negligible, shoulder pressed to shoulder and legs interlocked in the strangest but somehow still feverishly comfortable arrangement Albus thinks they’ve trialled.

“I kind of feel like I’m hallucinating,” Scorpius says at one point. They’re poring over the crossword book Albus had bought at the station back in England, one to occupy him on the bus journey to Scorpius’ town after he took the international Floo line to the German wizarding hub. “I can’t believe it’s taken so long to have you out here with me.”

Albus smiles, warm under the flame, eyelash shadows long on his cheeks. “Anything you want me to do to break you from your hallucinations?” he asks. He puts a hand to Scorpius’ cheek and pulls him close to kiss him. When they split he gently pokes Scorpius’ cheek with the eraser end of his pencil.

“See, that would probably work in any other circumstance,” Scorpius starts, tightening the blanket strewn around Albus’ shoulders when he sees him shiver. It’s a testament to the chill of this place that even Albus is succumbing to the cold. “But I happen to dream about doing that quite a lot, so for all I know I could still be asleep.”

Albus rolls his eyes. He flicks Scorpius’ nose, one of his most favourite things to do, and hastily fills in a clue he solves before the word escapes him again. “Guess I’m screwed then,” he says. “How am I – the man of your dreams – meant to get around that problem?”

“Man of my dreams?” Scorpius repeats.

“Don’t even try, you troll,” Albus says, leaning down to kiss his shoulder blade. “You’re clever. Solve five across for me.”

The day after they venture out to the national park. Albus had read about it in the brochure Scorpius sent with the bus ticket a week prior, paragraphs and paragraphs about the Muggle history of the place interspersed with a little bit of wizarding history, too, mostly in the form of Scorpius’ own annotations in the margins to fill in the gaps. All Albus really finds important is that the national park is a hub of ecology, specifically for types of plants that wizards use in potions for healing purposes. It’s the whole reason Scorpius is stationed out here, actually, to learn more about intricate healing potions. He has a trunk beneath the tiny desk in the corner of his flat filled to the brim with various vials of specimens, plants he’s accumulated throughout his travels, some Albus recognises but most he does not.

Several things are keeping Albus warm as they walk through the trails, the lake to one side and the great expanse of the mountains to the other. The winter sun is a cool one, a low hanging lantern in the sky drawing long shadows over the terrain. Birds call from the bushy tops, hidden amongst the caps and their rustling tails sending clumps of snow tumbling to the ground. Albus’ jacket is fleeced, an old one that used to belong to his Uncle George. Albus is the kind to insist that they just don’t make clothes as good as they used to in the olden days and so his wardrobe is a mismatched collection of thieved articles from his loved ones and second hand bits he picks up at charity shops on his travels.

He has the coat hanging over his frame, a scarf wound up around his neck to within an inch of his life, and Scorpius’ grip tight on one of his hands. The cold has no opportunity to get to him.

They walk with identical gaits, each footstep falling in time as their boots crunch over the gravel, breaking through the thin layers of ice glistening across the paths. Scorpius has a faux leather satchel crossed over his body; he dips a hand in now and then to pull out a trail map, just to make sure they don’t get lost, and Albus had noticed a few fleeting movements ago that a small photograph of the two of them is pinned to the inner lining. Faded around the edges, a cut out square from the photo booth strip they took at Teddy and Victoire’s wedding. Albus has the other two in the series tacked to his bedroom wall back home.

“That one is the Watzmann,” Scorpius says, pointing to the mountain between the treetops. A gradient of the finest white snow at the peak blends into the earthy auburns that make up the very foundation of the mountain. Albus doesn’t think he’s ever been somewhere quite like this. “There are three massifs in the park. That one, then over there is the Hochkalter, and the last one is just to the left. Don’t quote me on the pronunciation but I think it’s said Schönfeldspitze?”

Albus smiles. “That sounds pretty accurate to me.”

Scorpius kisses his temple, barely visible beneath the brim of Albus’ cap, and he keeps rattling off little facts as they walk. Every now and then they pause at the side of the track, Scorpius crouching to collect a stem or a petal. He does it in a way that supposedly doesn’t hinder the growth of the natural plant, carefully clipping in spots Albus doesn’t think he’d ever know to look for.

“The point,” Scorpius explains when they are stationed to the side of a tiny pond, leaning over a patch of yellow flowers, offering the vial to Albus to hold as he taps pollen into it. “Is to gather without destroying the local ecology. Natural healing remedies work because we appreciate nature rather than abuse it for our own benefit.”

It’s all a little intoxicating. The way he can see all of their breaths in the air, the way Scorpius holds onto Albus’ wrist for balance when he has to lean a little further to get to the plant he desires. Every glimpse of the picture in the satchel and every time Scorpius weaves their fingers together when they start walking again. The fact that, when Albus thinks about it, they started as two troubled souls desperately searching for a place to be and now somehow they are here, in Germany, knowing nothing but love and friendship and forever.

Everything is going well. They follow the curve of the path as it closes in on a small valley. The ice is a little thicker over here, the precipice to the left leading to the edge of Obersee Lake. The clouds reflect in the clear teal surface, a few wading birds nestled on the banks on the opposite side. “This place is insane,” Albus says, letting go of Scorpius’ hand so he can turn to the side and peer out over the lookout. “It feels like I’m walking through a postca–”

He catches a patch of ice, of course, disguised by a clump of leaves and twigs resting overtop. It all happens very quickly, some sort of sick coincidence that dominoes the one time Albus isn’t holding onto Scorpius. One foot slips on the ice, the second gives way and loses grip, his ankle twisting at a horrific angle which registers as painful for only a moment before Albus falls.

The slope isn’t terrible, luckily, but it’s still embossed with jagged rock edges and damp stretches of dirt that only serve to slide him further towards the water’s edge. His ankle – the bad one, as chance will have it – snags on rock midway down, halting his momentum.

The pain comes all at once then. His ankle, a lot, his wrists, his tailbone. A lot of pain in a lot of places.

The pain is so vibrant in the depths of Albus’ skin he almost forgets Scorpius is there until he hears him say, “Oh fuck, Albus,” from the top of the ledge.

“Shit, Scorp. I think I twisted my ankle,” Albus says, stating the obvious. He tries to lift himself up, to detangle himself from the brush and the pool of rocks surrounding him. But when he puts his hands down to try and push himself up his wrists burn, and as he flinches in response his ankle rocks back into the jagged edge of the stone upon which it rests. The pain is almost loud, like sirens screeching in his ears. “Ouch, okay. I’m panicking slightly. That really hurts.”

“It’s okay, you’re fine,” Scorpius is saying. Albus looks over his shoulder to try and determine how much Scorpius is panicking based on his expression, looking for the furrow between his brows and the nervous way he flips the parting of his hair in terse times. “Did you go down on your wrists?”

Albus turns back to look at his hands, at the way the love lines on his palms flood with a river of red. “Yeah, shit,” he mutters, going to wipe blood on his trousers before realising that may not be the best idea. He holds them in front of him, instead, tilting his fingertips towards the ground for the flow to trickle away from his clothes. “Oh Merlin, there’s blood. I don’t know where my wand went. I had it in my hands and then – I think it might’ve snapped.”

Scorpius cuts in a little quickly. There’s a moderately concerning urgency to the way he talks, to the way Albus hears him drop his satchel on the ground and the crunch of snow under shoe soles as he looks for a way down. “No, stop. It didn’t snap, we would’ve heard it,” Scorpius says, and Albus wants to bite back with a comment about how the snapping perhaps was drowned out by the whole falling down a ledge escapade, but as he goes to point at Scorpius he realises his hand is going numb and he commands no control over his fingers and the terrible thought disappears as fast as it arrived. “Shit, Albus. Okay, okay. Don’t move anything, I’m coming.”

“I couldn’t move anything even if I fucking wanted to, Scorpius,” Albus snaps. Everything begins to feel a little too warm; his skin burns, his cheeks are flush, the layers he wears feel three times too thick. And he’s panicking, okay, he’s panicking. “Merlin that hurts so bad. I think it’s broken.”

“What’s broken?” Scorpius asks, his voice a little clearer and closer as he navigates his way to the scene of the crime. “Your wrist or ankle?”

There’s an unpleasant scratch that cuts through the air as Scorpius almost slips on a patch of ice himself. Albus sees it out the corner of his eye, the way Scorpius grimaces and rubs a circle around his left hipbone. How he steadies himself and redirects his attention to a different patch of rock which looks less incriminating.

“Scorpius, be careful,” Albus says. He watches the way Scorpius walks, his uneven gait only compounded by the topsy-turvy terrain he moves across. The cuffs of his trousers are splattered with damp mud, melted snowflakes staining the material a wash or two darker. “Please don’t put yourself in more pain than you already are.”

“I’m not in pain, Albus. My limp doesn’t hurt anymore,” Scorpius murmurs. Albus doesn’t know whether or not to believe him. “Answer my question: what do you think is broken?”

Albus sniffs, returns his gaze to his limbs. To his ankle, still propped against the rock, and to his wrist. He sees more clearly the extent of the injuries there, the zig-zag lacerations from above his wrist bone all the way up to the middle of his palm in some places. From where he fell and tried to cushion the blow, forgetting to lift his arms as his slide continued. “Ankle. Possibly my wand. My wrist is just bleeding,” he murmurs, looking closer at the cuts, the way they crisscross with the Fulgari scars. “Oh, man. Looking at it was a mistake.”

“Albus,” Scorpius hisses. “Look at the water. Or the sky. Anything not your wrist. Also, like I said, your wand is fine. Stop thinking about the wand.”

It seems to take forever. What Albus circumvented in seconds appears taxing for Scorpius, most likely because he knows the route he makes down is also the route he will need to take them both back up. But the longer Albus sits there the more he can feel everything blossoming, the promising ache of a bruise running around the circumference of his ankle, the lipstick stained smudges of blood over his knuckles.

“Babe, please hurry. I think I’m going to have a panic attack,” Albus says. It’s painful, the throb of his heart against his ribcage. The way each beat shivers over his skin, wave after wave of adrenaline and anxiety rushing through his bloodstream. “This is so fucking stupid. I’m so stupid.”

Then, at last, Scorpius is there in front of him. He crouches down and brushes the hair back from Albus’ face, kissing his forehead once, twice. “I’m here, it’s okay. Hey, look at me. You are okay, it’s fine,” he says, tilting Albus’ chin up so they’re looking at each other. “Hands, please. We need to get you on your feet, see if you can put weight on your ankle.”

Albus hums in protest, looking around again for somewhere to wipe his hands. “I don’t want to get blood on you,” he mumbles, swiping his palm over his forearm in an attempt to clear some of the mess, to smudge it somewhere other than on Scorpius’ hand. He feels outrageously like Lady Macbeth, as if he should wring his hands and have a bit of a breakdown at the waterside.

“Respectfully, Albus, shut up. Blood is the least of my worries. What do you think I do for a living?” Scorpius asks, taking Albus’ hands in his before he can protest anymore. Albus winces, just a little, at the strength of Scorpius’ grip against the constellation tracks running over his veins, but after the pain passes the pressure morphs into something more comfortable. The hold restrains the blood flow, it beats their pulses against each other. “Okay, up. Are you–?”

Albus manages to be lifted but when he goes to put weight on the ankle, to stand up for himself, it crumbles beneath him. He goes to fall again but Scorpius is there, of course, one arm grabbing at Albus’ coat to keep him upright. They both struggle to find their footing on the uneven turf and Albus loathes the tackiness of tears he knows are all over his cheeks. “Ouch,” he says, resting all his weight against Scorpius instead of trying to hold his own. “No, okay. I can’t put weight on it.”

“That’s fine,” Scorpius says.

Albus looks at him. Plainly, affronted. “That’s fine?” he deadpans. “My ankle is broken and you’re saying it’s fine.”

“I’m ignoring everything you just said for your sake and mine,” Scorpius says. It makes Albus feel bad in hindsight, the way in which he always jumps to the defensive when it isn’t necessary. But then he remembers the blood pouring from his arms and the bones that are rattling about in his ankle and he thinks, just about, he can forgive himself for jumping the gun. “Arm around my shoulders. I’ve got you, it’s completely fine. The path I took down is firm ground, no ice. We’ll just take our time and then at the top you can sit on the ledge. I’ll bandage up your wrist and everything, too.”

Albus listens to the instructions, of course. He drapes an arm around Scorpius’ shoulder, trying to avoid contact with any of Scorpius’ clothes but Scorpius is soon reaching up to hold onto his hand, resting their knuckles against his coat lapel, rendering Albus’ best intentions useless. Scorpius’ other arm is around his waist, the ghost of a thumb trailing up and down the curve of his hip, catching on the embossed seam attaching the pocket to the bodice. “I want to cry so fucking bad.”

“You can cry if you want to,” Scorpius says, a kiss to Albus’ temple following suit. “That was a dramatic fall, honey.”

It takes a while. Some of the wading birds give up watching and take to the skies, others having time to flee and return to their treetop nests with more twigs to weave in for decoration. Albus watches the way their shadows grow longer in the grass, how the patches of ice melt and thaw as the low sunlight cuts through different openings in the thicket. Scorpius gets them back to solid ground eventually, though, to the spot right next to where he’d dumped his belongings, where Albus had skidded originally.

“Okay, down. Gently, Albus,” Scorpius scolds, having seen the way Albus flinched trying to step back and lower himself onto the ledge.

Albus grumbles, not wanting to look at Scorpius with agitation colouring his pupils but, similarly, not finding the strength to hold it in. “I’m fucking trying,” he says. He finds himself calming as he sits, all pressure taken off his ankle and his hands bare and open in the wind again. The blood is all smeared across his skin, some having transferred over to Scorpius’ palm, too. “Mum would hate me if she heard the shit coming out my mouth right now.”

“Well, good job she’s not here, then. Right, I’m going to go back for your rucksack and wand,” Scorpius says, all but breaking Albus’ heart as he wipes his hand clean on the material of his baby blue corduroys. “Stay.”

“I’m not a dog, Scorpius.”

Scorpius glares at him. Glares. Albus can’t even summon in his memories a time when Scorpius has looked at him like that. He’s frowned before, tossed a somewhat agitated glance Albus’ way, but if Albus were in a catastrophizing state of mind he’d believe that there is a flicker of hatred in Scorpius’ eyes. He knows it probably isn’t, though, but it burns out the light in Scorpius’ face in a terribly unfamiliar fashion to what Albus is used to.

“Okay, shit. Sorry,” Albus says. “Not the time.”

Scorpius kisses his teeth, rakes a hand through his hair. The motion leaves streaks of pink in his roots, the blood diluting to a strawberry milk sort of shade when it lies overtop the blonde. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Definitely not the time.”

He goes back for the rucksack Albus had dropped. His wand, too, though Albus doesn’t know where that is. Albus watches him the whole way down, the way he retraces his steps for a second time. Scorpius handles the bag with deep care, fixing the zip and the pin badge which has come loose and giving a chaste glace to the contents to make sure nothing in there is broken. His footsteps are cautious as he walks to the water’s edge, the cool of the current making him flinch as he tears through the surface with his fingertips to pick Albus’ wand out of the shallows.

Albus watches him and wonders if Scorpius knows how much love there is in Albus’ bones for him. How sometimes he thinks he’s made up more of love than he is of oxygen, especially when it comes to this boy. It startles Albus himself, sometimes, when he catches himself looking at Scorpius and thinking up all the things he would do for him if he could. Sure, he would hang the stars in the sky and steal the sun if he so asked; who wouldn’t do that for the person they adore? But he’d do other things, too. He’d make it so every pair of shoes Scorpius owns has a thicker right sole than left, just to help with the limp. Being crucioed over and over again, apparently, does a little damage to your nervous system. He’d charm every kitchen utensil and household tool to become suited for left-handed people when Scorpius touches them. He’d make it so the willow that is the world bends to the beck and call of Scorpius’ wind, whatever he wants, because it’s the least he deserves in this lifetime.

Scorpius has mud and blood all over his favourite pair of trousers all because of Albus. Albus used to think he didn’t deserve such unwavering loyalty, but when you look at someone and know you’d do the same thing for them in a heartbeat you learn to realise that, sometimes, everything is fair and just even if you don’t always believe it to be so.

“Here, okay. Wand is completely fine, like I said,” Scorpius says when he’s back in front of Albus. He places the rucksack beside Albus, keeping a hold of the wand just so he can spin it between his fingers, let the handle roll up and down his palm. “Just wet, but that’s not a problem. I have some hand towels in my bag you can dry it off with.”

Albus thinks love didn’t exist before Scorpius was put on this planet. “You always do that,” he says, voice slick with a sort of softness nobody else on the planet can coax from him. “With my wand. Every time you touch it.”

Scorpius shrugs. He spins it a few more times, just for good luck, and Albus wonders how many other people in this world are so generous with their wands. To let someone hold your wand is, to a certain extent, to give them access to the very beating part of your soul. To let them be in control of your magical destiny. Albus likes the way Scorpius looks when he holds Albus’ wand, when he fiddles with it and drags his index finger along the caverns between the cherry blossom pits at the handle.

“It’s fun. You know I love your wand,” Scorpius says, offering the wand back for Albus to take. He dives into his satchel now, digging through the contents to find a vial of a shimmering, silver liquid. “This is going to sting.”

Scorpius gives no time for Albus to register what’s happening before the ointment is pipetted onto Albus’ cuts, each little incision throbbing like a charged wire as Scorpius blots the site with an anti-bacterial wipe. “Fuck, Scorpius.”

“I’m sorry,” Scorpius says, dipping his head down to kiss him. His mouth tastes like the blueberries they had with their pancakes this morning, like the peppermint mouthwash Scorpius religiously swills throughout the day. “I don’t want it to get infected.”

It’s delicate, the way Scorpius tends to the wrist injuries. How he cleans up the blood from Albus’ palms, dragging the wipe over the map-like streaks until every last blemish is removed. He presses down on a few stubborn ones, ones that just won’t stop weeping, until the flow is all but contained. Albus has his forehead resting on Scorpius’ shoulder throughout the whole thing, feeling rather than seeing the way he wraps the injuries with dressing strips, throwing a unicorn-patterned plaster overtop just to make Albus smile.

“There. Okay, one problem down,” Scorpius says. He taps his fingers over Albus’ knees, drawing their eyes back to each other. “Does anything else hurt other than the ankle?”

Albus shrugs. Sighs. “My ego is a little bruised.”

“Your ego? Albus, it’s me. It’s not like you fell in front of the Minister for Magic.”

Albus hums. “Well, she is my Aunt. Probably wouldn’t be as mortifying an ordeal for me as it would for another random person.”

Scorpius ignores him again. He’s rolling up the cuff of Albus’ trousers instead, and it’s only then Albus notices the tear in the material running midway up the left seam. “This might hurt.”

“That sounds familiar,” Albus mutters, muffling a groan in the crook of his elbow as Scorpius presses on either side of Albus’ ankle. “Is it broken? Fuck my life, if it’s broken I’m completely screwed.”

Scorpius shrugs, the back of his thumb gently swirling up and down Albus’ Achilles, feeling the way the muscles are swelling beneath the skin's surface. “I’m not sure, Albus. It’s either a major sprain or a break. It’s hard to tell from just a visual,” he explains. He reaches back over to his bag and pulls out what Albus assumes is a compression bandage. He loosens Albus’ laces and pulls his shoe halfway off, just enough that he can slip the bandage over Albus’ ankle and give it a little bit of support. “I can take you to work, get you properly checked out.”

Albus huffs, pretending to not notice the way Scorpius looks at him. “Can’t you just fix it here? They used to do it on the Quidditch pitch at school when people broke a bone.”

“The professors using those spells are way more experienced than me, Al. I’m not about to risk making it worse when we’re in the middle of a forest in Germany,” Scorpius says. He sprays his hand with some sanitiser, doing the same to Albus’ palms so they can both scrub away the remaining bloody crusts stapled to their skin. “Also, like I just said, I don’t know if it’s a break or a sprain. I’m not doing a spell on something I don’t know the damage extent of.”

“Babe.”

“Albus,” the imitation hurts almost as much as the fall did.

“I trust you,” Albus says. Scorpius kisses him just long enough for Albus to wonder if they were both having the same conversation moments prior.

“That’s sweet, and I love you so incredibly much, but you’re not convincing me to do this. Your wand is fine and you’re fine. Just sit for a second, breathe a bit. Here, drink,” the instruction is followed by Scorpius’ flask being placed on Albus’ thigh. He watches and waits until Albus has swigged half the contents before continuing. “You’re cold and probably dealing with a little shock.”

“How am I supposed to hobble all the way back to the station?”

Scorpius rolls his eyes. “Albus, we are wizards. We can Apparate if we absolutely must,” he explains. They both hear the cracks and pops of Scorpius’ knees as he stands up straight, repositioning his satchel back over his shoulder now he’s satisfied everything is back in order. “I’m trained in this, gorgeous. We aren’t doomed.”

Albus takes a moment to tie his laces again. From this angle on the ground Scorpius towers above him. He’s like a statue you see in the finest museums, stood there wondering how someone can so skilfully, so accurately, represent the softness of silk in something as sturdy as marble. Which fascinates Albus, because he’s of the absolute belief that the two of them were cut from the same cloth but he’d never liken himself to anything nearly as monumental as a statue. Their existence as something akin to soulmates burns a hole in Albus’ heart when he comes to terms with how oxymoronic they are. He doesn’t think he will ever find someone so well suited to him all the while thinking, in those twilight moments where he allows a saturation of self-deprecation to touch the tip of his tongue, that Scorpius’ loveliness is wasted on someone so cruel.

“I’m sorry for swearing at you,” Albus says. He manages to turn so he is looking at Scorpius, but doesn’t feel ready to attempt standing without support.

Scorpius’ laugh is a confused one. He wets his lips with the last dregs of water from his bottle and swipes a sleeve over the chapped pilgrims before humouring Albus with a response. “Huh? When? You didn’t swear at me.”

“But I swore vaguely at your face,” Albus explains, gladly taking Scorpius’ hand when it is offered to him. The ankle still hurts on an almost feverish level, but with Scorpius there to offset some of the weight the thought of moving feels a little more possible. “Several times. Aggressively.”

“No, Albus. You were swearing vaguely at the world,” Scorpius says, picking a little bit of dirt out of Albus’ coarse curls. “It’s not like you looked me dead in the eye and specifically told me to fuck off. I’ve dealt with worse.”

“Worse?”

Scorpius shrugs. “People can be cruel when they’re in a lot of pain and they forget that a Healer's job is to make things better, even if it takes a little pain to get there.”

“Well, I hate that information,” Albus says, a frown piercing every part of his face. “And now I feel worse for being so mean.”

Scorpius hums. He helps Albus put his rucksack back over his shoulders, giving a cursory look over the wrist bandages to check nothing is bleeding through. “You fell down a slope, cut open your hands and twisted – possibly broke – your ankle, Albus. I think a little vulgarity is to be expected.”

“Still,” is what Albus mutters, thinking up a thousand ways he can try and show Scorpius how much he appreciates him without wearing out the words thank you over and over.

Scorpius lets it simmer for a moment or two, the heaviness of the still and the weight of their love for each other. He gently squeezes Albus' waist as if to remind him of the bigger picture, of the truth that ten years of devotion greatly outweighs a few minutes of panic-struck subconscious nonsense. “Imagine if you weren’t perpetually bound to the hip of a Healer, huh? You’d have wilted down there waiting for someone to walk by. Probably would’ve turned into an icicle by the time someone found you.”

“Perpetually bound to the hip?”

Scorpius lets out a low whistle, smiles down at Albus as his shirt is grabbed and face pulled down until the two are close enough to breathe in each other’s toothpaste. “I’m sorry, is that not an adequate description? Would you rather I use one of those dastardly labels you get furious at people for saying? Imagine if you weren’t dating a Healer. Imagine if your boyfriend wasn’t a Healer. Imagine if your eternal life partner whom you share a bed with and, shock horror, sleep with, wasn’t a He–”

Albus cuts him off with a kiss, his favourite thing to do. “Suddenly I wish you weren’t a Healer. Turns out Healers are a little bit annoying sometimes. Maybe dying down there would’ve been less painful.”

“We can’t have that happening. The world wouldn’t be half as interesting or worthwhile if you weren’t in it,” Scorpius says. “Where’s your wand? I’ll put it in my bag for safekeeping so I can get us out of here.”

Albus peels it out of his back pocket, giving not even the slightest of thoughts as he hands it over. “Are you going to do the spinny thing?”

“Of course I’m going to do the spinny thing,” Scorpius states, doing just that. Spinning it, balancing it over his knuckles. It’s like when you learn, as a kid, how to shuffle a deck of cards by splitting them in two and fanning them together. When you learn how to juggle, how to do a front flip on a trampoline. When kids learn one fun trick that makes them feel like an expert, and so they hash it out over and over again as a way to impress people and fulfil their own deep-set need for fun.

Scorpius spins the wand like it’s the most incredible trick in the world.

“Thank you, S,” Albus says, realising that nothing will do the job quite as succinctly as those two simple words. “For… you know. All of it.”

There’s an ever so slight impression of peachiness over Scorpius’ cheeks. A colour Albus kisses in a wishful attempt to make it darken, though Scorpius puts a stop to that by turning his head to the side and kissing Albus properly instead. “I love you, Albus. There is quite literally nothing I wouldn’t do for you,” he says, tossing a cursory glance around them just to make sure they picked up everything that belongs to them. “Right, I’m gonna Apparate us out of here. Please wait until you’re facing away from me to throw up if you feel the need to do so. Thank you kindly in advance.”

⚡︎

five: twenty-one, the potter house

Their legs are pressed together in the back of the car. The window is rolled all the way down and the sweetness of spring is ripe on their faces as they cut through the outskirts of Oxford and everything about everything is blooming like sunflowers to the west but all Albus can dare to think about is the leg pressed against his. The hand draped over his lap, index finger outlining the impression of his kneecap through the softness of his suit trousers.

Albus sits on the left and Lily is on the right picking at nail polish that peels around her cuticle but between them, leaned forward so he can continue a conversation he’d struck up with Harry back at the restaurant about the wizarding district in Italy, is Scorpius. They’re driving home from James’ rehearsal dinner – something Albus had been under the impression was a very American tradition, which the Potter family are decidedly not – and the moonlight mirrors itself in the face of Scorpius’ watch and perhaps it’s the champagne talking, or maybe it’s that he’s so profoundly in love he thinks he could die, but sitting as they are has Albus thinking his heart will give in.

James is getting married tomorrow. She’s a reporter for Quidditch Weekly, having met James at a keystone of the post-season media carousel that is the champion’s celebratory party. Albus can’t say he knows much about her – for all his efforts he just can’t kick up a fuss about the gossip of his family members the same way they do about him – but he sees how the two of them look at each other and he recognises how James’ face has softened and brightened over the last two years of knowing her, so he settles in the belief that the whole arrangement is a good thing.

They get back to the Potter house just after midnight. Albus holds the car door open as Scorpius steps out, ignoring the look Lily gives as she walks past them into the house. Scorpius helps Harry clear the leftover bags from the boot, resting a cake box against his hip and laughing gingerly in response to something Dad says.

“Here,” Albus says, one hand pressed to the small of Scorpius’ back as he reaches over to pick up the excess bottles of wine and champagne his parents had bought for the occasion. “I do not trust you to not drop and smash those on the way in.”

Scorpius fakes a frown. “That is so rude, Potter,” he says, though his actions contradict his sentiment as he kisses Albus’ cheek. “I’m gonna go give your mum a hand finding space for all this in the kitchen. I think they said leave the drinks in the garage so they stay cold until tomorrow.”

Albus nods, uses his free hand to brush Scorpius’ hair back from his face. They look at each other for a moment or two, all soft under the streetlight glow and the uneasy thrum of alcohol flirting around the edges.

Scorpius’ mouth twitches into a small smile. He looks to Albus’ lips, then back to his eyes. “What?” he asks, his posture slackening so the two of them are closer to seeing eye to eye.

“Nothing,” Albus says, rocking up onto his tiptoes to kiss him. “Just appreciating the view.”

Scorpius rolls his eyes. “Zip it, honestly,” he says, wanting the rosiness of his cheeks to dissolve there and then but Albus sees it more clearly than ever. He brushes his knuckles over the concaves of Scorpius' cheekbones, over a tiny papercut on the bridge of his nose he’d inflicted onto himself trying to hang bunting at the restaurant. “You’ll make me drop the cake.”

His dad locks the car when everything is decanted. Scorpius follows him into the kitchen with the food while Albus detours into the garage, setting all of the bottles beside the washing machine. Perhaps it’s that his dad spent his childhood immersed in Muggle culture, or perhaps it’s that his family has always had an affinity for the Muggle way of life with how much time they spend alongside the Grangers, but so much of what they do blurs the lines between magic and not in a way that feels so astonishing compared to Hogwarts, to the Ministry and the Manor.

Modern appliances everywhere, even down to the car. His parents chose this cottage because it had an air of solitude about it. Close enough to a city that they wouldn’t be depriving themselves or their kids of light and culture and community, but far enough removed from the bubble of wizarding gossip that they could start building a life out of journalistic earshot. His dad had to learn how to drive, though, for the bus route connecting them to the rest of civilisation has always been sketchy and as parents they’ve always insisted that the kids, when old enough, not Apparate to town for fear of them becoming complacent with their magic.

When Albus gets back into the house and kicks off his shoes at the rack by the door everyone seems to have settled. There is vibrancy in the kitchen, the sound of cupboards opening and closing as his mum looks for containers to put food in, as Scorpius rearranges the fridge shelves to Tetris everything in. Lily is upstairs; Albus can hear music trickling through the floorboards and her heavy footsteps creaking as she turns on the shower in her room.

“Your speech was nice tonight, Al.”

Albus looks over to the coffee table. James, knelt by the side of it, is sorting out nameplates for the dinner tables tomorrow. They’re all rectangles of wood with attendee names carved into them, though what sets them apart from other standard nameplates is that the wood choice corresponds to the type of wood the person’s wand is made out of. Albus thinks it’s a darling idea, and as he sits on the sofa opposite James he sees his own one – a slab with a slight pink hue – being set next to Scorpius’ – creamy white with flecks of honey accenting the sides.

“Well, thanks,” Albus says, hugging a cushion to his chest. “I was bricking it the entire time, though.”

James laughs. He has a plaster over his eyebrow at the moment, tending to an injury he’d obtained at practice a few weeks ago. Albus does not doubt that someone will paper concealer over the skin tomorrow morning if the cut is still too obvious; after all, nobody wants a Snitch-patterned plaster dirtying their wedding portraits. “We both loved it,” he assures, looking up at his little brother. “You have a weird way with words when it comes to love.”

“That was a lot of alliteration.”

James rolls his eyes. “Don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not.”

“You are,” James insists, rolling his shirt sleeves up to the bend in his arms. “You talk about it as if you’ve circled the sun eighty times and are the bearer of all love-related wisdom.”

Albus sees it from a mile away. He stares at James, perhaps daring him to consider going on. James’ gaze is somewhat sinister, loitering on the edge of sibling mischief that Albus desperately doesn’t want to venture into tonight.

“I just think it’s interesting how you know so much about being in love when – so you claim – you are so very single.”

Albus despairs. He drops his head into the cushion and ponders suffocating himself, because surely that would be less painful than yet another foray into this lifelong battle with his brother. He is far too tired and a little bit too tipsy to elegantly navigate himself out of this, and so he does what he has done since the day he learned how to talk: bite. “You actually need to give it up, James,” he says, a little fraught around the edges. “It’s been years. You are twenty-three. You have a mortgage and a marriage license to your name. Surely you realise it’s time to stop pestering me about my dating life.”

“I’m drunk, Albus,” James says as if that clears him of all charges.

Albus nods, says, “I can tell,” with as little consideration as humanly possible.

“I just… I just don’t understand why you don’t want to admit it,” James has his hands splayed out on the table, all coarse with cuts and bruises and a lifetime's worth of Quidditch scars painted over his knuckles. “Boyfriend isn’t a dirty word.”

Albus hates it. He hates it so much. Having explained to him the very intricate workings of his life as if he’s some innocent bystander in the whole ordeal and not the one at the heart and soul of it all. He doesn’t understand how, after all these years, people continue to oversimplify the reality of his life. They spell out things as they would apply to someone of a usual countenance without realising that Albus has his heart set on living eternally on the cusp between contentment and anguish.

He will never allow for things to be simple; simplicity is too boring for him.

“Believe it or not, Jamie, I – the one who went through the whole self-discovery process and had to come out when I was fifteen – do know that boyfriend is not a dirty word,” Albus states, suddenly a kid again in his bedroom reading a ratty old copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray beneath his Snitch-shaped nightlight wondering so deeply what it means that he reads things about beautiful boys and feels the truth of it like harp strings being plucked in his soul. “It’s just not a word that applies to my life right now.”

James nods. Slowly. Deceptively. “So you’re not dating him?”

“No, James,” Albus deadpans.

“But you’re not not dating him?”

Albus doesn’t humour him with a response. Someone in the kitchen tells a joke and the rest of them laugh in support. Albus wonders if the house feels the difference in energy, the divide between the happiness in the kitchen and the tight-wound tension building up in here. Why James had to bring this up tonight Albus doesn’t understand. Why he always insists on having the two of them bicker like teenagers when they’re under the same roof is forever going to be beyond Albus.

“Are you two seeing other people?” James asks.

Albus throws the pillow at him. “James, seriously?” he counters, standing from the seat as if to assert some sort of dominance over the conversation. It doesn’t work, of course. He’s too loose around the edges and is too terrible at maintaining a poker face. James knows if he keeps chipping away at it with questions they both know the answers to that he’ll strike gold eventually.

James shrugs, drumming his fingers over the coffee table. “It is literally an exclusive relationship that you refuse to put a label on,” he states, swerving out of the way of a bunched up tissue Albus attempts to toss at him this time. “Have you talked to him about this? Does he also not want to use those words you despise so much?”

“Okay first, I don’t despise them,” Albus says, the composure of his voice slipping beyond his control as the words trickle out. “And second, I once again reiterate: it is none of your fucking business.”

“Albus,” he turns around and sees his mum in the doorway, having come to the living room to deliver them cups of tea.

“Absolutely not,” Albus proclaims, jabbing a finger in the general direction of where Ginny walks. She’s still in her formal attire, a cream suit set with the jacket simply laying over her shoulders, a smudge of makeup staining the left side cuff. “You are not scolding me for swearing right now. I don’t care that he’s getting married tomorrow, he’s doing that annoying older sibling thing where he interrogates me under a thinly veiled teasing disguise.”

Ginny shakes her head, seemingly deciding that this isn’t a conversation she wants any part in. Ten years ago, sure, she’d be shutting it down at once. But they’re adults now, Merlin forbid; she has surrendered her authority on the petty bickerings the two of them have. “You two raise my blood pressure.”

“He raises mine,” Albus snaps, though she’s already left the room and it’s just the two of them and their warm drinks left within the most fundamental four walls they’ll ever know in their entire lives. Height marks tallied on the doorframe to the entryway. OWL and NEWT results framed above the fireplace. This room is a toast to all three of them, the way their shoes leave imprints in every notch of this world.

James has his arms crossed over his chest now. He’s all flush in the face, a little ring of dampness around the crease of his shirt collar as he sweats his way through this conversation. “I just don’t want you to throw away a good thing solely because you’re afraid of labels,” is how he broaches it again, something that elicits such a sardonic laugh from Albus he hardly recognises it as coming from his own mouth.

He waits for a moment, just to see if his apparently newly-appointed therapist has any more words of wisdom to provide. “I cannot believe you’re standing there giving me relationship advice–”

James interjects with a quiet, “I’m sitting, actually,” and for a moment Albus considers hexing him. But, knowing him, he’d miss and would end up smashing one of his mum’s Quidditch trophies on the mantelpiece and he really doesn’t want to be in her bad books this week.

“–Not to be crass in the family home, but I genuinely think I’ve been doing this longer than you have,” Albus continues, determined to not give James what he so desperately wants. He’s failing, though, they both know it. By trying to shut him down like this all Albus is really doing is giving him more ammunition, more reasons to believe that he is right. “Do you think Scorpius sleeps on the fucking sofa when he is at my flat? How do you think we’ve spent a decade entertaining ourselves? Spoiler alert, it doesn’t always involve talking.”

James clicks his tongue, nods again. Albus wonders briefly if it’s possible for James’ head to fall off his shoulders just so he doesn’t have to keep watching him nod. “I just couldn’t do it,” James says. He tends to the nameplates again, slotting the stacks into different envelopes all adorned with the table number their contents belong to. “The whole broad unknowingness.”

“Good job you’re not involved in it and the logistics don’t concern you,” Albus deadpans, shuffling around the table to pick up both the discarded cushion and the tissue. James lightly tickles the back of Albus’ ankle as he walks past, and with it, Albus knows they’re pretty much done for the night. “I hate when you drink. It’s like fighting with a clingy, overtired toddler.”

Albus is at the border between the living room and kitchen when James musters up a response. He clears his throat and Albus turns, and as he looks at his brother he realises how much more space they take up these days. Gone are the times when all three kids could sit on that side of the coffee table doing their Hogwarts summer homework in the lulls between family activities. Now, James alone takes up most of the space, his long limbs struggling to find a position of comfort as the table edge digs into his shins.

“You never answered my question,” James says, a moderate air of finality lingering around what he has to say next. “Imagine if you wanted to make it exclusive and he was the one being difficult. You’ve been… whatever you are for, like, seven years. That would wear you down constantly not knowing where you stand.”

It gets to him. Albus tries desperately to have it mean nothing and roll away like water off a duck’s back but he can’t. Because it’s the simplest of statements that chips right into the heart of all these things Albus doesn’t like to think about. Things that have intensified over the last few years as he spends time with people other than Scorpius, thinking about Scorpius doing the exact same thing. Meeting people Albus will never know, having conversations that are long-forgotten by the time they next see each other. Making mental notes of things they should tell each other but the lapses between their meetings stretch on and on so when they finally stand face to face those intimate intricacies that formulate the basis of their individual lives away from each other feel as unimportant as a speck of dust on your cheekbone.

“James, fuck off,” Albus says, too tense and too irate. He can’t even pretend to be unbothered by it, and perhaps James knows it’s a bit much, even for him. “I love you, but seriously. Not your circus, not your monkeys. Please go smother your fiancé with some love so you stop thinking about me.”

“Love you, Al,” James says, and Albus can’t bring it in himself to say it back.

He skulks into the kitchen, to where Scorpius is leaning over the sink with a sponge in his hand and champagne flutes set up beside him. Albus steps up to him and hugs him from behind, his fingers finding the gaps between Scorpius’ shirt buttons. Scorpius has his sleeves pushed up, too, soap suds painting his skin with spots of white and the lemon-fragrant detergent staining his hands the colour of faded sunflowers.

Albus kisses the space between his shoulder blades, and there must be something about the way he tightens his grip around Scorpius’ chest that lets him in on the secret.

“Oh, Merlin,” Scorpius says. He turns off the tap and wrings out his hands, turning on the spot so the two of them are looking at each other. He’s slouched against the counter with Albus looking up at him and with one arm draped across the edge of the sink he uses his other to twizzle Albus’ curls into submission.

Albus shakes his head, stretching out his muscles just enough that he can reach to kiss Scorpius’ chin. “No. I’m fine, don’t even go there,” he says, to which Scorpius looks. The lie is paper thin, burning beneath Scorpius’ gaze. And so Albus corrects his statement, a little quieter as he mutters, “I’ll be fine.”

Scorpius grazes his thumb over Albus’ bottom lip, the terrain all chapped and torn and, Albus realises then, probably deeply unpleasant to touch. “You’ve almost made yourself bleed,” he states. Albus hasn’t noticed, of course; he chews at his lip when he’s so lost in his own thoughts he doesn’t know what his body is doing. But, now Scorpius mentions it, he does feel the soreness of it. The dull, throbbing promise of a blemish to appear in the next day or so. “Albus, what in the world–?”

Albus kisses him, taking Scorpius’ lack of resistance as a sign that he hasn’t rendered his lips quite as unkissable as he’d first thought. “You taste like strawberry.”

“Very cute, but not cute enough to swerve out of the conversation,” Scorpius says, setting his arms around Albus’ shoulders. The sink gurgles behind them as the last droplets of soapy, lemon suds disappear down the drain, and in the quiet that follows Albus thinks they must be the last two inhabitants awake. “What’s up?”

“Do we really have to talk about everything?” Albus is on the edge of being pretentious, of pontificating to someone who doesn’t need to hear it. Not right now, at least.

Scorpius tilts his head to the side. Albus had expected more of a pushback, perhaps a glistening of sarcasm. Or, at the very least, a god-forsaken flick to the nose. “Um, yes? I thought that was our whole thing,” is what Scorpius says instead, holding himself at a distance where Albus can’t kiss him with ease, but not far enough away that he implies he doesn’t want to be kissed. “I’m pretty sure part of the best friend criteria is talking about everything. The fact you’re resisting this so much makes it only more concerning to me.”

Albus nods. Then remembers how James nodding had boiled his blood, and so he shakes his head instead. Scorpius’ face colours confused; Albus kisses the part of his shirt that covers his collarbone in hopes of clearing things up. “Can I shower first?” he asks, relishing the way Scorpius hugs him tight in advance of them heading upstairs. “I’ll bring myself to a place where I can talk about it when my skin isn’t alcohol-sticky.”

The bathroom isn’t as big as the ones at the Manor. You can step out of the shower and be within touching distance of the sink and the towel rack, and it decidedly isn’t large enough to house the sheer amount of bottles wedged into the pigeon-hole cupboards. It’s only the three of them who still reside permanently in the cottage – his parents and Lily, that is – but all three kids, and a few extra repeat attenders, still take up space on the shelves. Albus’ pigeonhole contains bottles belonging to both him and Scorpius. Which feels unnecessary given the whole, you know, overlap in their life.

But, still, Albus nudges through the army of toiletries to find a bottle of mouthwash that won’t sting his gums the way Scorpius’ does. Some things don’t have to be compromised upon, including mouthwash.

Albus had thrown his wand and suit jacket on his bed when he first walked upstairs, hooking his tie over the door handle as he made his way to the bathroom. When he returns to his bedroom, the shoebox one right in the back corner of the top floor (Albus still isn’t sure how he ended up with the smallest room when he isn’t the youngest kid) Scorpius has cleaned up a little. Jackets hung on velvet coat hangers, Albus’ tie rolled and placed on the chest of drawers beside his mirror.

Scorpius perches on the edge of Albus’ bed, arms stretched out behind him. He has his tie pulled loose around his neck, his top two shirt buttons undone. In the ways Scorpius used to be lanky – a golden retriever not yet grown into its ears and legs – he is now tremendously sharp. His trouser hems taper to just above his anklebone every time, his shirts pull taut against his shoulders in ways they used to bloat with excess material. Albus remembers days when Scorpius could sit at the bottom of the bed and scarcely make an impression on the pressed sheets. Now he sits and he sprawls and he’s all the world and more and even though they’ve been here over and over since the day they turned fifteen Albus doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to seeing a boy in his bed. His mother always used to set out a sleeping bag and pillows for Scorpius to use on the floor; Albus believes those things stopped showing up when they were seventeen, neither of them really noticing the absence of a designated other spot for Scorpius to sleep having been so lost in the whimsy of closeness.

Albus goes to throw himself back on his bed, but before he has a chance to creak onto the mattress there are arms around his waist pulling him to the side. He stumbles over Scorpius’ knee and ends up somewhat on his lap, somewhat not. Albus looks at him, flicks his nose, drags a finger over the ghostly outline of Scorpius’ collarbones, all the way along one, down the dip between, and then all the way across the other.

Albus feels he’s missing out on the punchline as Scorpius chuckles to himself. Breathy, rueful. He’s holding himself up with one arm, the other touching Albus’ cheek to blot forgotten shampoo suds off his skin. “You’re such an idiot,” he says.

“Am I that irresistible?” Albus asks.

Scorpius rolls his eyes, reaching over to the spot Albus had wanted to lie on. “Your wand, silly,” he quips, spinning it around his fingers as he holds it between the two of them. Albus had forgotten about that sodding thing, as always. He often thinks it’s a blessing he hadn’t inherited his dad’s terrible eyesight; if the way he treats his wand is anything to go off, he’d surely go through a pair of glasses a month.

Albus shuffles off Scorpius' lap and sits next to him. Cross-legged, facing Scorpius, knee pressed against the plushness of Scorpius’ suit trousers. For a moment he doesn’t say anything, nor does Scorpius. Scorpius just twirls the wand between his fingers, rolling it up and down his palm. He handles it with a familiarity not too dissimilar to someone navigating their home in the dark. Knowing exactly how many steps to take to get from the foyer to the kitchen, to the bowl atop the fridge where they can dump their keys. Scorpius knows exactly how Albus holds his wand, his thumb finding the worn out groove on the left side where Albus grips it during spell casting. Albus usually thinks his wand is boring, hence the haphazard way he treats it, but sometimes – moments like this, nightlight glow over their skin and the sweating stems of alcohol working their way out their system – he thinks it possibly isn’t as bad as he often believes.

“Imagine how many of these things you’d have bought if I wasn’t around,” Scorpius says. He reaches over to set Albus’ wand on the tiny bedside table. Everything in this room is tiny. Albus’ spirit is overflowing in here, having always been a magpie who loves nothing more than collecting things. His bookshelves were once organised by colour but are now filled to within an inch of their maximum capacity with poetry collections, history textbooks, fiction paperbacks with dog-eared pages and cracked, dusty spines. Along a shelf hung on the opposite side of the wall, next to his bulletin board, lives a once shiny pride of trophies from 5-a-side football as a kid and draughts tournaments he partook in during the summer holidays.

There are versions of himself scattered across every ounce of this room that he doesn’t even recognise anymore. Ghostly reminders of the way his life had been, the ways things used to be when everything seemed too large and suffocating. St. Mungo’s appointment letters pinned on the bulletin board overlapped with postcards boasting pictures of the French Riviera and notebook clippings Scorpius had doodled on during a particularly dull History of Magic class. Over and over Albus sees places he has tried to paper over the parts of his life that profoundly upset him, only failing to realise in his youthful naivety that it’s those parts that will have had the most impact on the person he became.

The person he ended up wanting to be.

Albus clears his throat, picking at a button on Scorpius’ shirt until it slips through the hole holding the two material panels together. “Counterpoint, if you weren’t around I probably wouldn’t be putting myself into so many situations where my wand could break,” he says. “You’re a distraction.”

Scorpius finds himself stuck between the desire to roll his eyes and the need to kiss him. “Respectfully, honey,” he says. “That’s such bullshit.”

Albus decides for them both. It requires no explanation which one of the options he chooses.

He watches as Scorpius pushes himself off the bed and searches through the drawers for something to wear. He’d travelled back from Italy early in the morning just to make it in time for the wedding. Albus had been asleep when he Flooed into the flat, curled up on his sofa with a patchwork blanket pulled over his legs. He’d been reading over some sheets from the Manor late into the night, apparently not realising how tired he was until he was awoken by Scorpius’ touch on his temple.

Scorpius ends up pulling one of Albus’ jumpers over his head. A navy blue one, the centre embroidered with an American flag overlapping the Union Jack. Something about The Ryder Cup sprawled beneath the illustration. Albus believes it to be some sort of vintage golf piece, one he found tucked at the back of a clothes rail in his favourite charity shop. The colour brings out the hues of Scorpius’ eyes, the flickering cerulean shade Albus thinks he could mix from scratch if he had to.

“I can’t believe James is getting married,” Scorpius says. He tugs open a different drawer to find a pair of socks, ever so chronically cold in the night. Albus is the opposite, something of a furnace, but he puts up with the endless extra layers Scorpius throws over the bed just because he gets to have him so close. “Sometimes I look at him and it’s like only yesterday he was sat in the Great Hall charming pieces of toast to hang in the ceiling, pretending they’re stars.”

Albus smiles. Scorpius clambers over him when he’s dressed and satisfied, nestling to his rightful position pressed against the wall. A twin-sized bed is far too small for them – they both know it – but something as simple as that isn’t going to stop them at all. Albus pushes his nose into the curve of Scorpius’ neck. The leftover streams of his cologne, threads of vanilla and mint, are all over him. Albus could bathe in it, the subtlety of it, the way the spritzes have worn off throughout the day and the only person who can get close enough to smell the remains is him.

“Well, he’s still as ridiculous as he was at Hogwarts, so I guess he’s not so far removed from the version of himself that did all that,” Albus murmurs. He goes to stretch out his legs and ends up knocking against Scorpius’ shin.

Scorpius has an arm crooked beneath his side of the pillow, the other busying itself with separating out Albus’ curls. Picking out the clusters and twirling them between his fingers like he does Albus’ wand, leaving them to spring out in whatever way they see fit. Albus’ hair isn’t quite like Scorpius’ hair. Scorpius’ is soft, always has been, and brushing it back from his forehead so Albus can kiss him is a sensation astonishingly similar to that of smoothing down silk. Albus’ isn’t like that at all, though, quite coarse and fine and difficult to run your hands through because of the tangles blocking the way. Scorpius seems to find it therapeutic to ease out the knots, though; Albus doesn’t know how he isn’t bored of it by now.

“This entire ordeal makes me feel a little like I can’t breathe,” Albus confesses, the silence feeling like a welcoming shove to let out his feelings. Scorpius’ fingers fall motionless in his hair. “Like, am I crazy for thinking it’s the most asinine thing in the world, a wedding? Gathering people you know and some you sort of know just to sit in a room, only to spend the rest of the evening getting absolutely plastered.”

A response doesn’t come immediately. Albus feels Scorpius’ touch fall from his hair and settle, rather, on the seam holding his sleeve to the rest of the shirt. There’s a whisper of skin on skin as Scorpius’ delicate graze touches over a small hole burrowing its way into the material. He does, finally, speak. “I don’t think it makes you crazy. I think it just means you have different priorities to your brother,” he says, the whole thing excessively pruned in a way Albus knows means he’d tossed the sentiment over and over in his mind before figuring out how to articulate it.

“He’s only known her two years,” Albus scoffs.

Scorpius readjusts his weight on the mattress. The duvet scratches against their clothes, his leg slings over Albus beneath all the layers. Albus can feel he is being stared at without meeting Scorpius’ gaze. “And?”

Albus starts to think they’re on the brink of bickering, but then Scorpius is kissing the bit of t-shirt over Albus’ shoulder and the concern temporarily ebbs into the distance. “What’s two years, really? Nothing. Two years ago he was aimlessly wandering through life just being a nuisance to everyone,” he says, somewhere down the hall the end of his sentence punctuated by a chesty cough. “And now he suddenly thinks he’s an expert on everything just because he has some things in order.”

“Two years is a long time when it strikes you at a formative part of your life. Not to be corny, but I think we moved pretty fast in the space of two years when we met each other,” Scorpius says, and it’s true. They’re both twenty-one now, ten years removed from when they first met. Five chunks of two-year slots to break their life together into. As each day ticks by they crawl ever closer to the break of the wave where they will have known each other longer than they haven’t.

If Albus were to pluck a random day from his life as a fifteen year old and then think two years down the line, to his misadventured teenage dreams of seventeen, he could probably list a thousand things that changed between the two of them. More overlaps in their life that swoop like stitches drawing tapestry chunks together, sewing them together in ways that nothing can unravel.

“That’s different,” Albus says, though he doesn’t elaborate on why.

Scorpius dusts a flyaway curl from Albus’ face, and in the way they look at each other Albus knows they’re on the precipice. “Strange, that. You always say we’re different when someone throws facts in your face. If I opened a dictionary I think I’d see your face next to the word hypocrite.”

Albus sits up. He disturbs the tranquillity of the blankets, the currents of them all turning. He stares down at Scorpius in a way he detests, with the beginnings of betrayal all in his eyes and tugging down the corners of his lips. “Ouch,” he deadpans, not necessarily moving deliberately away from Scorpius’ touch but not, in the same way, reciprocating the gentle tap of Scorpius’ fingers over his thigh. “Is there a point to this barrage or are you just feeling snarky?”

Scorpius rolls his eyes. “Albus.”

“Okay, sorry,” Albus laments, though the lacklustre placidity of his voice doesn’t do much to make the apology sound convincing. “But, also, you’re taking my brother’s side over mine when you know he’s pissed me off today. Pardon me for being arsey.”

They don’t get like often. Terse, scuttling around the periphery of genuine disagreement. They bicker, sure, because that is fun. To teasingly get under each other’s skin until the twinkle in your eyes surrenders the bit and you end up circling back around to a state of love once all is said and done. But they don’t argue. They have nothing to argue about, really. Conflict management is something they’re rather good at.

But it’s lurking. In the shadows of the box bedroom and the arch of Scorpius’ eyebrow as they stare at each other. Kind of like a lion waiting to see if its prey is going to react, if it is coming up on an opportunity to pounce. Albus can see the cogs turning, can feel the way Scorpius weighs up whether or not pushing on is going to be productive.

“He has a point sometimes. I agree with you when you say it’s none of his business and that it doesn’t matter what he thinks. But I also agree with him when he says that – sometimes – the way you squirm your way out of interrogation is a little cop out-y,” Scorpius states, plain as anything. As if reading from a textbook. Albus wants to act nonchalant but it doesn’t work. He isn’t in the business of disguising things from Scorpius even if isn’t the sort of pleasantries they’re used to. “We just spent the evening watching two people hold hands and dance and kiss when they think nobody is looking. Does that not give you the tiniest bit of deja vu?” 

Albus has no response. Scorpius throws up his hands.

“Exactly,” Scorpius says.

Albus goes to move again, to shudder against the truth bright in front of his face but Scorpius is there, of course, a hand latching itself around his wrist, fingertips all over the tree-branch scars, pressed against his pulse point. The look they share is wary, but when Scorpius kisses the spot adjacent to his wrist bone everything quietens.

Scorpius hums. Breathes and sprawls out under the blankets. The jumper is awry at his hipbone and Albus gives himself a moment to wonder if he’s cold, if a chill in the peculiar space between them catches his skin. “Sometimes I think you get mad at him because he makes things seem easy,” his voice is gentle now, less of a broad observation to be used as evidence and more of a genuine dismantling of Albus’ anxieties.

Scorpius lifts his free arm to stretch out his muscles; Albus swipes at it to press a kiss to the crease of his elbow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

The mattress creaks as Scorpius sits up. They’re hipbone to hipbone, the triangular window of Scorpius’ bare skin flush against Albus’ ragged t-shirt. Albus has his legs pulled up to his chest and so Scorpius drops his chin over the peaks of his knees, looking up at him. “In two years he went from a little lost to finding someone he wants to marry,” he says, and it’s effortless. Albus sometimes forgets how much of their life is entwined until moments like these where they speak as if every part of their history is shared knowledge. As if their blood runs the same colour despite being born worlds apart. “He knew from the age of, like, six that he wanted to go into Quidditch. School was fine, he never had a weird haircut phase. He makes things seem breezy.”

Albus bites down on his bottom lip. He anguishes over how difficult it is to not be defensive. “And I don’t?”

“You’re joking, right?” Scorpius asks. His touch is feather light, delicate as he gently frees Albus’ lip from the razor sharp dangers threatening it. Scorpius kisses him for good measure, too. “You are perhaps the least breezy person I know. If James is breezy then you’re, like, still air. Standing behind a brick wall in a twister.”

Albus rolls his eyes. Can’t help it. He rests his hands behind him and leans back. The tininess of the bed seems tenfold, as if it’s a lifeboat drifting in stormy seas. The pillow has absorbed too many tears for Albus to count over the years, right where Scorpius had been lying moments prior. They’re somehow both rooted in reality and rowing through lurid clouds at the same time.

“Are you mad at me?” Scorpius asks. He doesn’t appear interested in closing the gap between them again, perhaps deciding that this is a battle for Albus to win, to decide when the resolution comes. “You can’t be mad at me for long, darling. If you think I’m sleeping on your bedroom floor like I did when I was fourteen then you are gravely misinformed. I will be in this twin bed even if you want me dead and elbow me all night.”

Scorpius lies down, back against the wall. Above his head hangs a calendar from three years prior, the last year Albus spent living in this room full-time. It remains on September, adorned with a picture of a castle from somewhere in the depths of Wales, from back when he was obsessed with Medieval Britain.

“I’m not mad at you,” Albus is all earnest as he speaks. He shuffles next to Scorpius again, finally daring to touch his jumper and tug it back down to its proper position. “I just think you’re wrong.”

“About what?”

Albus shrugs, lays so his head is over Scorpius’ ribcage, both of them staring up at the imaginary maps drawn over his ceiling. “I mean, most of what you said. But that’s just a difference in perspective, I suppose,” he admits. He doesn’t like thinking of there being things the two of them don’t perfectly align in, but, on the other hand, being complete mirror images of each other would probably be quite boring. Besides, Albus doesn’t think he’d be able to spend as much time with someone who so violently reminds him of himself; he doesn’t think he’s the best of company the world has to offer. “But, mainly, I’m not bothered that he found someone he wanted to marry in the space of two years.”

Scorpius’ hand is back in Albus’ hair; it’s as if nothing has changed. “Why’s that?”

“Because he wasn’t the first Potter kid to do that, Scorpius,” Albus states. The words are golden, polished by the peacefulness they fall into. “He can have the Quidditch and the good hair – I don’t give a fuck – but he’s not taking that from me.”

Scorpius’ chest stills, but Albus feels his heartbeat throbbing through his ribcage, his skin, the thickness of his jumper. It dangles between them like a hypnotist’s pendant, ticking back and forth as they muse on the undercurrents of the confession. The earnestness takes them both by surprise, but perhaps it shouldn’t. It’s been there all along, after all. They rarely address it by name but the truth of the situation is that the way they orbit each other like a moon once separated from its meaning of life could only have them on a one way path towards that level of eternity.

Arms wind their way around Albus and he heaves the covers back over the two of them. There are lips against the crux of his jaw and breaths fanning over his skin and Albus thinks for a moment he was a fool to even kick up a fuss earlier. To waste their time disagreeing when they could’ve been doing this.

“Does it bother you?” Albus asks. He feels the life leave Scorpius’ bones, the way he deflates, having pricked the balloon enough to have it burst. “That we don’t use labels.”

“Is that seriously what this whole thing is about?” Scorpius asks. “Why haven’t you two gotten over that yet.”

“I have. He’s the one who keeps pestering me.”

Scorpius scoffs, kisses Albus’ cheek so strongly it almost hurts. “Al, come on,” he says. They’re all twined in a way that makes it hard to know where one body ends and the other starts; Albus figures Scorpius doesn’t want to chance either of them letting go again tonight. “If you were over it you wouldn’t let it keep bothering you. The fact you keep biting and arguing back with him only gives him more of an incentive to keep asking because he knows it grates you. Surely you – a middle child – know to not fight back?”

Albus’ unease must be palpable. The way he fidgets against the covers and knocks their bones against each other. Scorpius just tightens his grip, every bit of his hold leaving warm blemishes all over Albus’ skin, soft against his bruises and scars from the forces of life that he struggles to navigate alone.

“What did he say?” it’s a whisper this time, light over Albus’ skin. As if afraid to permeate the air with too much vigour, afraid to speak into existence some sadness that will hang thickly off Albus’ skin like half frozen raindrops. “Was it about me specifically, or something? You’ve had this argument more times than I can remember and you’ve never been this tense about it.”

Albus huffs. Sighs. A little childish, but he doesn’t care. “He was just, like, implying that you might want to use labels but don’t because of me, but also how pretending you’re okay with something for years when really you want to put a name to it would wear you down,” he explains, voice trailing off towards the end as he comes to terms with how little he wants to be reliving all this. “And now I’m paranoid you’re just, like, going along with my shit for the sake of it and you’ll get fed up eventually.”

“I have autonomy, Albus. If I didn’t like or want to do something I would’ve said so,” Scorpius says it as if it’s obvious. “Why are you giving what he says about me any consideration? When have I ever given you a reason to think that I’m unhappy? I am literally sharing a twin-sized bed with you right now. If I was bored or unhappy you would know about it.”

“You’re good at acting."

Baffled, all Scorpius can do is gently poke the curve of his hip. “You’re a liar, Albus.”

Albus shrugs. Someone, down the hall, vacates the bathroom. Albus wonders what time it is but knows he stands no chance of casting a glance at his watch.

Scorpius senses he’ll get no response. “No, it does not bother me,” he insists; Albus is in half a mind whether or not to believe him. “Okay, look: do I use labels when other people ask? Sometimes. When someone asks if I’m single I say no, because I’m not. When someone asks if I have a partner I say yes, because, for all intents and purposes, I do. It’s just the way the world works and it’s easier than explaining the semantics of us to people who don’t deserve to know the details. I’m not going to sit here and pretend to understand why you don’t want to use them, but I similarly do not care that much, either. Because why the fuck would I care about you telling someone I’m your boyfriend when I come home to you every day? It’s irrelevant. I have a box of Valentine’s cards from you under my bed and your cologne is all but woven into the fibres of my bedsheets at this point, but you think I want you to call me your boyfriend to feel fulfilled?”

Albus’ bones feel the weight of the frustration. Both of their frustrations. He thinks he can feel his skeleton fighting to break through his skin, to get some respite from the anxiety that rattles through him far too frequently. It must be exhausting, Albus thinks, having to hold up a body bruised by fear. “I don’t know why I don’t like them either.”

Scorpius kisses his temple. “That’s fine, Albus. It’s really not that big of a deal. Definitely not as big as James continues to make it,” he says. His mouthwash is vibrant on his breath, sharp and tangy as it slithers over Albus’ skin. “I know I love you, I know you love me. You tell me and you show me and that’s all that I care about. I’m not in this… whatever you want to call it just so I can walk around and throw labels at people. I’m here because you make my life substantially better and there’s nobody else I would ever want to live out my days with. I’ve known you almost half my life, Albus. I’m pretty set in my ways about how I feel about you.”

Albus nods, turns his head to the side to kiss him. “Okay,” he says. “I believe you.”

Outside is a bird, chirping to itself. Perhaps somewhere in the darkness it has a companion, but there is no response to the calls. Just the singular, solitary voice. The rustle of branches in the spring’s twilight breeze, the snaps of twigs as unknown nocturnal wanderers traipse through the Oxford outskirts.

Scorpius clears his throat, pruned to go on. “Plus, you did literally just say you knew you wanted to marry me after knowing me for two years,” he says, the edges of his words stained gold. Albus rolls his eyes, lets Scorpius take hold of his cheek so he can kiss him again. He keeps waiting for this to grow old; he doesn’t think they’re anywhere near that yet. “So… I think that says more than going around with a bunch of juvenile descriptions about dating and whatnot.”

“So you’d marry me?” Albus asks.

They look at each other. Even in the darkness their eyes are so clear. Seaglass, cerulean. Albus thinks the secrets of the universe lie behind the threads of grey and hazel that weave amongst Scorpius’ blue. That all the knowledge one could need, the answers to life’s big questions, all simmer in that bright mind of his. “Why is that even a question you feel the need to ask?”

Albus is tucked into Scorpius’ side. Their limbs are as tangled as ivy is over the wrought iron gates outlining the Manor. This bed is barely big enough for Albus alone but with someone else next to him it’s as if they’re floating. As if they exist in some omniscient half-life, nothing else out there strong enough to make a dent in what has bloomed between them.

“Are you happy now that’s all off your chest?” Scorpius asks.

Albus wonders when their lungs will run out of air. “For now,” he says. “Until he undoubtedly brings it up again tomorrow.”

Scorpius groans. It’s hoarse and littered with beats of tiredness and Albus has to sit there and pretend like the sound doesn’t light a fire in his soul. “Talking to you is like talking to a brick wall sometimes,” he mutters. He kisses the spot on Albus’ arm where his shirt sleeve ends and his skin begins.

“Thisbe’s wall?”

“No, because the conversations that were had through the crack of Pyramus and Thisbe’s wall actually stuck,” Scorpius says. Albus’ shorts have an elasticated waist, the band comprised of ridges where the seamstress serged the lining into place. She perhaps didn’t realise that in creating such a thing she had made a playground for Scorpius’ fingers. A place for him to drag his fingertip over the bumps, circling back and forth and occasionally swooping off track and offering a tantalising, tactile impression over Albus’ hip. “Everything I say to you goes through one ear and out the other.”

“Not everything.”

“Really? What sticks then, huh?”

Albus kisses the corner of his mouth, voice all muffled as he says, “You telling me you love me,” against Scorpius’ skin. He sort of wants the words to burn, to scar and to linger so Scorpius can feel them every day for the rest of his life. “That makes an impression.”

Albus feels the warmth blossom all over Scorpius’ cheek. “Ugh. I hate when you set me off on a moderate tantrum and then immediately U-turn by being sweet,” he lies, arm lazily draped over Albus’ torso, overhanging the edge of the mattress, as they both saunter closer to the promise of sleep. “It’s like living on a yo-yo.”

“Life is boring if you aren’t kept on your toes.”

“Go to bed, you troll,” Scorpius murmurs. Albus almost forgets that he’ll be sleeping alone in two days' time. “I love you always.”

Their silence is so tried and true the only thing to hear is the wristwatch tick from Albus’ bedside table. Albus used to hate saying goodnight because it seemed desperately troubling to lose eight hours with Scorpius. At the end of the road he knows every second has to count and the ones they spend apart in that elusive place between here and then throw off the tally. But, these days, Albus meets him so often in dreams that it’s as if they are never abstract.

A cuckoo clock chime, a house-settling creak, the cottage boiler rumbling the walls. Pictures on his bulletin board and love letters hidden in shoe boxes at the base of his wardrobe and a promise of daylight breaking unto another day of everything Albus has ever wished for.

He sleeps with Scorpius beside him; it is always the sweetest nectar.

⚡︎

five + one: twenty-two, albus’ flat

Stone-cold tea in the mug Scorpius painted for him one day when they were eighteen. It had been at one of those pottery painting parlours; they’d sought to make a date out of it, or something, but had spent most of the time in silence as they laboured over the details of the mugs they decorated. The one Albus made for Scorpius has the Roman numerals for September 1^st drawn beneath two lemons, a single streak of red twining around the rest of the mug’s circumference to join the fruits together. Scorpius’ is a repeated pattern of tiny stars, little golden beads all around the entire canvas. Except, by the bottom left side, bookmarked by a love heart, he’s joined some of the stars in the shape of the Scorpius constellation.

Stone-cold tea and a tag in the collar of his jumper that keeps irritating the peaks of his spine and perhaps a thousand other things that hang over him as he sits in the eye of the dog days; of long, trembling nights with only his papercut companions to remind him he’s alive as he cleans dishes and allows the tang of dish soap to shiver over his fingertips while he ignores, with pervasive diligence, the piles of work building up on his desk. Pencils that he wears down to the nib and invitations to parties and birthday celebrations he goes to but leaves feeling ever emptier as a consequence.

It’s not that he’s lonely, per se. He has friends and colleagues and people he is cordial with as he walks to the offices in the morning and twice a week he finds himself at his parents’ house and, sometimes, his grandparents’ house for dinner. There is no space – no time – for him to feel lonely. A better description would find itself wedged somewhere between a sense of imbalance and the profundity of being unmoored. A ship cast off to sea without a final destination in mind.

There had been a moment, as a love-struck, claustrophobic teenager, where Albus couldn’t wait to grow up. To be as he is now, in a place he has decorated with furniture he has chosen covered with blankets made for him. To have the freedom to make his own schedule, to warp his life into what he has always wanted it to be.

He had, it seems, forgotten to accommodate the seasons of melancholia in the frame-by-frame demonstration of his future.

Albus sits at the kitchen island in the midst of his mental canicule wondering when exactly his life became quite so insular when he hears it. The crack. Crack. He’s just enough time to stand from the island chair and get to the archway separating the kitchen from the living room before he finds himself face to face with Scorpius.

Satchel in hand, of course, a rugged-tweed overcoat unbuttoned in the exact same colour as the muddied boots making him an inch or so taller than normal. It’s past midnight but the room is brighter with Scorpius in it; Albus thinks it could easily be mistaken for two in the afternoon whenever he is around.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” Albus says, watching as Scorpius drops his bag and shucks off his coat and tosses all the layers into a pile on the floor beside the fireplace. (Every wizard has to have a fireplace in their home.)

Albus is itching to touch him, this promise of a rainstorm after weeks of endless warmth in his mind.

It has, of course, been an unseasonably warm October, but Albus thinks he was frozen at the end of September – the middle of a heatwave, sweat-stricken and sourly sad – seeing Scorpius off at the port of Dover for his next journey back over to Calais. His insides are all charred, fingertip touches to books almost dangerous as he fears he will set them alight if he gets too lost in a daydream.

But Scorpius? Merlin, he can wash it all away with those cerulean waves of his.

“I thought you’d be asleep,” Scorpius says. He rakes his hands through his hair, offsetting his parting and bearing to the world every freckle over his cheeks and all the shimmer in his eyes. “It’s so late.”

Albus shrugs. “I’ve missed you. Didn’t want to wait until morning to see your face,” he says. He clasps an arm around the back of Scorpius’ neck and kisses him. For the Hell of it and for the fact that he’s lucky enough to have someone who would travel all night, from anywhere in the world, to meet him just in time for the breakthrough of even the most mundane of sunsets. “Hi, you.”

“Hi,” Scorpius breathes in response. He has his arms around Albus’ waist and an embrace strong enough to startle both their skeletons waiting in the wings, and for a few listless moments they stare at each other as if remembering the colour of the other’s eyes; only by the end of the time it takes Albus to get back to his island stool do either of them appear to land back on earth. “What’s all this?”

Scorpius gestures to all the papers over the marble. He sifts through some of the paper clipped stacks, thumb following the curves of Albus’ annotations in the margins, of the sentences he’s bracketed and dragged highlighted streaks of neon yellow over. Highlighters are his most favourite Muggle invention; he often wonders why wizards don’t use them more.

“Work stuff. I found a bunch of radio transcripts of Potterwatch before I left earlier today,” he says, voice a little fraught as it stumbles over his own surname. It never quite sinks in, the knowledge that the landscape of the world as you know it exists predominantly because of things your father did as a teenager. “They’re completely addictive. Your family gets a mention, actually. I just read their name as you Apparated in.”

Scorpius hums, skipping over the transcript Albus points out as the one the Malfoy name is noted in. “Probably getting mentioned for all the wrong reasons.”

Albus finds a way through the layers of his jumper and shirt to conquer the waist of Scorpius’ trousers, hooking a finger through the front-most belt loop. They’re both old enough and wise enough to know how to negotiate the complexities of their differing family histories, but it’s evident sometimes in the shadows of Scorpius’ face that he really never will find a way to come to terms with everything his shoulders uphold. Scorpius will never be the way his grandparents were – the way his dad used to be – and it’s nothing but a testament to the changing of the tides, the ways he consciously unlearns behaviours that are unconceivable to a bright mind like his own. But nothing he does will ever change what is written on the stones. Nothing will ever erase the knowledge that he exists only a slight breath away from the tendrils of Dark Magic even with how hard he tries to be better.

Albus sees how it bothers him, wonders sometimes if he refuses to anchor down in this place because he prefers to be in cities where his surname is starting to fall out of common knowledge. Where he can be the friendly and thoughtful and wicked sharp Healer without any baggage of his forbearers lurking in the distance.

“You look tired,” Albus moves the subject on. Scorpius holds Albus’ cheeks as if he’s a precious jewel and Albus wonders if he’ll ever find something that makes him feel as alive as Scorpius’ touch does. “Rough journey?”

Scorpius kisses him once, twice, thrice, then sits opposite him at the island. He crosses his arms over some of Albus’ papers and rests his chin atop his knuckles. “Getting from Bulgaria to home is a pain in the fucking arse, Albus,” he says. “Even though I could paint this place from memory they still won’t let me inter-country Apparate. Drives me mad. Had to grab a broomstick from the hospital and fly to the central Floo network in the city, then had to Portkey one by one across the remaining bordering countries. Hungary. Slovenia. Austria. Germany. And – to make matters worse – the Portkey from Germany to Belgium didn’t work so we ended up on a Muggle bus over the border. I’ve never been so excited to Disapparate the fuck out of London in my entire life. How you were even willing to hug me just then when I must smell like rotten sweat is beyond me.”

“You smell like vanilla, as always,” Albus says. He taps his wand on the top of the papers and watches as they all shuttle back into the envelopes he brought them home in. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t supposed to let them leave the building, but nobody will know. And, if they do, then he isn’t completely beyond the realm of using his dad’s name and legacy as a way to weasel his way out of problems. What? If he had to grow up with the burden of the Potter surname the least he should be allowed to do these days is exploit it when he can. “At least you can rest tomorrow. Don’t even need to leave the bed if you don’t want to.”

Scorpius smiles at him. It’s all the best parts of the London skyline with a little Wiltshire sweetness somewhere lost amongst the haze. “What’re your plans for the weekend?”

“James has a Quidditch match tomorrow morning, but I was hoping for a reason to skip it, to be honest.”

“Albus,” Scorpius groans, the first of many irrefutable eye rolls making its appearance.

“I’m too old to keep pretending like I care about Quidditch, babe. I can’t do it anymore.”

“You’re twenty-two,” Scorpius deadpans.

Albus throws up his hands. “Exactly,” he says. “Which means I’m twenty-two years too old to pretend I care about Quidditch.”

Scorpius peels off his jumper and sits in just his t-shirt and his corduroys. All at once it’s like the flat is whole again and Albus can scarcely remember the lethargy that bore into the walls only moments prior to this. He wonders what people thought as they watched Scorpius conquer the streets of Europe to get back home, rushing from Portkey spot to Portkey spot with nothing but his faux leather satchel and his mass-market paperback dangling between his fingertips to keep him company.

Albus playfully calls him a forever stranger sometimes. The figures you see on public transport who are mesmerising in the moment, the ones who stick with you for the rest of your life as you wonder what could have been if something in the universe perturbed you both onto similar paths. He thinks it would be impossible to see Scorpius in passing and not feel that way about him. Wonders how many strangers did a double-take, how many tried to pick up an innocuous conversation just because Scorpius looks the sort to reciprocate it.

Wonders if any of them had a clue he was coming all the way back here for a boy.

“There’s food in the oven if you’re hungry,” Albus says, picking up his mug with the intention of making a fresh brew. “Some gluten-free vegetarian bake thing I found in one of my grandma’s old cookbooks. It’s been keeping warm.”

“Have you eaten?” Scorpius asks.

“I have no appetite.”

Scorpius rolls his eyes. He heads to the cooker and summons out the casserole tray – a gift from Albus’ Aunt Luna when he moved in – to save himself having to use the oven gloves. There’s a glimpse of instinctive domesticity woven in the way he reaches into the cabinets and pulls out a plate, serves up a dish. Grabs two forks from the cutlery drawer and tears a single napkin from the roll beside the breadbin. How he moves about this place as if he owns it, as if he doesn’t even know how much Albus wishes that were true.

He sits back down opposite, one fork on Albus’ side and one on his own. They stumble upon a stalemate on either side of the marble and Albus thinks, not very productively given the wariness of the situation, that there is nobody else in the world he would let stare at him for this long without breaking eye contact.

Albus sighs. “You can’t force feed me.”

“I can try,” Scorpius says, waiting until Albus surrenders before taking a bite for himself. “Have you had a haircut?”

Albus looks up at him, waiting for the mouthful of carrots to go down before offering a shrug, a half-committed shake of the head. “Ages ago. Just after you left last time, I think. Nothing too dramatic, just a bit off the underneath layers so it’s a little more put together. It was getting a little bit too messy. Sort of into actual unkempt territory rather than the troubled-alluring-mysterious-artist look I quite like to represent.”

Scorpius smiles. Says, “You look gorgeous,” before shaking his head. He wafts his fork in the air as if to retrace his steps, to breathe back out the words he just bore into the universe. “Sorry, correction: you are gorgeous.”

“There’s bottles of lemonade in the fridge,” Albus says while his cheeks tinge rose. He drops his fork on the edge of the plate and goes to push himself up, offering a gentle, “I meant to get them out earlier, let me just–” but there’s a hand on his wrist holding him in place and Albus can’t do anything but succumb to it. To sit back down, tilt his head to the side, look over at this boy he loves so much he can’t even contain it sometimes.

“Stay, it’s fine,” Scorpius says, grabbing at the abyss between them to pick up a wand. “What’s the point in being magic if we don’t use it to deal with mundanity?”

“Wait, Scor–”

The spell fizzes blue. Dark blue. Sparkler shards pop in the flat's stillness as Scorpius points the wand at the fridge and summons the lemonade bottles. They whizz through the air with the elegance and precision of a wizard well-trained, but all Albus can do is stare at Scorpius even as he twists off the bottle cap and takes a first, longing sip.

Only when he puts the bottle down and goes for another mouthful of food does Scorpius notice. “What?” he asks, looking from Albus to the lemonade to the fridge back to Albus all over again. “You’re looking at me weirdly. Albus, what?”

“My wand.”

Scorpius’ eyebrows sew themselves together. “Huh?”

“You just used my wand.”

“That’s impossible,” Scorpius says. His voice is humoured, not even disbelieving because he doesn’t for a moment think Albus is trying to tell the truth. “I didn’t disarm you. It should only answer to you.”

Albus reaches over and picks up his own wand. His fingers slot in amongst the buds on the handle, his thumb finding the groove which has bored into the wood through years and years of use. He points it at the candle sitting unlit beside them – a vanilla and fresh laundry scented one – and utters a quiet Incendio to set alight the wick.

“Blow it out,” Albus says. Scorpius blinks, goes to lean forward like a child to a birthday cake. “Merlin, no. Scorpius – with my wand.”

Scorpius stares at him. Albus stares back.

With a huff, as if the entire exercise is pointless, Scorpius picks up Albus’ wand, points it at the candle, and says “Nox,” in a tone of such mundanity you’d think he was a student being forced to sit through their least favourite lesson. So, in Scorpius’ case, History of Magic.

But then the candle extinguishes itself with a sigh, as if clasped between two tacky fingertips willing it out of existence, and Scorpius perks up. Looks at the wand in his hand, at the magic he just cast with it. Looks at Albus like he’s afraid he won’t be there anymore, but he is. He’s there to look back and to bask in the confusion like it’s the first fall of rain in three months and you don’t know whether to run or to stay.

“What the fuck,” Scorpius says. It’s so quiet, so barely there, and as he spins Albus’ wand around his fingertips for the first time that evening Albus almost expects the room to explode. “I’ve held your wand so much and it’s never done that. I’ve… I have said spells with it in my hands and they’ve never worked.”

Albus touches the smoking wick with his fingers. Ignores the disapproving stare of Scorpius as he watches him smear ash into the grooves of his fingerprint. “I have no idea,” he confesses. “I mean, like… I remember reading in some diary entries we found in an old witch’s basement that she and her husband were able to use each other’s wand, but I thought it was bullshit. You know, wands don’t really choose two people. They don’t get confused over who they belong to.”

“Maybe it isn’t confused,” Scorpius casts another spell, just for good measure. Whispers a defiant Accio in the direction of the biscuit jar and flinches as it tumbles onto the marble, the lid lopsided but the hand-painted lettering looking Scorpius right in the eye. “Merlin, this is wicked.”

Albus smiles. Tosses his eyes around the world. “You can’t have my wand,” he says. “I know you love it more than your own, but hey. Mine.”

He takes his wand back, though not before Scorpius takes the time to spin it again, roll it along his palm. Albus will never know where that came from, or why it stays, but every time he bears witness to it it’s like a delicate reminder of the transcendence of their love. How things can change and seasons will pass and people will go on with their lives whatever the cost but, befallen in the nooks and crannies that they all overlook, Albus and Scorpius are still the same sort of in love.

“I think if your wand could talk it would try and tell us we’re dating,” Scorpius says. There’s an edge to his voice, a playful rumination that all but shimmers like the tacky lemonade over his lips. “I mean… why else is it getting confused? Whatever souls are made of, and whatnot.”

Albus hums. “I mean, yeah. But why now?” he asks. “We’ve been a single soul split in two since the day we met.”

“Maybe it knows something we don’t.”

“You’re being so elusive,” Albus says, flicking a sweet potato cube over at Scorpius. “I think all those Portkeys have given you water for brains.”

Scorpius pushes his plate away when he’s done. Rests his arms on the table and leans forward and waits until Albus is looking at him before continuing. Albus reaches down to take one of Scorpius’ hands in his and is all layers of affection as he kisses the Fulgari scars, the nicks and scratches from days in the hospital and nights at home sifting through textbook pages trying to absorb all the information he possibly can. “Why are you not getting annoyed at the implication that we’re dating?” he asks. “You’re usually so firm when it comes up.”

“I don’t know, Scorpius,” Albus murmurs. His fingers fascinate themselves with the curling edge of a plaster across the fleshy part of Scorpius’ palm, arching over his thumb and just about stopping short before it reaches his love lines. “It doesn’t annoy me as much when it comes up like this. It’s not some cynical attempt at mining for gossip when we talk about it between us.”

Scorpius hums. They’re in the weeds together, trudging through the nettles and passing past thistle brush as if there is nothing there to fear. Because there isn’t, really, not when you have someone to guide you home.

“When all your childhood memories are underscored by Prophet articles essentially tracking your journey through puberty, and the better part of your Hogwarts life was spent being the talk of the halls whenever you so much as looked in the wrong direction I think it’s a fair move to not want to permit strangers the opportunity to be part of your private life when you finally have chance to close the door on them,” Albus says, the sentence striking itself as being far too long and a little like a thread of the sincerest truth having unravelled itself from the deepest chamber of his heart. He knows he hardly breathes during it and he knows each word is a star that hangs above the two of them but he’s too far gone to try and work a way out of the light. Has no choice but to face it head first.

Scorpius taps his thumb over Albus’ wrist bone. “I don’t think your family would like being compared to strangers.”

“That’s different.”

“It always is when it comes from you,” Scorpius says. Albus pictures them back in his childhood bedroom, watched by the ghosts of the versions of himself he no longer looks to for reassurance that he’s doing okay. Thinks of the canvas sheets and the too tight mattress and the way it felt to be in that place as someone completely brand new. “James doesn’t mean ill by being curious.”

Albus kisses his teeth. “It is still none of his business,” he says. “The only people who it concerns are sat at this fucking table, Scorpius.”

Scorpius pulls Albus close over the table with a tug of his shirt. Kisses him over the lemonade bottles, over the Potterwatch transcripts. “And your wand, apparently.”

“Yes,” Albus supposes, lost in some place between heaven and home. “And my wand.”

“I’m not used to this,” Scorpius says. Albus wishes the table weren’t half as wide as it is, desperately wanting the feel of Scorpius’ knees against his own, the gentle taps of shoe to shoe in the abyss. Connected by hands alone feels like insufficient touch to sustain either of them. “You being all relationship-y. We don’t really talk about this unless it’s a conversation diffusing an argument you’ve had with James.”

“I miss you terribly when you’re gone,” Albus states. He picks up his empty mug and the messed up plate and carries them to the sink. Scorpius’ chair creaks as he spins in it to follow Albus’ movements, like a sunflower tracing the arc of the biggest star in the solar system as it crosses through the sky. “How else am I meant to wish away the hours if not by spending them thinking about us?”

“And what conclusions do you come to at the end of those hours?” Scorpius asks.

Albus leans against the counter. He has his arms crossed over his chest and in his peripheral vision he sees all the things tacked onto the fridge door. To-do lists, a sticky note detailing the days Scorpius will be coming home, magnets bearing the name of all the countries he has visited so far. Polaroid slips and photobooth strips and love letter clippings Albus doesn’t think he’d be able to live without. “You’re still never going to catch me calling you my boyfriend, that’s for sure,” he says, though what he means encompasses something greater than such simplicity. They both know it. “That word makes me feel as nauseous as baby does.”

“But for all intents and purposes?” Scorpius asks.

“Yeah,” Albus says. Scorpius finds himself in front of Albus again, beneath the flickering kitchen light. The tiles are cool through Albus’ socks and the cutlery drawer handle digs into the small of his back but with Scorpius so close, arms on either side of him, resting against the edge of the countertops, Albus doesn’t think anything could make him move. “For all intents and purposes.”

“Merlin, if I’d have known years ago all it took for you to admit it was your wand letting me cast a spell I would’ve tried harder to make it work,” Scorpius says. “Instead of spending all that time spinning it between my fingers.”

Albus rolls his eyes. “Shut up,” he says though he ends up the one quietened as Scorpius kisses him. “It probably wouldn’t have worked tonight if you weren’t obsessed with spinning it as a kid. Every time you did it I think I fell a little bit more in love with you.”

“That’s soppy.”

“It’s endearing,” Albus insists, reaching up to smooth a flyaway strand of hair of Scorpius’. “You really like my wand.”

“Duh, because I really like you.”

Albus raises an eyebrow. “Only like?”

“You’re an irritant.”

“You love me,” Albus insists. He touches their noses together and kisses him in the aftermath. Thinks he’s certain he’ll be able to keep Scorpius forever, to walk with him through every epoch of life. “You wouldn’t travel from Bulgaria to my bedroom by Portkey and bus if you didn’t.”

“Your bedroom?” Scorpius asks. He worms his hands around Albus’ waist, squeezing him and pulling the two of them impossibly close. The worn out minty remains of Scorpius’ breath feel as akin to home as his kiss does. “Honey, half of the shit in the wardrobe is mine. I’m the one who built the chest of drawers, my bloodstain is on the wood from when I nicked myself with a nail. The jumper you are wearing literally belonged to my Dad when he was a teenager.”

Albus shrugs his shoulders, plays the part of a scoundrel as well as he possibly can. “You’re not on the lease,” he states. “The landlord would kill me if he knew you stayed here so often.”

Scorpius laughs. It’s a clandestine sound, one only Albus gets to hear. At night, sometimes, when Scorpius is somewhere far away in the deepest depths of Iceland, far enough away that Albus thinks he forgets the feel of his hands, he can think up the sound of his laughter and it’s as if, all at once, everything settles. It’s the promise of something nothing can touch. Distance, time, the creeping flickers of anxiety that Albus happens upon sometimes. None of it can ever make him forget Scorpius’ laugh.

“Nah, it’s fine. We’re not dating, after all,” Scorpius says, dotting a kiss to Albus’ cheek. “He can’t be mad about a friend sleeping over every now and then. I don’t think that breaks the lease.”

“A friend?” Albus asks. Everything about it is electric with joy. The way he almost laughs out the question, the way his breaths fan over Scorpius’ cheeks and ruffles up his hair. The way Scorpius kisses him like there’s nothing else he’s ever been meant to do.

“Of course,” Scorpius insists, looking at Albus with a softness that somehow feels like forever. “Friend. Best friend. Call it what you want, honey. It’s the one thing that makes life worth living sometimes, right? Us being friends.”

And he’s right. He’s always right. It’s a swan dive, a penny tossed in a pool. Skipping over cracks between paving slabs because of those folkloric tales from childhood. It’s both an instinct and a shot in the dark, the altruistic way that everything always comes back to this. To glance across a room, knowing there is always a seat saved for you at every table in the world.

It’s a wand that now answers two people because there is so much of them woven into the fabric of each other’s beings that the binary where one ends and the other starts is imperceptible. It’s the sweet spot where the ocean meets the sky. Albus thinks the two of them – sea glass and cerulean and the sun which the sunflowers yearn to touch – they can call it what they want because every word applies.