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Chapter Text

Yann and Polly are arguing, and Albus feels a little like a child caught between the crossfire of two frustrated parents. He sits at the coffee table in the old place, cradling a cup of tea between his hands, while Yann angrily scrubs sauce out of a crock pot and Polly muses to the side, arms crossed over her chest, eyes daring.

They don’t argue a lot, actually. Albus can’t really remember the last time they had a fight that lasted more than ten minutes, a fight where there seemed to be actual anger in their words. Except there isn’t really much anger here, it’s more disappointment. A slight twinge of betrayal. And, well, Albus saw it coming.

If Polly had asked him for his opinion before she went and lied to Yann about the exhibition, he would’ve told her straight that it wouldn’t end well. That Yann would find out about it somehow, and he’d be hurt by her withholding of the truth.

And, low and behold, he found out. And he’s mad. Point to Albus for knowing this boy like the palm of his hand.

“You know,” Polly says. “You can’t take your frustration out on a crock pot, Fredericks. That’s not very mature.”

Yann looks at her. Albus wants to say he glares, but he doesn’t think Yann has the capacity to glare at Polly. It’s sort of like how two cats look at each other when one is being a little annoying. Airplane ears, that type of thing.

“You know,” Yann copies, shaking suds into the washing up bowl. “Maybe you can’t expect maturity from someone when you haven’t been acting mature yourself, Chapman.”

Albus sips his tea. “Guys. Come on, is it–”

Polly exhales, and Albus swears she stamps her foot on the floor. The carpet on the kitchen floor drowns the sound out, though. Why they haven’t gotten rid of the weird carpet is beyond Albus, honestly. “Yann, seriously,” she says, sounding equally as serious in her tone. “I didn’t think it would be this big of a deal.”

Yann throws the sponge into the bowl, a little spray of soap splattering over the windowpane. He turns, looks at her, one hand gripping the counter top and the other clenched in a fist, his thumb slowly trailing along the curves of his knuckles. “Why wouldn’t it be a big deal?” He asks; Albus is sure he hears a little inflection of Yann’s old French accent slipping into his speech. “You lied to me, Pol, about something so inconsequential. It was a pointless lie.”

“No it wasn’t,” Polly says. Albus drops his head onto the coffee table. “If I told you the truth, you would’ve been sad and you probably would’ve cancelled your trip or tried to move it or something. And you have already missed out on one gig because of me, so I wasn’t about to make it two.”

“When? What gig?”

Something shifts in the air. As if something once clandestine has been exposed, a door cracked open slightly to let in some long forgotten air. “About a year ago,” Polly explains, all at once soft around the edges. He can imagine her fiddling with the ring on her finger, twirling the band round and round. “When my sister… you know. You skipped out on the shoot to come up and see me.”

Yann sighs. “That was different,” he insists, and Albus hears him dip his hands back into the bowl to pick up the sponge. “I had to be there for you. There was no other option.”

Albus lifts his head up just in time to see Polly roll her eyes. “Yeah, I know. So forgive me for thinking you would react the same way this time around,” she says. Her voice is all sorts of strain, a little bit of scratch. He isn’t sure if she’s trying to diffuse the argument or not, but Polly had never been the sort of person you can decipher that easily. “It may not have been the same level of severe, but it was still a pretty big deal in my life. I didn’t want to like… detract from your big moment.”

“I appreciate that, darling. I really do,” Yann says, his voice languid and loving as he breathes out darling. Albus shuffles about in his seat. “But it still makes me feel shitty for being the only one to not be there, to not have known about it. You are the person I love most in this entire world, Chapman, how did you think I would react to not being allowed to celebrate your achievements? I could’ve video-called, maybe I could’ve come back for the day. I don’t fucking know, but I would’ve made it work. Because it’s you, and I want to be by your side in some capacity for every incredible thing you do. That's what you do when you love someone, you make things work.”

Polly sighs. Yann sighs. They seem to falter as they stumble into this stalemate, both of them staring at each other, hypothetical airplane ears still intact. Someone tumbles along the hallway outside, chatting with their companion as their keys clatter against the wall. And then the birds; a sweet chorus of blackbirds are resting in their guttering, calling out longingly into the smoggy city air. All the while, as if nothing else matters, Yann and Polly stare at each other.

“I want to apologise to you, but I just don’t regret it. I can’t stand here and say sorry when I don’t feel bad for letting you go to Italy to enjoy this amazing work opportunity,” Polly explains, perhaps getting to the crux of the problem at long last. “That’s just not the sort of person I am, Yann. You know this; you’re the one who wants to marry me in spite of it.”

“So you don’t regret lying to me?”

“Well, of course I regret that part of it.”

Yann kisses his teeth. “So why not apologise for that?”

Polly sighs. “Okay,” she says, hands splayed out on the kitchen counter closest to her. “Yann, I’m sorry for lying to you about the exhibition. I should’ve… I should’ve told you when it was, and at least let you be involved in the decision to have not been there. In the moment I was just so excited for you that the idea of making things complicated by mentioning the exhibition seemed problematic. Pointless.”

Yann dries his hands on a Halloween themed tea towel, he steps over the carpet to stand in front of Polly, looking at her over the rim of his glasses, and then he kisses her. “Nothing you do is ever pointless,” he murmurs. Then his fingers are on her face, in the dips of her cheekbones, dragging slowly upwards to tuck strands of her hair behind her ears. He handles her as delicately as he does pieces of pottery, unfinished mugs that he’s glazed and is about to place into the kiln. “Thank you, Pol. I accept your apology. Please don’t ever exclude me from something like this again, okay?”

Polly presses their foreheads together. “Okay,” she says. “I promise.”

Albus clears his throat. “Mom, dad?” He says, holding up his mug. “Can you make me a fresh cup of tea? This one went cold while I was listening to you fight like an old married couple. Or, well, a young almost-married couple.”

Someone throws the tea towel at him, and Albus would place every single penny he owns on a bet that it was Polly.

“Shut up, Albus,” Polly says. But he hears her flick on the kettle, so he knows she doesn’t mean it. If there had been clouds lingering in the room moments before, they have seemed to suddenly dissipate into nothingness. There is just the coarse sound of sponge on a ceramic crock pot, and a tea spoon clattering into Albus’ mug, and the calm breaths exiting all of their lungs, swimming softly into the air, then ceasing to exist at all.

⚡

Albus agrees to cook a final meal for Scorpius’ last day in London. Like some sort of last supper, all six of them in the same place for the last time with things the way they have been for as long as Albus can recall.

That’s the part of the whole situation he’s deciding to ignore; that Scorpius’ leaving indicates the first real change to their dynamic. Sure, he’d felt this way when Rose moved, when Yann and Polly moved in together, and even when he himself moved to the flat across the road, but those changes didn’t feel so earth shuddering. Those changes were merely reshufflings of the furniture in the dolls house of their life. This, though. Scorpius moving is like a doll being taken out and moved to somewhere they can’t see, and suddenly there is an empty room in house and the space is so dense it feels like poison acid in your throat.

But Albus is trying to ignore it, and he thinks he’s doing a good job as he pushes a trolley through the supermarket aisles, glancing down at his list every now and then to make sure he’s getting everything he thinks he needs.

Polly and Scorpius are there, too. Albus is pushing the trolley, and the two of them are walking at the front, shoulders knocking, giggling like two school kids as they throw biscuits and sweets into the cage as if those are essential ingredients by any definition of the word.

Albus is listening in to their conversation, just a little. Listening as they murmur about the weather and clothes and art and everything else under the sun that makes sense to them. Albus isn’t sure he ever noticed when it happened, but he sees it now very clearly, outlined in gold: Polly and Scorpius are close.

Perhaps since Polly has always been his closest ally, the person he goes to for any problem and every conversation, he sort of forgot that she means things to other people, too. That she can mean something to Scorpius, who is so often the root of their conversations. He watches as Scorpius bumps into her, as he drapes an arm around her shoulder, and he wonders what their friendship is like.

Probably beautiful. Since they’re both two endless, gorgeous, intelligent people of their own right. Putting two pieces of perfection in a room together is only going to cause more joy, really.

Albus is putting some sheets of pasta into the bottom of the trolley when he catches Polly saying, “So when’s the big day then?” And he sees Scorpius still, watches his hand fall from her shoulders to instead fiddle with the zip on his coat. “It has to be soon… surely?”

Scorpius is silent. And then the three of them are stood in the pasta aisle, Polly and Albus looking at Scorpius though Scorpius is staring at the floor. Like a thrum of thunder in the distance, Albus knows something is about to fall apart.

Polly laughs. She gently shoves Scorpius, flicking his cheek, too. “Um, hello? Mr Greengrass?” She says.

Scorpius looks up, wets his lips. He looks from the aisle, to Polly, to Albus. And he takes Albus’ breath away in the worst way. As if he’s drowning. “Please don’t be mad at me,” Scorpius says. To Albus. He speaks directly to him as if nobody else is in the supermarket, and Albus can do nothing but tighten his grip on the push bar of the stupid, stupid trolley. “I’ve known for a while and I just… couldn’t bring myself to say it.”

Albus laughs, humourless. He’s never felt quite like this before, so exposed and open and targeted. Polly is looking at him, and Scorpius is, too. How he wishes the floor would open and take him down to the depths so he doesn’t have to keep feeling like this. “Why would I be mad at you?”

“It’s October fifth.”

Albus tilts his head to the side. “My book publication? Yeah, it’s October fifth.”

“No,” Scorpius says, so quietly it’s as if nothing was spoken at all.

“No?” The floor opens. The dots join. “Wait…”

Scorpius’ voice is tight as he says, “My leaving day,” and Albus plummets through the floor to what he thinks a sickening version of Hell would look like. “It’s October fifth.”

“Oh, Christ,” Polly murmurs, and it hits him all at once.

Love is making space in your life for someone else.

“Are you serious?” Albus asks. He isn’t sure when it happens, but he suddenly finds himself a few steps away from Scorpius, as if some space between them will make the enormity of his declaration hurt a little less.

“Yes,” Scorpius says. “Please don’t be mad.” And he steps around the trolley, an attempt to close the gap, though Albus all but flinches at the movement. Then Scorpius is back at the other side, and it feels like there are oceans between them.

“I’m… I’m not mad. I don’t have a right to be mad,” Albus says, and he lies. He can feel it in his veins, little bullets of agitation spreading around his body. He doesn’t know if he should feel this way, or if he even has the right, but he does. And it doesn’t feel like something he can stop. “But that really fucking sucks.”

“Al–”

“No,” Albus cuts him off. Shakes his head. Clenches and unclenches his fists. “I don’t… no. I can’t have this conversation in the middle of a fucking Tesco. People will think I’m a lunatic.”

Scorpius’ look is helpless. His bright blue eyes laced with some form of desperation. Albus can’t help but wonder how long Scorpius intended to keep this a secret. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “I had no control over it.”

And it’s that. That sends Albus over the edge.

“Yes,” he shouts. He sees Polly grimace out the corner of his eye. But she doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t try to hush him. Perhaps she also senses how much Scorpius’ nonchalance hurts, how much it drives a knife through his soul to see that even in the face of Albus’ biggest achievement to date, it seems like Scorpius can’t reciprocate any level of sacrifice. “Yes you did! You must have had some control. Start dates aren’t that freaking difficult to negotiate. Oh, sorry, could we push it back a couple of days? I have some things I need to sort out on that date. Or, like, could we rearrange that for a few days later? Or fucking lie and say you have to work your notice or something. You always have so many options and you never take them. You never think about how your actions are going to make me feel until after you’ve gone past the point of no return, and then you think saying sorry is going to make me forgive you and it fucking sucks. Because it makes me realise that in the past I did just forgive you, and that you have always been a little bit fucking selfish.”

Someone walks past and gives Albus a look of disapproval. Not that Albus cares, though. Polly and Scorpius seem to, however. Scorpius murmurs an apology and steps to the side, while Polly comes to the back-end of the trolley and places a hand on Albus’ shoulder.

“Albus,” Polly murmurs. Perhaps even she has a limit for how long someone can rant before she tells them to tone it down. “We are in a supermarket. The whole lunatic thing?”

Albus shrugs her off. He’s seeing stars, his head is spinning. He could be blacklisted from this shop and he doesn’t even think he’d care. “No, Polly. I don’t care. Or, well, that’s not true,” Albus scoffs, gesturing towards the area where Scorpius is standing. “I did care until he just lied to me, bare faced.”

Scorpius kisses his teeth, stares at Albus. Any semblance of sorrow has disappeared from his expression, and the lines carving between his eyebrows look a little too similar to what Albus imagines his face looks like at the moment. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about my dad having a stroke, but I just didn’t want to get in the way of your holiday, oh, sorry¸ I meant your work,” he says, tapping his index finger to the top of the thumb on his other hand as he starts to count. “I’m sorry I made you break up with me even though I was the one who wanted to break up in the first place, but I just felt like acting like a coward. I’m sorry I accused you of wanting to save face by inviting me to your ex-fiancée’s wedding even though you’d opened up to me in the past and told me how anxious gatherings with people from your youth make you, but I just wanted to be spiteful.”

“Scorpius–”

Scorpius throws his hands up. “Absolutely fucking not, Albus,” he seethes, and Albus wants to be taken aback, wants to challenge him on it, but he can’t. Because he knows he’s been cornered here, knows there is no coming back from it. “If you want to be all high and mighty and bring shit up from the past, then I will, too. If I’m selfish, you’re selfish. If I guilt-trip, then you guilt trip.”

“Can you two stop,” Polly snaps. She’s standing in the space between them, like a wave breaker sitting between sand and sea. “Jesus fucking Christ, shut up. We are in the middle of a supermarket, there are parents with children standing in the aisle next to us. This is really not the place to have this sort of conversation, so stop.”

Scorpius clears his throat, drags a desperate hand through the beautiful strands of his hair. Albus watches every single damn move he makes. “We forgot to pick up red wine,” he says a beat or two later, already turning on his heel. “I’ll go grab a bottle.”

They watch him walk off. Albus throws another bag of pasta into the trolley, and he can’t bring himself to look at Polly. To see into her eyes and try and explain the war that’s burning bright and hot in his heart.

“Why, Albus?” She whispers. “Why start that here?”

Albus glances at her, “Whose side are you on?”

Polly rolls her eyes. “There isn’t a side to be on,” she murmurs, resting a hand on the side of the trolley as they escape the pasta aisle and head towards the spices and condiments section. “Because you’re both as stupid as each other. He’s moving in less than a week, do you really want to unearth all that shit now?”

“If not now, when?”

“If now,” Polly counters, shaking a tub of cinnamon like a maraca. “Then when are you going to resolve it? You two don’t communicate at all nowadays.”

Albus scrunches up his nose, shakes his head. “I’ll talk to him later.”

“No, you won’t.”

Albus says nothing, because anything he could say could be a lie. Except the truth, which is that he won’t speak to Scorpius later. But he can’t admit that to Polly, not right here, not right now.

⚡

If I am to feign from telling you of my love for you I fear my regrets will follow you to the grave, all Asphodel.

Regarding you with tears, stuffed between innocence and love of a daffodil.

In His words; there’s a fennel for you, and columbines.

Eternally worthy of all praise until time outdoes itself.

Like Marigolds on death-beds blowing, and with fantastic garlands of crowflowers, nettles, daisies and long purples.

You glimmer – you pulse – with the colours of them all.

For any sin of pain I commit against you I shall repent, handing some rue to you and

Professing my faithfulness with a blush of violet across my cheeks.

Please never leave me;

For there is a willow grows aslant a brook that shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.

A mourning, forsaken love: that is all I would become.

I wish to hang you on a wall, behind a frame carved from the hands of life-long expertise, and keep you safe.

In the name of the Victorian Language for forget-me-nots: true love;

Please, forget me not.

⚡

Albus’ twenty-fifth time experiencing the day October first starts with silence. A sense of emptiness. For in none of his twenty-five birthdays spent on this planet has he ever woken up in a home all by himself.

He spins himself out of bed and shuffles into the kitchen and there are no balloons hanging on the mantelpiece, no banners strung across the door. There is nothing save a small pile of cards assembled on the coffee table that he’d organised yesterday evening, a couple of bags tucked on the sofa. And as Albus flicks on the kettle, places two pieces of bread into his toaster, he can’t quite decide how he feels about it.

As he pushes open the window and allows the crisp October air to breathe life into the flat, as he flicks the needle on his record player and starts filling the eerie silence with delicate dashes of a piano – Albus thinks he should feel sad, but there is a more pertinent part of his soul that feels rather at peace. That feels proud.

If this were to happen to any former iteration of Albus at any point in his life – waking up alone on his birthday, how silly it sounds – he thinks it would’ve destroyed him. He’d built his life thinking that everything he loves must be within touching distance. He must be able to hear the breaths of those he loves for fear they may cease to exist almost instantaneously. But now it feels different. Now he knows he’s going to see them later, he’s going to hug them and love them and it’s going to feel just as sweet as if they’d been here upon waking up. 

And that has to count for something, right? That has to be some sort of inclination to the growth he’s gone through the last few months. Perhaps it’s just that he’s able to divorce himself from the preconceived ideas he had about what life should look like, or maybe he’s getting better at adapting to situations that really aren’t in his control.

Whatever the case, as Albus sits down to eat his toast and open his birthday cards and roll his eyes lovingly at all the messages that are written before him, he doesn’t feel sad about them. He laughs, he smiles, he tears up a little when he reads the card from his grandfather and sees a few clippings of new poems tumble into his lap. Like confetti, but a beautiful sort, instead.

London is a big city, after all. It’s hard to feel lonely when you know there is so much out there; you just haven’t seen it all yet.

⚡

For Rosamond, who loved the Ducks.

Albus hasn’t been to this bench for a while, but it hasn’t changed in the slightest. He sits with a thermos flask between his legs and a small pouch of thawed peas freezing his fingers to their bone, tossing a handful whenever a little muddle of ducks come waddling up to him. The air is rich with the smell of coffee, a slight burnt char simmering around the edges. It’s cloudy, though the sky is blue, and Albus thinks if he were to close his eyes he would for a moment forget he was in London.

And so he does. He closes his eyes, listens only to the lapping of the canal water as a houseboat trundles through, to the distant quacks as another duck family wakes and begins their gentle crawl through the murky lochs. And then there’s the sound of crunching gravel, evenly-spaced footfalls.

Then there’s geranium, sandpaper and honey. And all at once, Albus is right back in the dead centre of London.

“Hey, you,” Scorpius says, breathing heavily as he comes to a rest next to the bench. “Happy birthday.”

Albus turns to look at him, and he tries to smile, but it doesn’t work well. “Hey,” he says, fighting with all his might to keep his gaze above Scorpius’ shoulder-level. “Thank you. Twenty-five… it means you’ve known me for four years now.”

“Have I really?” Scorpius asks. He drags his hand through his hair, the ends of which are damp with perspiration. He has a water bottle in one hand, using the fingers of his free one to pinch at his shirt and pull the material away from his chest. Albus’ mind is all fog and no logic, and he crushes a pea between the palms of his hands just so he has something else to try and focus his attention on.

“You have,” Albus says. He shuffles over a little, making space for Scorpius to sit beside him. “I had not long turned twenty-one when we… you know. And now here we are.”

Scorpius smiles, swigs his water, stifles the air to silence with just his sheer presence. “Here we are indeed,” he says. He tucks one leg under the other, draping one arm over the back of the bench as he looks at Albus. “Where are we going again tonight?”

Albus shrugs, clears his throat. “This pub Karl heard about at work,” he says, tossing a fresh handful of peas at a couple of ducks who swan up to them. “They do some sort of quiz night, and every round you win gets you a free round for the table.”

“Sounds like a very Karl thing,” Scorpius laughs.

Albus smiles. “It is.”

And then he looks at him again, all long legs and blonde hair and tantalisingly blue eyes. Everything Albus has ever wished for, and everything he has lost, too. He feels it most in moments like this, where in times gone by he could just reach over and kiss him and tell him how wonderful he is. He could press his fingers into the expanse of skin between Scorpius’ shirt’s hem and his shorts’ waistband, and it would be received like the most normal gesture in the world. A time where everything he did echoed Scorpius’ name, and every move he made was without hesitation.

Times like this he feels the burn, fresh and raw over his skin.

Albus kisses his teeth, then dares to speak again, “Um, sorry to like, change the subject,” he says, the tone of which draws Scorpius’ attention back to Albus’ face. “Since when do you run?”

Scorpius laughs, uncertain. “I mean… I’m not sure. Since a few months ago, I guess? I started it out in Australia. Running along the beach early in the morning before it got too hot to do just about anything… it was very tranquil. It helps clear the mind, I think. Fresh air and your lungs burning… it’s cathartic.”

“It sounds hellish,” Albus says.

“Your idea of catharsis is purging your mind onto a piece of paper,” Scorpius says, and Albus can’t argue with him there.

A couple walks past them, one holding a briefcase and the other talking enthusiastically about some sports match that had happened the night prior. They smile at Albus and Scorpius, and the two of them smile back. Around them the rest of the world is coming to its senses, and what had once been a relatively quiet atmosphere slowly succumbs to the revving of engines and the screeching of sirens as the inner city populace clicks into gear.

“Well, running suits you,” Albus says, because why the hell not?

Scorpius tilts his head to the side. “It does?”

“You look good.”

Albus sees Scorpius bite the inside of his cheek, musing over what words to use. “Thank you,” he says, eventually. “A compliment from you is like pure bronze, quite frankly.”

A pleasant silence fizzles for a moment, like a sparkler slowly dying out, leaving behind a puddle of char and mere memories of fascination. Albus looks at Scorpius, and Scorpius looks right back.

“I can’t believe you’re moving in four days,” Albus says.

Scorpius shrugs his shoulders. He fiddles with the cap on his water bottle, spinning it all the way on and all the way off again. He looks into his lap, away from Albus, and just like magic there is a gap between them that hadn’t existed before. “I can’t believe you become a published poet in four days,” he says, surprisingly. “I feel like it’ll be my claim to fame… I knew that guy before he was published. He used to… never mind, that’s not important.”

Albus’ smile is a sad one. “No, you can say it,” he murmurs. “He used to write poetry about me. All his poetry used to be about me.”

Scorpius is watching a boat crawl past, all the way down and out of sight. “What do you write about these days?”

“Nothing,” Albus says, frowning at his own answer. The peas are astonishingly cold on his lap as he sets them on his thighs. “Or, well, that was dramatic. I haven’t really had time to write, since my life has been filled with edits for the last few months. But even if it wasn’t… I’m not sure what I’d write about.”

Scorpius frowns now, glancing at Albus out the corner of his eye. “You used to write so much.”

“Because I was writing about you,” Albus deadpans. “And before I had you, I wrote about other people. But those people pale in comparison, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do in the future because nobody compares to you.”

“You wrote about more than me,” Scorpius defers the attention, though they both know he’s lying. “You wrote about places… I used to read all of them, you remember, right? The ones on the backs of receipts, napkins, your notes app. You wrote about Brighton, about Wales, about Oxford.”

“Those were all places I went with you.”

“Well… maybe you can visit me in France, and then you can write about that, too,” Scorpius ends with a shrug.

Albus cannot muster a response to that. Is it an invitation? A declaration of intent? He can’t spend any more time mourning a life he doesn’t believe can come to fruition. This slope feels too slippery, and Albus knows he isn’t strong enough to stay afloat, that his knees are already too bruised from falling to rock bottom in the not too distant past. He would give up absolutely anything to believe it could work, but perhaps he has nothing left to give.

Scorpius clears his throat, and Albus notices then how he’s turned his body, shoulders facing Albus, all attention placed on him. “I know we didn’t have a constructive conversation about it the other day, and I know you probably won’t believe me,” he says. “But I am sorry I’m going to miss your publication day. You’re right, I probably could’ve pushed the day back a little… but I guess I was just, like… scared?”

Albus shifts in his seat, a little splash of tea swilling out of his flask and painting his knee pink. “About what?”

Scorpius shrugs, his fingers all up in his hair, scratching the nape of his neck. “About what I’d do if I had to read some of those poems knowing you were in the same room,” he murmurs. “Or having to hear you read those poems while I was there.”

“What do you think you would’ve done?”

“Something you’d get mad at me for,” Scorpius says, as simple as anything. “You do get angry with me quite a lot these days.”

Albus stifles a small laugh, and as he sniffs the fragrant scent of coffee overwhelms his senses. “You should know it’s never genuine anger,” he says, and he hopes Scorpius believes him. “I’ve never been good at processing my feelings.”

Scorpius shrugs. “Well,” he says, dragging out the last sound. It’s a word that he makes sound wealthy, palpable. “You seemed pretty good at processing love, that’s for sure.”

He hears it in his head, this song that he used to listen to on repeat during university, sometimes even after. It had been on a vinyl Yann picked up from a charity shop one day, and the music crackled on their cheap record player, a sort of crisp sound not too dissimilar to the kind that scratches through you when you dog-ear a page of a vintage Penguin classics book.

Just once in a lifetime, a man knows a moment. One wonderful moment when faith takes his hand. And this is my moment; my once in a lifetime.

This is his moment, Albus thinks, this is his once in a lifetime. Perhaps not the only love he will have, but definitely the only one who will love him in such a peculiar and wholly true way. Rosamond’s plaque catches a glimmer of sunlight, and the peas as cold against his skin, and Albus thinks there’s no better time than now to seize his moment.

“Are you ever going to admit that you flirted with me that night on the boat?”

Albus doesn’t look at him, but he feels Scorpius’ gaze burning through his skin. “What?”

Albus shrugs his shoulders. “Back when you first moved in with Karl, and we were in the kitchen together, you insisted that you weren’t flirting with me, and that it was a one-sided thing on my behalf. But I just… don’t believe that. And I never have,” he says. The words fall freely, all but tumbling into place. Little jigsaw puzzle pieces drawn to their rightful location as if each syllable is a magnet. “But I never brought it up because it never felt important, especially when we ended up together.”

Scorpius clicks his tongue. “And you’re saying it’s important now?”

Albus looks at him, finally. “No,” he says. “I just have nothing to lose anymore, so I have no qualms about asking you.”

Then their eyes meet, and Scorpius’ gaze is burning into him, and Albus sees him as if it’s for the first time. He sees the face of someone he has let break his heart a thousand times over, only Albus knows he’s broken him, too. But for all the broken bones there is never not a thread of something pure. Of something they both know is worth fighting for, if only they could find it in them to try. He is staring in the face all the joy they made and all the love they unravelled, and he hopes Scorpius can see it, too.

“I was flirting with you.”

Albus’ breath is trapped in his throat. “Okay.”

“And I was in a relationship,” Scorpius continues. “And those things happened concurrently, which is awful. And I suppose I was so reluctant to admit that because I never wanted my life to become a place where I had to betray someone to make myself happy. I hurt someone else to make my own life better. How am I ever meant to accept that and move on from it?”

Albus rolls a pea between his fingertips, the thawing ice melting into the ridges of his fingerprint. “Okay… sure, maybe it was shitty to flirt with someone else when you were engaged, but you say that as if everyone else hasn’t fucked someone over to make their life better, too. I mean, I forced you to break up with me so I wouldn’t have to feel sad that you were doing a job you loved. How fucked up is that?”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“Is it not?” Albus asks. He waits until a mother pushing a pram has long since passed them before continuing, and when he speaks again he feels as if the urgency in his voice is tangible. Heavy in his hands, like a block of raw untumbled obsidian sitting prettily, waiting for a use. “Because, to me, they’re both examples of two foolish and desperate people making snap decisions because they’re thinking with their heart instead of their head. Everyone is allowed to be a little bit selfish, Scorpius. Everyone is bad sometimes. We’re just trying our best to cope with whatever life throws at us.”

Scorpius shakes his head. He appears exasperated, fingers detangling his hair, shiny white trainers digging into the puddle of pebbles upon which the bench is situated. “That’s a terrible thing,” he says, all sandpaper. Sharp, disappointed with himself. “This world is such a gorgeous place and yet here we are, humans, spoiling it with casual cruelty in the name of trying our best.”

Albus dares to touch him, to place his fingers over his knuckles and hold him still. Connecting two live wires, trying to send a current through his veins. “You have always told me that I’d be unstoppable if I stopped trying to validate every single emotion I feel, every experience I have,” he says. And then you told me you loved me, he thinks. “I think you need to take your own advice. The more you let it eat away at you, the guilt and the regret and the endless what ifs, the more you forget that life is what you make it. You made a mistake, and that’s okay. All you can do now is make sure you don’t do it again.”

And maybe it’s just that simple. When you strip back the layers and you forget about how they almost killed each other by loving each other too much and, perhaps, not enough all in the same breath. When you separate them with a sheet of glass and wait and watch with wondrous anticipation to see who shatters the pane first, only to realise they’d both go for it at the same time. Perhaps they are both just two people who made a few too many mistakes and bathe in a downpour of regret because all they ever want to do is be on the right side of their own history with the person who should be in every single chapter of the textbook.

Two petals from the same flower, plucked and tossed away to the tune of he loves me. He will always love me.

Scorpius says, crystal clear, “I don’t regret it.”

Albus blinks. His next breath is a twisted helix of laughter and relief. “What?”

“Flirting with you… I don’t regret it.”

“I never said you did.”

Scorpius’ hand flexes beneath Albus’, his fingers tapping over the bench slats like a pendulum ticking up, down, up, down. “You said it was a mistake. And, normally, a mistake implies regret. That’s why I still feel awful about it,” he explains. The words mistake implies regret all fall on a beat of his finger pressing against Albus’ palm, as if they needed the extra accentuation at all. “Is it terrible what I did? Sure. But if I went back to that night on the boat, knowing what I know now and having seen what my life will be, would I do it again, over and over? I would. Maybe I’d even be bolder, and do worse things, and become an even greater antithesis to the type of person my parents raised me to be.”

“I’m not sure what you want me to say.”

Scorpius shrugs. “Nothing.”

“But for what it’s worth… I never thought you were a dick. I know I said it, back in those days… that you were terrible for flirting with me, for spending all that time with me even though you were engaged, I was just jealous, I guess. Head over heels, or something.”

“I don’t regret any of it.”

“Even the breakup?” Albus asks.

“Even the breakup,” Scorpius answers. “I could never regret a single second of the time I’ve spent with you.”

Albus smiles. The sibilance glides over him, Scorpius’ voice returning to the wholly honey state that Albus loves most. “That sounds like a line from a poem.”

“It probably could be. I’ve read plenty of them the last few months,” Scorpius says. He removes his hand from beneath Albus’ just to take a sip from his water. Chin upturned, the sun glazing over the outline of his nose. A little bit like how perfection looks.

“You optionally read poems these days?”

Scorpius shrugs; Albus is amazed his shoulders haven’t become stuck in that position over the last twenty minutes or so. “I have had a lot of time to fill,” he says. “Time that used to be taken up by someone else.”

Albus stands up. He steps over to the side of the canal, crouches down, and tosses the rest of the peas towards a little gaggle of ducks resting by the reeds on the opposite side. They all float, little buoys dancing there in the light current sprung up by the desperate paddling of webbed palmates driving the ducks towards the feast. He feels Scorpius watching, senses the trained gaze of those beautiful blue eyes following his every move.

It means when he stands up straight again, and he spins on his heel, he is looking straight at Scorpius, who is looking straight back at him.

“I’m glad you don’t regret it,” Albus says. He folds up the empty bag, tucking it into his rucksack so he can toss it in the recycling later. “Because I don’t either. The catalyst of our relationship may have been shitty, but if that night on the boat is what stopped you from committing to a life that may have made you miserable… I don’t think I could ever regret that.”

“No?”

“No. Your happiness above anything else is all that’s ever mattered to me for as long as I’ve known you. And even if it isn’t the case now, I do believe you were happy for those two years with me,” Albus says, the God honest truth.

“I really was.”

“Me, too.”

He loves me, he loves me not. Albus thinks he could pluck off every remaining petal from their flower and the answer would always be love. Always and forever, they know it will never stop.

⚡

They go to the pub, to the quiz night. Albus wears this satin shirt with the top buttons undone, and he lets himself feel happy about it. Yann looks at him when they’re at the bar, ruffles up his hair, and says, “You’re one of the most beautiful people in this entire world,” and Albus dares to believe him.

They win a couple of rounds for the table. Polly nails the questions about art, Karl devours the pop culture section.

The question master asks, “What Age came between Stone and Iron?”

Albus looks over the table at Scorpius, only to find Scorpius already looking right at him. The room glistens just for that moment, and Albus feels oh so happy. Everything glimmers like Bronze, and Albus doesn’t want it to stop.

⚡

It’s raining in London, like it always does, as Albus sits at the counter in Karl’s new bakery and helps polish cutlery and cake stands and a million other pieces of tableware he didn’t realise one needed to run a successful business. The sign in the door is turned to closed!, and it will remain as such for the next few days on the run up to Karl’s official opening.

Albus had been there when Karl opened the letter confirming his investment and, thus, allowing him to put an offer on the little shabby place down a side road in central London that they’d toured all that time ago. The day after his dad had a stroke, back before things became ever so complicated. Though, at that time, Albus thinks, life had it’s own complications. So maybe he shouldn’t compare.

Karl has taken the place and turned it into something unimaginable. Something right out of an Austen novel, something quaint and precious and perfect. With taupe walls, save the one to the right which is painted a thousand colours by intricate swipes of a brush, and perfectly mismatched tables the two of them had collected together from various charity shops and lawn sales. In the corner stands a little bookshelf littered with spare paperback copies Albus had dug out from a box beneath his bed, having insisted to Karl that every bakery needs a take one-leave one library.

Sitting there, cloth in hand, Albus can’t quite believe this whole thing real. He thinks about little Karl, fifteen-year-old Karl, learning to bake with dad whilst in the same breath learning how to love the woman his dad wants to marry. Making space in his life for love of different forms. For a growing passion, one that will become his life’s ambition, and for a new type of relationship. One he perhaps didn’t want, or need, but one that is coming to him whether he likes it or not. Albus looks over at Karl, leaning over a book he’s filled almost cover to cover with details about his bakery, and he thinks, for a moment, that Karl is the most spectacular person to exist on the planet.

Albus clears his throat, waiting for Karl to look up at him. Then he picks up a fork, points it at the wall opposite, and says, “The mural is beautiful,” in a tone he himself doesn’t quite recognise.

Karl blinks, glances over at the mural, then looks back down to his notepad. At the numbers he’s scrawling, at the ingredients list he’s compiling. “Polly painted it,” he murmurs, tapping his pencil against the paper.

“I can tell,” Albus says, dragging his gaze over the finer details of the mural. The individual flower petals, the hidden ingredients scattered among the collage. “It has her flair. And the tableware…”

Karl smiles to himself, “Yann Fredericks originals. Every single piece.” And he sounds proud. Honoured. To have friends who will do such deeds for him, to be loved by these equally incredible people who all have the strength within them to extend the kindest parts of themselves to others every single step of the way.

“I feel as if I should be contributing something,” Albus says, humming to himself as he goes back to polishing a fresh piece of cutlery.

Karl scoffs from his side of the counter. “Are you kidding?” He asks, softly. Albus can’t not look up upon hearing the sincerity of his voice. “This place wouldn’t exist without you. Without all of you.”

“Why lie? I did nothing for this,” Albus says, sounding a little too much like his younger self for even his own liking. As if he’s slinking backwards in a shadow of his former self, a version that doesn’t know or accept the ways in which he’s shaping the lives of those he loves. “You thought up the whole idea… Polly painted, Yann crafted. Rose read over the contract and Scorpius helped you when you were budgeting and pitching to investors. I really contributed little at all.”

Karl looks at him, dead on. “You contributed yourself.”

“That measures to nothing when you compare it to everyone else.”

“You don’t need to compare,” Karl insists. He sets his pencil down, sidesteps over to Albus’, standing so they’re facing each other over the counter, and stares at him. Leaning on the marble top, resting on his elbows, just looking. Taking in every single last shred of Albus. “You helped. You toured buildings with me, you tested all the recipes. You kept helping to convince me it was a good idea even when I had doubts. None of the other’s would’ve needed to play their part had it not been for you in the beginning.”

“You’re far too nice to me,” Albus says, conscious that the breath he lets out flutters over Karl’s cheekbones.

Karl shakes his head. “On the contrary, Albus,” he says, picking up a spoon to gently tap against Albus’ lips. “You’re too cruel to yourself.”

“Since when do you speak so… colourfully?” Albus asks, glossing the cloth back over the spoon Karl has just spoiled. “So beautifully?”

“We take after the people we love, I guess,” Karl shrugs, standing up straight. Albus looks up at him, blinking through his lashes, and he can barely handle it. “Perhaps it’s your influence.”

For a moment there is nothing. Just the rain, the two of them, the ghostly history of this little building in the dead centre of London. All burning, all passing time. Though none of it seems to matter as they both – Karl and Albus – look at each other as if they’re the only thing that matters. And Albus recognises the look in Karl’s eyes. The warmth of it, the intensity.

It’s the way he looked at that guy on that tube platform that one night. The way he used to look at Albus back in the day, back in the restaurant where the food had celery in it and they ended up in the hospital. It’s the same gaze in a different shade of blue, and Albus just can’t help himself.

“Are you seeing someone?”

Karl blinks, tilts his head to the side. “Pardon?”

“You heard my question,” Albus says, clear as day. “Please don’t make me ask again.”

Karl scratches the bridge of his nose. Albus can see it in his eyes, the fact he doesn’t want to answer the question. But the two of them rarely deny each other the opportunity to be honest, for they rarely ever find themselves in such situations of intensity, so Albus knows Karl won’t withhold the truth from him. “I mean… I don’t know? Maybe? You know what I’m like. I go through phases of going out a lot and meeting a bunch of new people and then doing nothing,” he says, finally. So quietly Albus has to lean forwards to hear him perfectly. “I guess I’m in my going out phase again.”

“But you’ve met someone,” Albus murmurs; Karl looks back over at him. “I saw you with him.”

Eyebrows drawn, Karl asks, “You what?”

Albus shrugs. “A while ago, in the Underground. You were, like, waiting to get on a train and I was getting on the same platform and you were with this guy and it was really confusing.”

To that, Karl tenses. He sets his hands on the counter and flexes out the joints in his fingers. “Confusing?” He asks. “What’s confusing about that?”

“I don’t know.”

Karl clicks his tongue. “No, you do,” he says, stronger this time. Fuelled with new determination. “What’s confusing?”

And Albus can’t bring himself to say it. Not this time. Because when he goes to process some sort of sentence all his mind does is take him back to that night in the old place, the two of them kissing and then the next morning everything blowing up in their faces. How Karl had told him how much Albus has broken his heart over the years. And Albus can’t do it, he can’t break it again. He can’t stand here in this new haven for Karl and show him that he hasn’t grown at all, hasn’t learned from anything in the past.

“I’m not doing this again with you, Albus,” Karl continues, sensing correctly that Albus doesn’t have the will to finish the conversation he’s started. “I’m not… I’m not letting you make me feel hopeful about something completely hopeless. And I need you to stop giving me hope.”

“I’m not doing it on purpose.”

“Yes, you are,” Karl snaps, though he softens right afterwards. Regretting the harshness of his words, perhaps. Or, sensing that Albus really is rather confused, and that he definitely isn’t doing it on purpose. “You know how I feel – or have felt – about you for as long as I’ve known you. Every time you bring up this sort of conversation you’re basically opening up the door to us, which is really rather cruel because you and I both know it’s basically a doorway to nothing. I put my life on hold for you for, like, a year… just waiting to see what maybe could’ve happened. I’m not pausing it again.”

“I don’t want you to do that,” Albus says, because it’s true.

“Then what do you want?” Karl asks.

Albus sighs. Shrugs his shoulders. “I just… I want to talk to you, properly, and I want you to listen and to not be mad at me even though I know I’m going to sound like a prick,” he says, gently tapping a spoon against a cake stand he’s recently polished.

Karl frowns at that. “Don’t we always talk properly?” He asks. “You’re one of my best friends.”

“Not about this,” Albus murmurs, to which Karl sighs. Because he knows it, too. Knows this is something they always tiptoe around. They creep and they walk on eggshells until it ends up erupting in some grand Bronte-esque moment.

“Okay,” Karl says. He drags a chair over and sits down. He looks at Albus, right in his mismatch coloured eyes. “So talk.”

Albus bites on his tongue. He tosses some words around in his mind and glances out the window for a moment of respite, though when he looks back to Karl he’s instantly submerged in the reality of the situation he’s brought unto himself. “I guess what was confusing about seeing it, for me, was that it made me feel jealous,” he admits, and with the confession it’s as if all the oxygen in the room has been swallowed. “And I’d be lying if I told you I knew what the cause of the jealousy was. Because I don’t. But it did, and it bothered me for a while, but I know I don’t have the right to be bothered because your life is none of my business.”

“Well, no. It is,” Karl murmurs, dragging his thumb around the perimeter of a plaster he’d put on a cut a couple days ago. He’d been sectioning a cake to share with the group, and his grip had slipped, and Albus had been the first to leap for the first aid kit beneath the sink. “You’re like family to me, we basically live our lives concurrently. What is important to you is important to me, too.”

“I shouldn’t have felt jealous,” Albus declares.

Karl’s smile is soft; a petal upon his face. “No, you shouldn’t,” he agrees.

“And I shouldn’t have been so fucking selfish for years, giving you hope for something where hope shouldn’t have been,” Albus continues. “And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to apologise enough for putting your life on hold.”

Karl’s posture loosens. He slouches, he rests his hands in his lap. It seems as if for the first time ever he’s truly gotten to the bottom of the riddle that is Albus Potter.

“You didn’t put it on hold, Al,” Karl says, defiantly. “I did. You might have been a core reason, but you didn’t make that decision. It’s not like… like I spent every day pining at my window wishing you’d come to your senses and realise it was me you should be with. It wasn’t a year of my life wasted. It was just a year of my life that was more emotionally complicated than it probably should have been.”

“Because of my selfishness,” Albus mutters.

Karl shakes his head. He reaches over, places a hand atop of Albus’ and holds it there. His thumb cradles the pulse point on Albus’ wrist, and each beat thrums into their silky soft skin as their hands rest against each other. “You’re not a bad person, Albus,” Karl states. “You’re not. You’re a dick sometimes, and you’re selfish sometimes, but who isn’t? Occasional moments of meanness don’t define your entire personality. You’re so much more than your worst moments. Do you really think any of us would’ve stuck around if we didn’t think you were brilliant?”

Albus shrugs. “I just wish I could’ve made you as happy as you have always made me.”

“You did,” Karl says. “And you do. Yeah, I had crazy feelings for you and it drove me insane sometimes. But that was on me. And I guess I was still happy during it because it was some sort of lovesick rush. It’s not like you were leading me on. Well, most of the time, anyway. You were just being you.”

“Being me.”

“And it’s not really your fault that you’re stupidly desirable,” Karl says, adding a laugh for good measure.

Albus screws up his face. He turns his hand over and takes Karl’s in his, tracing a fingertip across the love lines on Karl’s palm. “I’m not,” he whispers.

“You are,” Karl responds with an edge of ferocity but also, more noticeably, an essence of love. “You are so talented, and so intelligent, and so… endless. And you’re gorgeous, too. Do you really think you’d have been able to forge a career out of love poetry if you weren’t desirable enough to be loved by so many?”

Albus looks over at him again. He blinks, he sees Karl clearly. Sees the softness in his eyes, the highlights in his hair. Sees a spec of chocolate in the corner of his mouth and can imagine the flour hand prints on his jeans. He can see every single version of Karl, every single iteration that he has loved, and he wonders why Karl has stuck with him for so long. “Does this person make you happy?”

“He does,” Karl responds.

Albus nods. “Does he give you hope?”

“Yes, he does,” Karl’s response is delicate, a tone Albus hasn’t heard in a while. “And I’m pretty sure I give him hope, too.”

Albus nods, again. There is a momentary ruckus outside as a walking tour parades past the door. All Albus can think is that, in the weeks to come, the traffic on the road out the window will turn in to customers for Karl to serve. People who will come in here expecting just a sweet treat, only to leave having met one of the most radiant people there will ever be to walk to the green grass of this planet.

Karl clears his throat; Albus looks at him. “Does that make you feel jealous?” Karl asks.

Albus thinks for a moment, really thinks, and then he says, “No, I don’t think it does. It makes me feel happy.”

Karl smiles. “Well, good. That makes me feel happy.”

“I love you so much, Karl Jenkins,” Albus says, the words never having sounded so authentic before.

“I love you too,” Karl agrees. He stands up, reaches over the counter. He pulls Albus into a rather bone-crushing hug, and he presses a kiss to Albus’ forehead before they separate. “Quite a lot.”

Albus clears his throat, and with it all the tension in the room melts away. Like butter in a pan, placed there to grease the surface for a cake to bake upon. “You know, I was thinking,” Albus says, pointing to the door. “It would be really funny if you put a sign in the door that says access to celery prohibited.”

“Oh, Christ,” Karl whines, though he can’t help barking out a small, small, laugh. “You’re so annoying.”

⚡

I think it is possible to fall in love and not know until you fall out

with the person, and with love.

Until one day you look at them, mind and body filling with doubt

and realise they could fit you like a glove.

I think it is possible for two people to be destined to be together

though the world has a trick up its sleeve,

And it will leave you and the one you love wondering forever

what in the world you could have been.

I think it is possible for you both to glide through life on parallel tracks

staring at each other through rose-tinted windows.

Then one day, later in life, you will come across some dusty spined hardback

and everything falls into place. Dominoes.

I think it is possible that you love them, and they love you, too,

though the stars could never align.

But fate can never get in the way of something that is so boldly true:

that they remain someone you love, for the rest of time.

⚡

Albus takes the train to Oxford that evening. He’s the sort of person who likes backward-facing seats, seeing the world fly past out the window without knowing what is coming next. Scorpius had always hated travelling backwards; he seemed to be the type who liked to take everything in head first, to see as much as he possibly could.

His rucksack occupies the seat next to him, heavy with a couple of advanced copies of his book his publisher has given him, saying he should hand them out to people he wants to share this with the most. She gave him five copies in total, and choosing the recipients made him feel a little like the Bachelor handing out his roses. But it hadn’t taken much for Albus to decide who got them; in fact, the names were in his mind before the books were even in his hands.

He stopped off at his old university first to give a copy to his final project supervisor, the lecturer who had always given him glowing praise on just about anything he wrote. Her classes were the ones he would look forward to most, and seeking her approval made up about eighty percent of the effort he put into his final year work. She’d been elated to see him, and placed the book on the bookshelf in her office right next to a collection of Blake’s Songs and Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

The next he shipped to his grandfather with a little note saying Albus hopes the poems are as good as the ones he tears out of newspapers to pop in the post. The third went to Yann, in what was perhaps a slightly too emotional encounter.

They stood at a bus stop just outside the theatre district, waiting for the last bus of the night to come and shuttle them home, and Albus extracted the book from his bag and nudged the corner into Yann’s side.

“For you,” he had said, watching as Yann peeled off the brown paper wrapping. “Since I no longer need to buy shares of your ceramics business.”

Yann brushed his finger across the embossed title, Counting All the Numbers I Did on You, then looked up at Albus as if he looked into the centre of a galaxy. “Are you serious?” He asked. “Wow, Al. Thank you so much.”

Albus had shrugged his shoulders. “It’s nothing.”

“No,” Yann shook his head. “It’s everything. This is everything. Look at far you’ve come.”

“I wouldn’t have made it out of the shitty university accommodation if I didn’t have you.”

And so Yann devoured a few of the poems on the ride home, and Albus watched as he placed it on the coffee table by the kitchen, swatting Polly’s hand away when she attempted to flick through it. She hadn’t been upset at not receiving one, though. Albus is pretty sure every single one of them knows this thing between Yann and Albus cuts deep. It’s in the structure of their DNA at this point, this weird sort of connection that Albus thinks could transcend universes if it had to.

The last two books, the ones in his backpack right now, are for his parents. And he’s really quite excited to hand them over. To walk into the front room, past the trophy cabinet of James’ and the photo wall of Lily on her adventures, and to hand them both this thing that he created. This thing that somewhat validates his entire life’s troubles. To finally have something to pass over and to make them proud with.

Albus pats the rucksack, just to check they’re still there, and then presses play on a jazz playlist Scorpius had made him while he was in Cyprus that one time; I could change the grey skies to blue, if I had you.

⚡

He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and I wonder if he’ll stick around forever if I ask him.

This French boy.

I wonder if we could orbit each other, a vinyl disc spinning for eternity

under the needle’s watchful eye.

Life paths pre-determined like the ridges making vibrations making music making life.

Will he come back to me in a faithful circle, even when the song ticks over to the next?

He is a lullaby that will evolve forever,

one I could write the words to.

If only he would stay.

I want, so dearly, for him to stay.

To become two strands interlocking in a Helix, not attached by force but lingering by choice.

If he asked me, I’d say yes:

Yes, I will stay with you forever. I will circle you like a moon, play the music you want to hear.

I’ll watch you push your glasses up your nose, and I will stay until the disc spins no more.

⚡

His mum picks him up from the train station.

It feels a lot like coming home for Christmas when he was in university, where he’d tumble down the steps with a little suitcase dragging behind him and she’d greet him with a hug and a kiss to his forehead and ask how are things going, darling?

Albus smiles as he walks over to the family car, as his mum opens up her arms and pulls him in to her familiar embrace. The smell of her perfume, the smell of the laundry detergent she has been using since he and his siblings were kids.

“Hi, mum,” Albus says, voice muffled by the swirls of fleece on her jacket.

She holds his cheeks in her hands and kisses his forehead. “Hi, Al,” she says. “How are things going, darling?”

⚡

There are tell-tale signs all over the place that his dad’s condition has worsened, but Albus doesn’t really think much of it at first. Of the way the umbrella basket by the front door is filled with different walking sticks, of the hand rails installed along most walls, of the bathroom that has been built on the downstairs level. It isn’t until he kicks off his shoes, walks into the front room and sees his dad that it sinks in.

“Albus, kiddo,” Harry says. He looks a little frail, that lifelong scar on his forehead from an injury when he was younger seeming to spread endlessly around the rest of his face in the form of wrinkles, but his smile is still the same. “Come here.”

And then Albus isn’t sure how to approach it, how hard to hug. He still tucks in just right, Harry’s chin on top of Albus’ head, but Albus is afraid to hug too tightly. So he tries a gentle squeeze, to which Harry holds him tighter, and that’s when Albus lets himself melt.

“Hi, dad,” Albus says. “I’ve missed you so much.”

“We’ve missed you more,” his dad says. “Happy late birthday.”

And so Albus tries to not think much of it. Of the stark realisation that everything in life is slightly different now, that things aren’t ever going to be the way he remembered them when he lived under this roof. He doubts whether his dad is jumping up to fix the leaks in the bathroom anymore, doubts he is able to get outside to the shed to run the lawn mower all over the grass to tame it. He doubts that if he ever called home, asking for some help with something for his flat, that his dad would come back with the offer of travelling down to London to do it for him.

Albus read something once about how when you’re young you don’t realise that, while they are watching you grow, you are simultaneously watching your parents age. Because, perhaps, they are spending so much time giving you the time of your life that you don’t have any time or space in your brain to look at them. Not because you don’t love them, of course, but because you’re so determined to be present during these amazing times that it doesn’t cross your mind to think of the time ticking, the years passing by. One year your dad is climbing into the roof to pull down boxes of Christmas decorations, and then the next he’s putting them in the garage just so he doesn’t have to use the ladder anymore.

Everything changes in a snap second. Suddenly you feel like life has unpaused, and you wonder whether you’ve even been acknowledging your experiences until this very moment. Sort of like how you forget about the fact you’re always breathing until, randomly, you’re counting every breath and it’s all you can think about. You don’t realise your parents are also living life until, all at once, you sense the nearing end.

So Albus looks around at this shell of a family home that looks nothing like how it once did for so many years. Toy boxes removed, baby gates thrown out. The little hook by the door where they’d hang their school bags had snapped off long ago and so the whole railing has been replaced with a mirror. The cereal cupboard has become a medicine cabinet, and the calendar documents appointments rather than birthday parties. And if Albus thinks about it too much he feels like he may cry. So he tries to convince himself it isn’t happening, and that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what has changed, because this day is a real one, and it shouldn’t be lost or wasted in the name of musing nostalgia.

Because, really, all that matters is he’s still here, he’s still kicking; he’s still Dad.

⚡

Albus peers out the kitchen window and watches his mother tending to her plants. She’s in the greenhouse, and through the tinted glass he watches as she toys her fingers over mint leaves and lavender buds, holding her hand to her nose as she breathes in the scent of the flora. She has her hair pulled back in a messy bun, the sort she used to wear a lot when Albus and his siblings were younger. He sees the style and thinks back to playing in the garden, splashing in the community swimming pool over summer, of her hand dabbing a napkin over his chin as he ate an ice cream.

Of all the little things she did to make him happy.

He makes his way outside, dawdling along the stepping stone path to the foot of the greenhouse, murmuring a delicate, “Mum,” as he raps his knuckles over the door.

Ginny looks over her shoulder at him, and she smiles. “Darling,” she says. She wipes dirt off her hand with a tea towel she slings over her shoulder, and Albus wonders how she always seems to have everything she ever needs right before her. “Hi.”

Albus cuts to the chase. “I want to give you this,” he says, handing over the brown paper bag with her copy of the book inside. “There’s only five of them in the world, and one of them is for you.”

She melts. “Oh, Al,” she murmurs, ever so delicate as she takes the book from the bag and begins to flick through the pages. He can’t bear to look at her as she drags her eyes over the words, a fingertip holding pause at the end of each line as she works her way through them. “Come here.”

And then they’re embracing. The weight of the book in her hands rests against Albus’ back, and Albus simply burrows further into the nook of his mother’s loving shoulder. For a moment all that seems to exist in this world is him, his loving mother, and the delicate pot of lavender resting behind them.

“I love you so much,” Ginny murmurs, clearing her throat when she pulls back from the hug and instead presses their foreheads together. “I’m so proud of you. This is absolutely beautiful.”

Albus scrunches his nose up. He shakes his head, and watches as Ginny’s gaze colours with perplexity. “I’m sorry for being such a bad son,” he mutters, fingers busying with the hem of his jumper, of a loose thread dangling from the seam where the front panel had been sewn to the back. “For… for neglecting to come home, to pick up calls. For not doing the bare minimum. If I could go back in time I’d go and slap myself silly for not appreciating the parents I have, and the sacrifices you made for me. And I just… I hope this stupid book makes up for it somehow, because it’s all I have to show for those days where I didn’t come back.”

For a moment she says nothing, and a blackbird over the fence whistles aimlessly into the fresh, morning air.

“Albus, honey,” Ginny says, eventually. Her hand is on his face, thumb sweeping back and forth over the curve of his cheekbone. “You were never a bad son. Ever. You were, like… our little wild child.”

“Wild child?” Albus scoffs. “I feel like that fits Lily and James better.”

His mum shakes her head. “No, it fits you,” she says. When Albus steps back she lets him, instead folding her arms over her chest and holding the book right over where her heart is. “You and your love for the city, for people, for love. You left somewhere that made you feel ugly on the inside and found somewhere that makes you feel beautiful there instead. And you met people who make you feel beautiful, too. And in return you’ve created so much beautiful stuff. I mean, look at his! First the anthology, and now your own book. Who would’ve ever thought, huh?”

“Not me,” Albus says, because it’s true.

“Nor me,” Ginny says, and Albus is moderately surprised to hear her say it. “But not because I didn’t believe in you, only because you didn’t believe in yourself. And somewhere along the way, in those missed calls and skipped trips, you found belief. You found love for yourself that I haven’t seen in you since you were, what, fifteen? Fourteen? I would rather take this beautiful version of you over the sad one that used to exist in your place, even with all the obstacles that came our way.”

Albus swallows the emotions he doesn’t want to release. The ones that he feels prickling behind his eyelids in the form of tears. “You say such lovely things to me,” he says.

His mum kisses his temple. “That’s because you are my lovely son,” she says, slowly and deliberately. “And I have loved you since before you were born, and I will love you even after I die.”

“I love you, too,” Albus repeats what she says. Like a baby bird copying it’s mother. “Since before I was born, and after I die.”

Ginny smiles at him. She looks away for a moment, then straight back to him. Right through him. “Even if I ask you to do a favour for me?” She asks. “That you probably really won’t like?”

Albus raises an eyebrow. “What favour?”

“There’s some boxes of James’ old trophies in the roof that he’s been asking for,” Ginny says, following behind as Albus steps out of the greenhouse. “And, well... does it look like any of the permanent residents in this place have the ability to do that?”

Albus rolls his eyes. “Fine,” he sighs. “Only for you.”

“Because you love me?”

“Because I love you.”

⚡

His mum puts the book on her bedside table. Next to a lamp, next to her alarm clock, next to a photograph of the three kids on the beach back during one glorious summer. She tucks her bookmark into the acknowledgements page, and she makes him sign the end page with a marker she found in the kitchen cabinet.

To Mum–

My inconstant moon, my constant supporter. I live and breathe because of you, and for you in return.

Albus.

⚡

Albus isn’t sure he ever wants to live in a world in which his dad doesn’t exist. As he watches him from the kitchen, the way he flicks through his newspaper and reaches with shaking fingertips to grab his glass of water, Albus thinks a world without Harry Potter is one that will have no meaning at all.

And a world without meaning is a world void of everything.

The book is heavy in his hands as he steps onto the carpet, pads silently over to the sofa beside his dad’s patchwork chair. As he sits, as the springs croak beneath his weight, his dad doesn’t even notice he’s there.

Albus clears his throat, “Hey, dad?” he says, to which Harry looks up, looks around, and settles his gaze on Albus. “Have you got a moment?”

Harry smiles. “I always have a moment for you.”

Albus hands the book over. Harry looks at it for a moment or two, then he folds the newspaper into his lap and instead opens up the hardcover. Albus watches as he reads it in a similar fashion to Ginny did, being cautious to not crease any of the pages or spoil the spine in any way. He peruses the poems for perhaps ten minutes or so, all of which Albus sits nervously, drawing patterns over his knuckles with his fingertips.

“Albus…” His dad says, finally. “This is incredible. Thank you so much for giving me a copy.”

Albus shrugs, an attempt to wash the compliment off his back like water. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s everything,” his dad says. “Are you happy?”

Albus thinks for a second. Thinks about how he wakes up each day feeling something he can’t quite put his finger on, a word he can’t seem to find. Is it happiness? He isn’t quite sure. It isn’t a happiness he thinks he’s familiar with, but he doesn’t believe that makes the feeling not happiness. After all, a road unknown to us isn’t automatically a path we should never take. It is simply something new.

“I think so,” Albus says, because that’s the most honest answer he can provide. “Or, at the very least, I’m getting somewhere close to happiness.”

Harry nods, satisfied to some degree. “This…” he drums his fingers over the book’s front cover. “This is beyond even my wildest dreams for you,” he says, and when he looks back over at Albus his eyes are glistening with sincerity. His green eyes; bright and alive.

“You have dreams for me?” Albus asks.

Harry’s laugh is a quiet one, breathy. “Every parent has dreams for their kids,” he says. “Even if they never tell them.”

“Oh,” Albus murmurs. He crosses his legs on the sofa, the springs hating that even more, and his dad waits until he is comfortable and settled before continuing.

“Your grandparents had dreams for your mum. Their only daughter, the kid who showed athletic ability. As incredible as they are I think, perhaps, their dreams for her were too much for her to hold on her shoulders. It’s a lot of pressure when your parents make their dreams for you apparent,” he says, and Albus kind of gets it. “I… well. I’m not sure what my parents wanted for me, but I’m sure they had some thoughts.”

Albus isn’t sure what to say. They’ve never really spoken about this. Albus can’t really remember how old he had been when he’d realised he only had one set of grandparents, but the fact has become such a mundane part of his life that he often forgets how frequently it must impact his dad. He feels foolish, momentarily. Mere moments ago was he stood in the kitchen wondering how life goes on when you lose a parent, seemingly forgetting his dad has endured that reality almost his entire life.

Harry clears his throat. “Anyway,” he says, readjusting in his seat so he can better face Albus. “I have dreams for all of you. Very different dreams. With James… when he started asking about golf, I had dreams he’d find value there, find a place he belongs. He’s… very scatter-brained, sometimes, and without an anchor holding him down I always worry he’ll stray a little. Traveling around the world is very much not an anchor, but I hoped he’d find his way. And he has. With Lily, I had dreams she wouldn’t change herself for anybody. I wanted her to stay headstrong, because she’s such a gorgeous human being, and the idea of someone dulling her soul… it saddens me.”

“Right,” Albus says. He agrees, and he finds himself starting to see the world through the eyes of his mum and dad. Of seeing your kids get to a point where everything they do is of their own volition. You can only hope that they take the lessons you taught them and mould them into something incredible, something safe.

Harry continues, “I never told them this, though. There’s a point in parenthood you realise you don’t get a say in your kid’s decisions anymore. You can want things for them, and you have choices you want them to make, but you can’t force them. You can only speak, and guide, and offer help if they want help,” he explains, putting things into words that Albus can only imagine. “So my dreams for them are very complicated. But you…”

And then there’s silence. But you, Albus thinks. Me. He looks around the room, at the photos of himself on the walls, and thinks about all those iterations of his life, at those versions of Albus who – in their moments – were the wisest and brightest of them all. School photos, graduation photos, family holiday photos. In all of them, in all versions of his eyes, Albus can see a little bleakness that he had once thought he hid well.

Oh, to go back and tell his younger self to breathe. To smile. For, God, he was only a child. He’s been carrying so much of everything since he was only a child.

Albus looks back at his dad, and his dad sees through it all. “You were such a sad kid, Albus,” Harry says. “And I knew it wasn’t because of us. And I knew it wasn’t just teen angst. Every kid goes through a little angst, shut up in their room and whatnot. But your sadness was palpable, it followed you. And neither of us – your mum and I – knew what to do about it. What to say… how to help.”

Albus chews on the inside of his cheek. “I think it was being in the middle,” he says, meekly.

Harry tilts his head to the side. “The middle?”

“The middle child,” Albus clarifies. He feels a little like he can’t breathe, and as he tries to filter through the thoughts in his mind to make coherent sentences he has to remind himself he’s still alive. “It’s sort of, like… nothing I ever did was special. James did it first, Lily would do it last. When James walked, it was a first for you as parents, and when Lily walked, it was, like, a close on your parenthood. You’d never have a kid take their first steps again. But me… it was just standard.”

His dad hums, breathes in and out. “Everything you do is special, Al,” he is defiant when he speaks, and Albus at once regrets saying anything at all. “And… and I’m sorry if anything we did ever made you feel as if it wasn’t.”

Albus shakes his head so quickly he sees stars. “No, no. It was always here,” he gestures to his head, fingertips tapping his temple. “Never here,” he concludes, pressing his palm to his heart.

“Okay… if you say so,” Harry says, and Albus senses the disbelief. Though he hopes later, maybe after Albus has left and his dad gets chance to think about it all, he comes to trust Albus when he says it wasn’t their fault. It was always him, up in his own head. “Anyway. I guess my dreams for you were to find happiness, wherever in the world you needed to go to find it. And I think, even if you’re a little lost right now, you’re still happy. Deep down. For the most part. This… this book is a product of happiness, of you accomplishing something you’re proud of.”

Albus looks at his book and can’t fight his laugh. “I’m not sure you’ll say that once you read them. Some of them are pretty sad,” he says, and for the first time that night both of them smile at each other.

“Well, I suppose. But you were only sad because you’d previously been in the presence of something that made you happy,” Harry explains. “Heartbreak is but only the consequence of lost joy.”

It burns Albus in his soul. Because it’s true. It’s like gospel as he plays those last few words over and over again in his head. “I feel…” Albus starts, and then he stops. He isn’t quite sure where he’s going, but he doesn’t want to let that stop him. “I feel so happy when I look at this book. But then I just… I don’t know what to do next. I never thought I’d get to this level. It’s like… I’m so fucking lost.”

Harry doesn’t correct his profanity. Albus looks at him, questioningly and confused, though he’s only met with a soft smile. A sad smile, but a smile nonetheless. “When you climb a mountain, and you get to the top, you always have to come back down before you can start again,” he says. Oh, Albus thinks, how he loves the sound of his father’s voice. “You come down, and then you find another peak.”

Albus nods. He gets it, at last. “I have to find a new dream?”

“You find a new dream, Al,” his dad repeats.

Albus holds out his hand, gesturing for the newspaper. His dad hands it over and Albus flips to the crossword, taking a pencil from the coffee table to start etching the words into the gaps. Harry watches him for a while, a thought burning at his lips. But he doesn’t say anything. He just watches his kid, and he presses his fingertips into the cover of the collection, and he realises he doesn’t need to say anything at all. No words will ever do justice to the love he feels for this boy.

⚡

Karl is officially subletting the second room out, and Albus isn’t sure how he feels about it. He’s seen the room in boxes before, empty shelves and empty wardrobe space, but this time it’s different. They all know it is. Even Scorpius seems to sense something awry, and he won’t meet anyone’s eye as they shuttle boxes up and down to the rental van Albus booked for the day.

Because Scorpius has so much stuff, but not enough space in his luggage to take it all to France in one go. And so he’s booking a storage unit for a while, and all of them are helping him move things there on this fine, crisp, Tuesday morning. Polly and Rose are in his bedroom in charge of Tetris-ing his belongings into the finite amount of cardboard boxes they’d ransacked from the recycling unit downstairs. Karl is liaising with some potential letters, so he’s exempt from the packing, and Yann is bustling the boxes up and down the stairs with Scorpius.

And Albus – lowly Albus with his godforsaken driving licence – is the one sandwiching the boxes into the vehicle and shuttling them to and from the unit when the van is full. It takes a couple of hours for them to get the van completely loaded, and Scorpius is rattling through a checklist over and over to make sure he hasn’t accidentally sealed his passport inside one of the boxes. He allows himself to be satisfied shortly after, and the two of them – Albus and Scorpius – settle into the van for the drive to the storage unit.

A drive which his Maps app had told him would only take thirty minutes. Though, about five turns into the trip, they hit a long line of traffic, and Albus relents to the knowledge that they’re going to be in here a lot longer than thirty minutes.

At first they don’t say much. Scorpius busies himself with something on his phone, flicking between his messages app and emails and a browser and a thousand other applications. Albus isn’t sure he believes he needs to use every single one of them, since what person needs that much? But, alas, he taps and he swipes and gentle dings that come from the tiny speakers every now and then begin to slowly drive Albus insane when they’ve been in the traffic jam for approximately ten minutes.

And so Albus goes to say something, to break the silence and stop the dings from dinging, but Scorpius gets there first.

“We never talked about what happened in the supermarket,” Scorpius says, not once looking up from his phone. “We just, like… ignored it. Bumped into each other on your birthday and kept going like nothing had happened.”

Albus clears his throat. “I’m not sure there’s much to say.”

“There’s plenty to say,” Scorpius deadpans. “I mean… you were the one telling me not too long ago that we needed to get better at communicating. That we wouldn’t be able to be in each other’s lives if we couldn’t figure out how to talk things through like adults.”

Albus pauses, thinks. Clicks his tongue, then asks, “Why didn’t you tell me your leaving date sooner?”

Scorpius sighs. He locks his phone, tosses it into the cup holder to his right hand side. “I don’t know,” he says. “I played the conversation over and over in my head a million times and every single run through ended with you looking at me sadly, and I couldn’t bring myself to make that a reality.”

“So… what? You just decided to keep acting like it wasn’t happening?” Albus says. “What would you’ve done if Polly didn’t bring it up?”

“You’re asking me questions I don’t know the answers to,” Scorpius groans. “And before you ask, I also don’t know why I didn’t try to get the date changed. I guess part of me thought that if I changed the date it would be like I was… I don’t know… allowing myself to let you continue to be on my mind all the time.”

Albus frowns. “So you chose the alternative option which is to leave on what’s going to be the most important day of my life thus far? Do you not realise how shit that makes me feel? That you’d rather be in France on my publication day than stay back an extra twenty-four hours? And for what? Not wanting to feel like my successes are something that concern you?”

“That’s not what I mean,” Scorpius insists.

“That’s how it makes me feel,” Albus counters. “It doesn’t matter what your intention is when the way it actually plays out makes people feel horrendous.”

They simmer in silence for a little while as the traffic breaks up, as Albus weaves the van off the motorway and instead beings to curve through a residential town. Scorpius rolls the window down and allows the violent rumblings of London to tumble into the space, engines revving and ambulances blaring to spoil the general thrumming ambiance of the van.

“You know how you asked me to breakup with you?” Scorpius asks. Albus isn’t sure how much time has passed, but it somehow feels like an eternity.

Albus clears his throat. “Um,” he says. “Yeah… I remember that.”

“Well… I wish you would ask me to stay,” Scorpius says. The van rolls to a stop at some traffic lights, the red light gleaming like a sign. “Because, sometimes, I think I would say yes.”

Albus’ stomach knots. He drums his fingers over the expanse of the steering wheel, finding some semblance of peace among the faux leather material beating into his skin. “I know… I wish I would ask it, too,” he murmurs. “But I can’t. I never want to be a person who holds you back from living your dreams. I told you that before.”

“Yes, you did,” Scorpius agrees, rolling the window back up again. Shutting the outside world out again. “And I love that you think that way. But sometimes… yeah. Sometimes I wonder.”

Albus looks at him, just before the light changes. “If you stayed?”

Scorpius looks back at him. “If I stayed,” he repeats.

Albus pauses. Suddenly the space between them seems too little. He thinks back to drives they’ve taken in the past, Scorpius’ hand on Albus’ thigh, or vice versa. Albus’ hand on the gearstick and Scorpius setting his on top. Scorpius reaching into the back seat to pull a bag of sweets out of his backpack. Casual and quaint and delicate little ruminations of love that seem like a lifetime ago.

The space seems too little, but life feels too long. Everything feels. It’s exhausting.

“Sorry… just ignore–”

Albus interrupts him, “So do it,” he says, softly. Quietly. As if he isn’t really sure of what he’s saying. “Stay… please.”

“For you?” Scorpius asks.

Albus swallows. Sighs as he says, “For all of us.”

“For you, Albus,” Scorpius insists. “Just say it,” he adds, quieter this time.

Albus shakes his head. Shakes it off him, the layer of wonder and hope and potential that seemed to settle over him in the moments prior. It’s all an illusion, he thinks. Some sort of game they like to play.

“I can’t, Scorpius,” Albus admits, and with it he thinks he shatters both of them simultaneously. What’s left of them, anyway. “Of course, for me, but that can’t be the only thing. I can’t be the only thing.”

Scorpius shakes his head. As Albus glances at him from the corner of his eye he sees a shimmer in his eyes, and not a positive sort of shimmer. “You are always the only thing,” Scorpius is so quiet Albus can barely stand it. “Every road I take always wants to lead back to you.”

Albus shuts the engine off when they get to the storage unit. Turns in his seat, stares at Scorpius; all he can feel when he looks at him is dismay. Betrayal. How could you leave on my publication date? “So step off the fucking road and forge your own path,” Albus says. “Life doesn’t have to be so cut and dry. You of all people should know this.”

Scorpius clicks his tongue. “I wish you’d take your own advice.”

“I am forging my own path,” Albus says, pausing momentarily as they both get out the van. The gravel crunches beneath his shoe soles, and he stands with crossed arms as Scorpius opens the back doors and picks up a couple of boxes. “I quit my job, I fought for my dreams and for myself.”

“Did you?” Scorpius asks, looking at him over the top of some boxes. “Or did you just listen to what everyone else was telling you and make those decisions because they convinced you?”

Albus stares at him as Scorpius places some boxes in his arms. And then they’re both just looking at each other, daring each other to go one step further. And, honestly, this boy could be the death of him.

“Everyone was telling you to try and get published,” Scorpius continues, nudging the doors shut with his knee. “For years… years we spent telling you that.”

Albus turns on his heel and looks. Really looks Scorpius up and down, head to toe, taking in his oh so long legs and oh so long hair. Like a beautiful statue, one Albus sort of wants to smash into pieces sometimes, only to glue him back together moments later. “What do you want from me, S?” Albus asks. “I can’t keep up with this anymore.”

Scorpius shrugs. “I just… want you to be happy.”

“I am happy.”

“I feel like you could be happier,” Scorpius murmurs.

Albus drags his bottom lip between his teeth, holding it in place between his teeth as he breathes through the motions. Breathes through these relentless waves of back and forth that the two of them carousel around. “You don’t get to comment on these things anymore,” Albus says. “If I tell you I’m happy, then you have to believe I’m telling the truth.”

They stand there in silence for a moment or two, looking at each other, trying to read each other’s minds. When Albus looks at him he wonders if he will ever stop loving him, if he will ever stop being utterly amazed by the sight that stands before his eyes. Even in times like this – times where Albus thinks Scorpius is constantly overstepping his boundaries and is teetering on that precipice of selfishness that Yann has brought up in the past – Albus is never able to not love him. To not want to stand before him all day.

And it sucks.

Scorpius readjusts his posture, propping the pile of boxes he carries on his hip instead. “I really hope your release goes well. And that your bubble pops, and you finally see that there’s so much for you out there,” he says, ending the sentence with a half-hearted glance around the world, up to the sky and then back down to the tarmac. When he looks back to Albus, there is a glint in the bright blue ocean before him. “So much that doesn’t have to be here, in London, being validated or encouraged by other people. You say you’re fighting for your dreams, but you’re still so cautious.”

Albus sighs. “Stay if you want to stay, Scorpius,” he says, the name like spice on the tip of his tongue. “Or go if you want to go. I’m not trying to dictate your life, I never have. So please stop doing exactly that to me.”

“I just want the best for you,” Scorpius reiterates. He chances a step forwards, drawing them both closer together. Albus feels the pull, the almost magnetic force that exists between their two souls, all but forcing them to remain in each other’s orbits.

“I know,” Albus says in a dulcet and quiet way. In a way where the buzz before them greatly outweighs the volume of the words he speaks. “And I appreciate it, a lot. You can want something, but you can’t force it upon me. I’m trying my best – and maybe I’ll come to the same conclusion as you at some point – but I’m trying. Isn’t that the most important thing?”

Someone slams a van door from across the way. Scorpius blinks and says, “Yeah,” softly, sensitively. Lovingly. “It is. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Albus murmurs, pocketing the keys. “I forgive you. I love you.”

“Me, too,” (forgive or love, Albus thinks?) “I always will.”

⚡

To grow up alongside someone brings with it a very specific kind of love. The sort of love where you look at them in their moments of pride and think back to the parts of their life where they were nothing but the building blocks of this version they are now. To look at them and think wow, look where you started, and look where you are now.

(When we were very young, and now we are six.)

Albus feels immeasurably lucky to have been born at the same time as Rose, to have been given the gift of a life-long friend from the second he became alive. He’s seen photos in albums at his grandparents’ house of his mother and Aunt, heavily pregnant at the same time, and sometimes it doesn’t even register that it’s him and Rose in there. Two iterations of themselves that had no idea what life had in store for them.

And, quite honestly, Albus has a large family. A lot of aunts and uncles, cousins, second cousins and former cousins from relationships that didn’t last the way that other ones have. And it would be a lie to say the bond is as tight with them, because life is life and sometimes your paths with people you share blood with will take you a little bit too far away from each other. But that doesn’t apply to Rose. To James. To Lily.

Albus looks at Rose now, ordering her oat milk latte at the counter and glancing at her phone every now and then when it vibrates in her hand, and he wonders what is different between them. After all, it’s not as if Lily is particularly close with Hugo – who she is very close in age to. And Albus supposes it’s because the two of them, Rose and Al, chose to be friends. They are cousins by chance, but friends by choice. When he thinks of Rose, it’s the same way he thinks of Yann and Polly and Karl. And Lily, and James. This little web of people he wants to keep with him forever, people he’s elected to love; to share his whole self with.

That is what makes her different.

Rose brushes her hands over her slacks as she sits down opposite Albus, pushing a tea towards him while cradling in her hands her latte. She looks at him, smiles, the slit in her eyebrow growing as her expressions brightens.

“Where did that come from, again?” Albus asks, gesturing to his own eyebrow.

Rose shrugs, thinks for a second. “I think…” she stars, humming into her cup. “Wasn’t it that summer with my grandparents? On my mum’s side? When I was going camping, and you, Lils and Jamie asked if you could come along, too?”

Albus clicks his fingers. “Yes! You’re right,” he says, dunking a shortbread biscuit in his drink. “Weren’t we playing with a Frisbee?”

“Yeah,” Rose laughs. “And Hugo threw it to James, then James flung it at me. And I wasn’t paying attention, I guess.”

Albus smiles. “The scar has always made you look really cool, though,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter.”

“Like your eyes.”

Albus shrugs. “Yeah. Like my eyes,” he murmurs. And he thinks of all the times people have mentioned his silly little eyes, dragging an index finger between the two of them. A conversation starter for so long and yet never seemingly enough to make people want to stay. That’s all he remembers from those earlier years; the compliments and the gasps and the happy laughter only to be replaced with nothingness the following day.

Albus looks at Rose and wonders if she understands. If she got that, too. Then he scrunches up his nose, shakes his head to himself. Because of course not. Rose has always had the personality to back up her appeal, has always been confident enough to make people fall in love with her in little ways just so they will want to stick around.

“What’s up?” Rose asks, gently throwing a sugar sachet at Albus.

“I’m just…” Albus trails off. He tears open the sachet and tips it onto a napkin, drawing patterns among the granules. Love hearts, smiley faces, that really cool S shape everyone used to doodle in their school workbooks. “Thinking of my younger self… and that makes me exceptionally sad sometimes.”

Rose frowns. “Why?” She asks. “I always thought you were the coolest kid around.”

Albus shrugs. “Because I was so unhappy. And for as much as life is giving me most of what I want right now, there’ll always be that little part of me that wishes teenage Albus had been given just a shred of the same opportunity.”

He looks out the window, at the crowds passing. Albus will never not be amazed at how easy it is to blend in with the masses out here. To step into a tidal wave and be washed out with the rest of the people charging towards their own goal, their own dream. In whatever shape it may take.

“Everything you experienced when you were younger has brought you to where you are now, though,” Rose says, always the diplomat. “Surely that makes it worth it?”

“It does. Sometimes,” Albus murmurs. “But then sometimes I, like, get reacquainted with the sort of loneliness that absorbed my entire childhood and teenage life and it just brings me back to those days. Everything was so dark back then. And when I feel like that now it just about kills me, so I’ll never know how thirteen year old me got through it.”

Rose’s phone buzzes. She take it off the table and quickly answers whatever correspondence that had been. “Dakota,” she says upon looking up and noticing Albus’ gaze. “Just checking that our dinner plans are still on.”

“Oh,” Albus says. “That’s fun.”

“Indeed,” Rose smiles, clearing her throat afterwards. “I think thirteen year old you got through all that because he knew, deep down, that it wasn’t going to be forever. You always had the most foresight out of all of us. While James was knee-deep in dreams and Lily was out getting her own knees muddy in the long grass it was always you who seemed to know exactly where he was going. Two feet on the ground, always.”

“The only place I wanted to go was away.”

“And going away made you happy,” Rose says. Simple as that. “Maybe you didn’t know what you wanted from somewhere new, only that you needed it. And look at you now, hey? You shine.”

Albus tilts his head from side to side. “I guess,” he says. He drinks his tea, he looks at Rose, and for just a moment he can’t quite believe they’re both twenty-five. “I’m sorry we don’t see each other much these days.”

Someone bumps into their table, apologising profusely as they wipe up the coffee spilt near their belongings. Rose smiles, tells them it’s not a problem at all, and she waits until they’ve tinkered off out the coffee shop before speaking again.

“That’s not something you have to apologise for,” she insists. “We both knew we wouldn’t be able to be glued at the hip for the rest of our days. I think that would get extremely suffocating extremely quickly.”

“Still…”

“No, Al,” Rose says, throwing another sachet at him. “Life gets busy. Me with the firm and Dakota, you with poetry. The frequency of our meet-ups doesn’t matter because at the end of the day I know if I need you, and I call you, that you will always pick up. And you know – or at least, I hope you know – that I’d do the same thing, too.”

Albus nods. He needn’t say anything else. There is always this unspoken understanding between the two of them. Back when they were kids and they’d play in the woodlands just on the periphery of their grandparents’ house, even if one of them strayed a little too far, the other would know they’d always come back. If one went to go and grab an ice cream, the other knew they’d come back with two.

And if there was only one left? They’d definitely share the last bar.

“So Scorpius’ leaving is hitting you hard, huh?” Rose asks.

Albus blinks, “What?”

“You always used to get a little sentimental before he went off somewhere before,” she explains. “I just kind of assumed the same thing was happening here.”

And yeah. She sees right through him. Always. Albus finishes the rest of his tea, letting the still too-warm liquid burn all the way down, and when he looks back at Rose it’s as if she already knows what he’s about to say. She has, after all, seen him clearly for his entire life. She saw him in love with strangers before he’d even come out to anyone, before he himself even really knew what was going on. Sometimes Albus wonders why she bothers asking the questions when she already knows the answers herself.

(He hasn’t quite caught on to the fact that she asks because she knows he wants to give the answer anyway. To talk about it. He never really sees her as clearly as she does him.)

“I just wish I could’ve been enough,” Albus says, finally. His voice is a little shaky, perhaps because he knows he can be authentic about his emotions in front of Rose, but she has no immediate reaction to it. “To make him stay. Me, London. Everything here. We could’ve been enough, I know it.”

She drinks her latte, readjusts the collar of her shirt, and then asks, “Do you not think he feels the same way?”

“Huh?” Albus asks, preceded by a breathy, disbelieving laugh.

Rose shrugs, “I’m sure he wonders why he isn’t enough for you.”

“But he is,” Albus says, as if stating the obvious. “He knows he is.”

“Is he?”

“Of course,” his response is a little snappy, a little too defensive. Like a twig being snapped underfoot in the dead of the night, shocking and surprising even to the person wearing the boots. “He’s the one who keeps choosing to leave.”

Rose shakes her head; Albus seems to forget that she had known Scorpius long before him. “Why does the definition of ‘enough’ have to come from your perspective all the time, Al?” She asks. Not in a cruel way, nor in an interrogative way. Just in a way someone sounds when they really want to know what’s going on. Someone who is confused. “Think about it for a second. He told you when you met him that he dreams of travelling, of going and being a fieldwork technician. And you supported that, and you loved him in spite of it–”

“I love him because of it,” Albus corrects, to which Rose sighs.

“Not enough to shape yourself into his dreams,” she continues. She flicks a speck of dust off her trousers, and when she looks back up at him he feels, all at once, like he’s in court. “The parameters of ‘enough’ have always been this: you, him, and London. And it’s always been on his shoulders to fit into those unrealistic boundaries. What about him? Why aren’t his dreams enough for you?”

Albus has never thought of it before. The two of them, Scorp and Rosie, at Law Society socials, at balls that Albus hadn’t been invited to. Quiz nights, freshers parties. Building a friendship so strong that when they bumped into each other years later they’d fallen back together as if nothing had ever changed. Albus thinks of little moments from the very first night; of Rose holding Scorpius’ hand as she brought him into the room, of her sitting at the foot of his chair to console and support him as he worked through the motions of a broken engagement. Of this secret friendship that Albus has never been privy to, because it was never something he belonged in.

For however much Albus loves Scorpius, in whatever way it is, Rose was always there first.

“I don’t know what you mean, Rose,” Albus says, finally. Lying, as always.

She rolls her eyes. “Yes, Al. Yes you do,” she corrects, setting her empty cup on a coaster when she’s done. “You both have your head in the clouds, and it’s perfect. You have dreams and desires and you loved each other and encouraged each other on the journey to achieving those dreams. Until those dreams got in the way of each other. Your dreams and your wants have always been non-negotiable, and in return he’s had to sacrifice his own ambitions time and time again. And he did it happily.”

“Rosie…”

Rose ignores him, continues anyway with a cutting declaration, “You’re always asking how could he leave me,” to which Albus winces, for so vividly can he hear those words resounding in his own voice. “When I think the question you really need to look at is why won’t I go?”

A hypothetical pin drops, and for a moment there is nothing. There is only the whistle of the milk steamer, the clattering of spoons against mugs and change against the cash register. Warm bubbles of conversations occurring all around them. But for Albus, there is nothing. For what is he meant to say in response to that? There aren’t words for it.

Rose clears her throat. “That’s all,” she murmurs, snapping out of lawyer-mode as if it’s a skin she can shed. “I just… I’ve always wondered why.”

“I don’t have the answer for that.”

“I can tell,” she says, smiling. “But perhaps that’s because there isn’t a reason why. There’s nothing holding you back except for yourself.”

Albus slumps back against the sofa cushions, digging the heel of his hands into his eyes. “Ugh,” he mutters, remaining still for a moment as he urges his tears to hold themselves hostage until he is alone in his flat. “I wish you weren’t a lawyer sometimes.”

“And, sometimes, I wish you weren’t a poet,” Rose says. She is warmth and comfort once again, returning to the shadow of a person he has always known, always loved, for his whole life. “If you spent less time in fantasy and more time with your feet on the ground I’m sure you’d come to conclusions at the same speed the rest of us do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Rose shrugs, taking her phone back out her pocket as it buzzes once more. “You’ll figure it out eventually,” she says, tapping away happily at the screen. “Just give it a few days.”

⚡

a rose by any other name would smell as sweet;

a touch is a touch is a confirmation of love

which not even death could defeat.

i wake each day and watch a new petal upon your complexion bloom

into a colour i do not think i have seen before

and for whichever room you enter, you brighten.

there is a depth within you that i cannot decipher,

nor can you, i think.

there is a wonder i wander upon each time i see your face

and i hope i can keep discovering you

for all my life; for all the days i am yet to remember.

⚡

The Last Supper has never been Albus’ favourite Leonardo work (he’s more of a Bacchus person), but sitting around the coffee table in Karl and Scorpius’ flat, plates of pasta before them, Albus thinks he’s uncovering a newfound appreciation for it. For the details in the expression of the Apostles who are all having violently different reactions to Jesus’ declaration of his upcoming betrayal. Judas holding a little bag, perhaps full of silver given to him as payment, Jesus sitting proud and defiant in the centre.

Albus looks to Scorpius – holding in his palm the Torc ring gift from Albus – and he feels the all too familiar burn in his stomach.

Dinner is going down a treat, and while they eat it’s as if every single one of them forgets that in less than twelve hours Scorpius will be gone. Albus thinks the betrayal in their Last Supper is that of Scorpius separating them. Perhaps it’s a childish thought, something he should’ve matured out of long ago, but Albus thinks the six of them are meant to be together forever. There is electricity between them. This thing works. Albus hates the thought of it burning out, of their circuit being broken.

But then he looks at Scorpius, laughing while in conversation with Yann, and he scolds himself for thinking of it as betrayal. Perhaps he is the one doing the betraying; the one to think so selfishly, the one who should be clutching the bag of silver. Albus isn’t sure.

He’s just so confused.

“This is so good, Al,” Polly says, swiping over her mouth with a napkin. “I miss the times when you would cook for me every single day. I don’t know what secret ingredients you use but nothing we make ever tastes quite this good.”

Albus shrugs, watching as Polly leans over and steals a piece of pasta from Yann’s plate. Yann kisses her cheek, dipping his finger in the sauce before drawing a love heart on her temple in two easy thumb swipes. “I have no secret ingredient,” he says. “It’s just me, and my grandmother’s old recipes.”

“I like your food best because it’s pretty much the only meals I can eat without worrying I’m going to end up in the hospital,” Karl says, happily serving himself a few more spoonfuls. “I don’t know how you do it, though. Every recipe book I read says you need onions, carrots and celery to start with.”

“Well, that’s for a traditional mirepoix,” Albus says, dragging his spoon around the circumference of his bowl. “I usually replace it with mushrooms or just double up the quantity of carrots.”

“In another life I’m sure you are a chef,” Yann says.

Albus smiles, shrugs. He wets his lips with lemonade and stretches out the muscles in his neck. “Perhaps. I don’t care to find out, though. I prefer this life the most,” he says, and as he looks around the group the only one who meets his eye is Scorpius.

Freshly showered, hair fluffy, cheeks a little red. Wearing the old faithful lavender jumper. Albus can’t quite recall when he’d handed ownership of the jumper back to Scorpius, all he knows is he sees it very frequently these days.

“Thank you for offering to cook, Albus,” Scorpius says, and Albus finds himself unable to breathe. “And, like… all of you. Thank you for coming round.”

Polly rolls her eyes. “Why wouldn’t we come around?” She asks. “As if any of us have anywhere else we’d rather be right now.”

“Besides,” Rose starts up, swiping a piece of garlic bread in the pool of leftover sauce collecting in the bottom of her bowl. “We have to look at you long enough to remember what you look like. Can’t have us forgetting how your face looks when you smile.”

And to that, Scorpius crumbles. Tears in his eyes, head in his hands. And all of them are taken aback, even Albus. Because this is Scorpius, and Scorpius never cries. Albus can count on one hand the amount of times he’s seen a tear in Scorpius’ eye, and he isn’t sure he’s even seen Scorpius bawl before. Never when he would leave on work trips, not even when they broke up. Perhaps he cries in private, but he very rarely does in front of them.

And not one of them seems to know what to do. Not at first, anyway. They just look at each other, then back to Scorpius, then around the table again, and it isn’t until Albus make the first move that it feels like any of them breathe.

For Albus is there, crawling around the circumference of the table to wrap his arms around Scorpius, to pull him into his side. And Scorpius bends to the wind of Albus’ willow, hiding right in the crook of his neck. He’s all geranium and honey and peppermint toothpaste, and as Albus kisses the side of Scorpius’ head he finds himself fighting back his own emotions.

“Hey, hey,” Albus murmurs, calloused fingertips catching in the knit of Scorpius' jumper. “You’re fine. It’s fine, S. What’s up?”

Scorpius doesn’t answer for a while, and Albus doesn’t push him. He watches Karl stand up and go to the kitchen, filling a glass with water. He picks up the tissue box, too, coming to rest on Scorpius’ other side when he returns. Water glass in front of Scorpius, tissue box in Karl’s hands.

And Albus thinks for a moment that this is necessary. It’s purgatory. It’s Scorpius coming to the realisation the rest of them have been waiting upon for weeks. The momentousness of it all. The finality.

At long last Scorpius retracts his head from Albus’ shoulder, though he stays as close to his side as possible. Albus’ arm is wound around Scorpius’ shoulder, even as Scorpius leans to the table to grab the glass of water, to take a tissue from the box and push it against his eyes.

Scorpius clears his throat. His lips are cherry red as he says, finally, “I just don’t want this part to end,” quietly and delicately. Like the sweetest song.

“What part?” Karl asks. He has a hand on Scorpius’ knee, and Yann has a hand on Karl’s shoulder with the other one holding Polly, who has her legs tossed over Rose’s lap. They’re a complete circuit, a live wire. Every single one of them.

Scorpius looks around the group. When he blinks his waterline glistens, and Albus wishes he could take all of his sorrow and wish it away. Load it in a bottle and set it loose in the ocean to drift far, far to a shore of some distant land. “The part where we’re all together. We’re like… sewn to each other at the seams. I feel like the tapestry is being torn apart.”

“Nothing is going to change except for the distance,” Yann says, drawing Albus’ attention with a small sniff. “You can’t get rid of us that easily.”

Scorpius stifles a laugh, his body shaking with the sound. His shoulder is pressed right against Albus’ chest, and he imagines his heart beat is noticeable as it pulses, as it sends vibrations across, and through, Scorpius. “I know… it’s just,” he starts, he sighs, he scratches the bridge of his nose. “The last three years of my life have been the best of my life. I don’t know how I lived without all of you. Sometimes I wish we could time travel back and start it all over again.”

Rose reaches over for a tissue for herself. “Have you had too much wine?” She asks, catching teardrops before they have the chance to glide down her cheeks. “You were never this emotional when you’ve travelled before.”

“I think I knew deep down that those past attempts were never going to work out,” Scorpius murmurs, to which Albus stills. (Why let me break up with you if you knew you’d be coming home?) “But this one is different. I’m almost certain I’m not going to be coming back.”

That sentence, perhaps, settles it. It isn’t as if Scorpius is saying something life-changing, a revelation none of them have thought of before. But something is different now, hearing Scorpius say it. Hearing him admit to the changes that are about to happen.

It’s like when a room full of people know someone is in love, and yet the individual hasn’t quite come to that realisation yet. And everyone is standing there waiting, watching, seeing the little trembles of their face as they look at the subject of their adoration. The way their eyes soften, their lips turn. The way their mouth drops as they think, oh, and they come to stand side by side with the rest of their friends as they bask in the truth of their love.

All of them have known Scorpius is going, and all of them have known, too, that this one is different. But for Scorpius to catch up, to stand alongside them at the precipice. Well… that just hits a little different.

“Well… then we’ll just have to come and see you then, won’t we?” Karl says, leaning over to kiss Scorpius’ temple.

Scorpius smiles at him. In his eyes live words he will never be able to say, gratitude to Karl and love and joy and everything else. “I’ve never felt so safe and loved by anyone before,” he says, making sure to look at every single one of them. “So, like, before I make myself even more emotional, thank you, I guess? For giving me the time of my life, even when I really didn’t deserve it.”

“You always deserve it,” Albus says, perhaps a little too quickly. “You deserve nothing but happiness.”

Scorpius looks at him, and Albus looks right back. He will never tire of the sight of him. It’s like seeing Ophelia for the first time. Like reading Middlemarch and getting to the chapter where Will sees Dorothea in Rome. He will never, ever tire of it.

“God, you’ve definitely had too much wine,” Polly says, scrunching up a napkin to toss at Scorpius. “You’re gonna make me cry, Greengrass.”

Scorpius laughs properly for the first time, and with the motion he sits back up. Albus rocks back onto his knees, resting and settling. He still doesn’t move back to his original spot, nor do any of them dare break the chain connecting them all. “Sorry!” He says. “I’m just so overcome with love. Like, what the fuck. I have the five best friends in the entire world. If only everyone could be so lucky.”

“I know,” Rose says, topping up her wine glass. “How lucky we are, truly. To have two families. The one we were born with and the one we’ve chosen here.”

“I’d choose you all any day of the week,” Albus says. His blinks come more rapidly, fighting back what he knows is brewing in his mind. “Over and over, in every version of my life. I’m sure we found each other in the past, and we’ll find each other in the future, too.”

Yann is the first to hold up his glass. “To life, to friends, to Scorpius,” he says, and everyone holds up their glasses, too. Lemonade glasses, wine glasses, water glass. “To us.”

For once they were very young, and now - forever - they are six.

⚡

Albus gets back home late. He intended to go straight to the bedroom, straight to sleep, but plans change, and here he finds himself standing at the kitchen window staring blearily into the late night lights of London, looking vaguely in the direction of the Shard, way in the distance.

He thinks of London, and of France, and of Scorpius, and of everything else he has. The things he can hold – like books, clothes, the hands of people he loves – and the things he can’t. Like love, and happiness, and the sure knowledge that there are people out there who he would die for and who would die for him in return.

In some part of his brain Albus is coming to terms with the fact that when he wakes in the morning his life will change dramatically. And that he’s on the verge of turning a corner towards a destination he isn’t entirely familiar with, but one he knows in his soul he should be excited about.

But how is he ever to be excited about a destination within which Scorpius Malfoy doesn’t have a permanent residence? Albus has tried endlessly over the last couple of weeks to create a version of his life where he can live without Scorpius, where he can begin to hold the things and people he loves in his heart rather than needing them in his immediate vision. And perhaps he’s getting there with certain aspects, but Scorpius seems to be a non-negotiable in his mind.

Albus looks out at London and it’s as if the city screams Scorpius’ name. Though Albus has been here long before he knew Scorpius, and will likely remain here long afterwards, there is still something in the heartbeat of the city that spells out the name of a starsign with every single thrum. There are parts that will always be Albus’, of course, and parts that belong to Karl and Rose and Yann and Polly, but there is more of it that will always come to his mind in shades of blonde and gold and wisps of sandpaper and honey. Geranium.

For to be young and to fall in love in a place with so much wonder is something that can never be written over. It forges itself as folklore, as history. Love mythologises itself until it becomes something like truth, and Albus’ truth is simply that: he loves London, and he loves Scorpius. And when two paths interlock as intently as those two do, the lines become inseparable. They tangle until they appear to the naked eye as one single red thread of fate.

Albus doesn’t think that is something he can unlearn.

He turns away from London, from his tiny little window in his tiny little flat, and he takes himself to bed. One dream away from waking up to a life that one only existed in that place between consciousness and not; a place where he thought he could never be.

⚡

ICE mum: Happy Publication day sweetheart Xx

younger sibling: congrats al – so proud of you!! :-)

older sibling: smashed it albus :)

Astoria GM: Pre-order arrived! Can’t wait to read it. D and I are proud of you.

greengrass♡: happy publication day!

greengrass♡: was I the first to message??

greengrass♡: my mum definitely got there before me didn’t she

greengrass♡: wish I could be there later x a million sorry’s will never be enough I know. see you in a bit

⚡

They can’t make it to the airport. Albus has a reading at a local indie bookshop to celebrate the publication and, timewise, the lot of them would be cutting it a bit fine if they travelled with Scorpius over to Stanstead. And so they walk him to the Underground station, where the two groups will be taking two trains in two opposite directions when the time comes.

Albus carries Scorpius’ suitcase down the stairs, knocking it into a couple of people’s knees on the way, while Yann follows up the rear with what will be Scorpius’ carry-on luggage. Watching Scorpius meticulously pick what items to condense his life into as he starts afresh in Brittany had been a curious activity, though he had to look away when he saw him packing a copy of Middlemarch and John Halifax, Gentleman.

Then they’re on the platform, and they’re standing there in a little gaggle, and Albus is grateful they aren’t travelling in rush hour because they’d look like fools to any passing traffic. They’ve already said their goodbyes, of course, and Albus is pretty sure most of what needed to be said between them all had been delivered during their last supper. So now they stand, and they wait, and the thrum of trains above and below occupies the silence while they work out where to go from here.

How to take that step to a different life, a life where they’re on different tracks. A life where Scorpius isn’t going to bumble into a room with a book about bronze and try to enlighten everyone with facts they really rather don’t care about.

“I can’t do this, I’m sorry. I’m terrible at goodbyes,” Polly says, acting as the first to go and break the distance and hug him. On her tiptoes, arms flung around his neck. Scorpius holds her tightly, as if trying to compress her, and Albus isn’t sure he’s going to make it through this train of farewells. “I love you so much, and I’m so happy that you’re doing what makes you happy. Now get out of my face before you make me cry.”

And then she kisses his cheek. And then she’s finished. Polly scuttles off around the corner to the platform they’re heading to, and Albus has barely had chance to look back to Scorpius before Yann is heading up next.

“I love you, man,” Yann says. He hugs Scorpius so tightly he lifts him into the air for a moment or two, and the two of them laugh when they separate. “Tout est bien qui finit bien.”

Rose and Karl go up quickly after. Rose reacts the way Albus expected her to, with not too much emotion. She has, after all, gone without Scorpius for an extended period of time in the past, and fate still brought the two of them back together. Albus wonders if she’s watching the rest of them with humour in her heart, finding amusement in the dramatics of it all.

“Love you, Rosie Posie,” Scorpius says. He kisses her cheek, squeezes her hand, then turns his attention to Karl. “Come here.”

They hug, quite intensely. And in the hug burns brightly the bond they’ve built as roommates. Albus knows himself just how close you can become with someone you share a space with. How your routines begin to align, how the person you live with crawls their way into your subconscious. Albus wonders how many times Scorpius picked up a bag of flour from the corner shop having seen that Karl was running low. How many times they’d used each other’s shower gel knowing that, really, the property is communal. It’s a special kind of bond, especially when you share a wall with one another.

Albus doesn’t think the next roommate will have such an impact; he’s pretty sure everyone else will agree with him, too.

“See you soon, Scorp,” Karl says, gently squeezing Scorpius’ cheek. “Let me know when you get there safely, okay?”

“Of course,” Scorpius says. “I love you. Thank you for letting me live with you, even when you barely knew me.”

Karl shrugs. Smiles. “Thank you for saying yes,” he says. “Even when you barely knew me.”

And then Karl walks off, too, gently patting Albus on the back as they cross paths. Then it’s just the two of them – Albus and Scorpius – on this endless Tube platform. And it feels different to all the departures in the past, the times in airports when they’d stared at each other and said goodbye and done the whole motion over and over again.

Albus looks at him and all he wants to do is kiss him. Then he sees Scorpius’ eyes flick to Albus’ lips, and he’s certain they’re both thinking the same thing.

“I don’t know what to say,” Albus says, finally.

Scorpius steps towards him, closing the gap, setting his suitcase between them. “You don’t have to say anything,” he murmurs. His cologne is heavy on his jumper, and his hair is almost exactly as it was that night on the boat. It’s as if no time has passed at all, as if time has paused when they met and they’ve been frozen in that space ever since.

“I do,” Albus insists. “I just can’t put it in to words.”

Scorpius laughs. “Ironic, given the occasion,” he says, and Albus so desperately wants him to stay. Even if just for the reading, just for a little while longer.

Albus rolls his eyes. Then he pushes the suitcase out the way, throws his arms around Scorpius’ shoulders, and hugs him. “You’re so fucking annoying, but I love you so much,” he says into the material of Scorpius’ coat. “You have made my life immeasurably better. And even if you aren’t always here in the flesh, I know you’ll continue to do so for the rest of our days.”

Scorpius’ grip around Albus’ waist tightens, lifting Albus onto his tiptoes. Albus wonders if the people around them think the two of them are lovers, and he doesn’t think he’d correct them if they said so, either. “This isn’t goodbye forever,” Scorpius assures.

“It’s the next best thing, though,” Albus says. He leans back ever so slightly, the two of them face to face, practically breathing in each other. Albus thinks he could do it and neither of them would mind, and he thinks Scorpius thinks the same thing, too.

Scorpius clears his throat, wets his lips with a swipe of his tongue. “I may not have the pleasure of being right next to you for it, but I’m so excited for this next part of your life,” he says. “You are somehow still the self-conscious, witty and wandering boy I fell in love with and the self-assured, breath-taking and brilliant one I know now; both at the same time.”

And, oh, how Albus loves this boy. As if nothing else ever matters, as if he’s never lived a life without Scorpius Malfoy. Albus thinks he would take him every single day of the week, even if they aren’t together, even if things are a little stunted and awkward. For having Scorpius, in any way and form, is better than any alternative.

Albus presses his hands to Scorpius’ cheeks, holding him a little like a precious stone. “I can’t believe you’re leaving,” he says, oh so quiet, as if it’s just the two of them. “For real this time.”

Scorpius’ smile is suddenly sad, and Albus wants to take it back. “Neither can I,” he says. “But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t ecstatic to find out what life has in store for me outside of London. It’s like… like every single day of my life in this place has been leading up to this moment, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“If someone told me, a few years ago, in that shitty bar we went to way too much, that he’d be about to move to France to do what he’s always dreamt of,” Scorpius continues, sounding so much like a dream it makes Albus nauseous. “He would not have believed you.”

“I would have, though,” Albus murmurs. “I think, deep down, I’ve always known you’re too good for this place. Even that first day, the first time you told me about archaeology, I knew. This whole thing has been inevitable.”

“If it was inevitable,” Scorpius starts, slowly. “Then why does it hurt so much?”

Albus scrunches up his nose, lets go of Scorpius’ face. “I don’t know,” he says, truthfully. “I guess it’s like watching a film adaptation of a book. You know exactly what’s coming, and yet the plot twist still makes your heart stutter a little. Love demands to be felt, as does pain.”

“You’re incredible,” Scorpius says. “There’s nobody else like you, Potter.”

“I’m glad,” Albus says. He takes Scorpius’ hand in his for a moment, the Torc ring cool as their fingers intertwine, and he kisses Scorpius’ knuckles, just because he can. “Because if you can’t find anyone else like me, then you’ll always have a reason to come back home. To us.”

“To you,” Scorpius corrects. “All of you. As long as you don’t find a replacement.”

“Never in a million dreams, Malfoy,” Albus says, pausing as the train shoots along the platform. “Never in a million dreams.”

⚡

I look at him and think it all happened so quickly.

Gosh, I muse, when did I fall in love with you?

Was it when you walked to me and kissed the corner of my mouth and whispered in a tone so sweet it almost tasted like cherries–

I’ve been waiting to see you all day?

Or was it the first time I saw you:

Champagne soft hair, ocean blue eyes?

You tell me you love me,

I pray I never get used to it.

I want every day to be like the first, I want every day to feel like the day I forgot when I fell in love with you.

Like a charge to the heart; like waking up suddenly, only soothing when you realise you’re safe.

I look at you and I wonder what I used to think the most beautiful thing in the world was in the days I didn’t know you.

A flower, a sunset.

The way the Thames curves endlessly into the distance, fiercely and fortuitously.

None of those quite compare, though.

They were always placeholders.

I look at you and think it all happened so quickly–

How in the world did we end up here?

⚡

Polly sits opposite him on the Tube. She has her elbows on her thighs, head resting in her hands, and she stares at him. Albus doesn’t look back at her to begin with, though. His eyes settle on the map above the seats, watching each stop roll by out the window, then counting them down on the map. Each little dot like a tiny ant in a bigger farm, leading the way to the centre of the universe.

He looks at her eventually, though, and that is when she smiles. Albus loves her so.

“What are you up to, gorgeous?” Polly asks, and Albus laughs quietly.

“Huh?” He says, shaking his head. “I’m up to nothing.”

Polly hums. “You are. I can see it. Brewing in that beautiful brain of yours,” she says. She reaches out across the aisle and takes Albus’ hands in hers. Her grip is warm, her touch is soothing as she smooths her fingers over the rocky expanse of his knuckles. “If you want to talk about it, you know I will always listen.”

“You always have.”

“I always will,” Polly promises.

Albus shrugs. “I’m not sure what I’m up to,” he says. “I think I’m too overwhelmed to know which way is North and which is South at the moment.”

“That’s fine,” she says. She’s beautiful, Albus thinks, no wonder Yann fell in love with her. “I’ll always guide you back home if you get lost.”

The train screeches through the tunnel, and someone walks down the aisle, separating their hands. Albus slouches back against his seat and Polly rests her head on Yann’s shoulder. Her ring shines under the tacky white glow of the lights, and her eyes harbour a similar sparkle as she looks at the reflection of her and Yann in the window.

Albus loves their love, loves that they have each other to depend on for the rest of their lives. Everyone needs someone like that, he thinks, someone to love. To trust. Someone to share your joys with, your fears with. Someone to live for. Till death parts you, Albus thinks. 

⚡

The reading takes place in a little place just West of where Polly’s studio is. His book is in the window, on little round tables, stacked high on the shelves surrounding the podium set up for him. Albus hadn’t been sure what to expect, but there are people waiting there. People who smile at him, people who catch him by the sleeve and praise his works.

Albus looks over one of their shoulders and catches Yann’s eye, who looks at him with a sort of knowing glance. I told you so kind of look. The manager of the store asks everyone to sit down, and when everyone is seated there is just one spot remaining to the left of Rose. Albus swallows thickly, fiddles with his hands, thinks about who should be there.

He’s introduced to the group and Albus is sure he blacks out. “Um,” he starts, the sound bouncing off the walls. “Hi. I’m Albus. And, um, this is my book.”

Albus holds it up, the glint of the light catching the embossed letters. There’s a little ripple of an applause, and Albus scans the crowd and counts every single copy of the book resting in people’s laps. “It’s called Counting All the Numbers I Did On You, as you probably already know,” he continues. “And I think, when I chose that title, I was stuck in some mindset that was determined to paint myself as the villain in my own life story. Because that’s what the collection is, really. It’s my life in words. There are some pieces from when I was younger, some that I wrote for university, and some new ones, of course. Mostly new ones.

“But when I was thinking about what to put in it, which to choose and which to leave behind, I just kept being drawn to the ones which are underpinned by grief, I suppose. And whenever I’m grieving something I tend to blame myself for it. My friends will be able to tell you how much I refuse to let myself just feel things. I’m always trying to validate every little emotion I have, and if I can’t come to a logical conclusion, I usually fall back to blame myself,” he says, fanning through the pages.

He sighs, settling on the page, and he reads over the lines a few times before looking back up. “I think we do a number on every single person we meet, and those numbers increase the more time we spend with them. But, as is the notion with relationships and connections, the more you love the easier it is to forgive and forget. And those numbers… they disappear. They become nothing more than a stepping stone in the path of your life. But I guess, to me, I never really forget them. Because every number you do on someone fundamentally impacts the route you take next.

“The idiom, to do a number on someone, is usually seen as vulgar. Violent. Something terrible. But I feel like that approach is just so literal, and so reductive, because pain is complicated. Life is complicated. And to do a number on someone, to knowingly inflict some sort of damage on them in one way or another, is a calculated and complex thing. You do it to people you love, the people you are in love with, and, of course, the people you don’t. And I guess…” he trails off. He looks up, settles on the empty chair. “I guess that’s what these poems are about, really. Just trying to figure out why the human condition often takes us to such dismal places. A love poem to one is a breakup poem to someone else. Everything is subjective, even things of pain.”

The words hover for a moment, then they settle. And then everyone is looking at him, waiting for him, expecting him to go on. So Albus turns to the middle of the book, brushing his finger over the deckled-edged page.

“Anyway. Enough of that,” he says with a laugh. Everyone laughs back, with him. Not at him. “Let’s get into some of those numbers.”

⚡

“Sign it for me,” Karl says, pushing the book over the table to Albus. “Please.”

Albus rolls his eyes. He takes a sip from his tea and scoots to the edge of the chair, smiling over at Karl. It’s been a while since they’ve all been in Latte! together, but it was a place that made the most sense when they’d been deciding where to go after the reading.

“This is so embarrassing, Karl,” Albus says. “You’re literally my best friend, why would you want it signed?”

“Because I’m fucking proud of you,” Karl states, throwing a sharpie over at Albus. “And also, I want people to know that I’m one of the shining stars you mention in your acknowledgements.”

Albus’ eyes roll, again. But that doesn’t stop him from taking the sharpie, turning to the title page, and scrawling his name across the lower section. He draws a couple of stars, dates it for good measure, and as he pushes it back across the table Karl places his hand on top of Albus’.

“You were great today, Al,” Karl says, to which Albus’ cheeks darken.

“He’s right, you know,” Yann adds. “You were, like… alive up there.”

“Stop,” Albus murmurs.

Polly kisses his cheek. “Never, Potter,” she says. “We love you, and we will embarrass you. And you have to take it because you love us too.”

“Love is an illusion,” Albus whines, freeing himself from Polly’s grip. “I can stop loving you if I wanted.”

“But you don’t,” Rose quips, sipping her oat milk latte, taking a bite from her vegan gingerbread man. “You’d never want that.”

And they laugh. Oh, how they laugh. Albus signs a couple more books for them, feeling less self-conscious with each copy he dates. By the end of it they all have their own edition, save for Yann who owns one of the elusive five first-print copies. Albus looks around the table, at the steam pooling out the top of their mugs, and he is struck with all the love he feels for them. Years’ worth of adoration bubbling under the surface. His best friends, his family.

But there is… something. Like the empty chair at the bookstore, like the spot at the end of the second sofa. Like everything, always, all along he can’t help but feel like something is missing, something isn’t quite right.

This is everything he’s ever dreamed of; why is he so sad?

⚡

Albus’ phone buzzes in his hand as he crosses the road and turns towards his apartment building. older sibling pulses back at him, and Albus stops just short of a phone box as he swipes to answer, holding his phone to his ear.

“Hey, Jamie,” Albus says. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” James responds, and Albus can imagine the odd expression of confusion flashing on his face for such a peculiar greeting.

“Oh,” Albus murmurs, leaning against the phone box. “Why the call?”

James scoffs from his side of the line. “Am I not allowed to call my younger brother anymore?”

“Well, no. It’s just odd. We don’t call much,” Albus states the obvious, kicking a pebble into the road. It hits a sewer grate, flicking up into the air and rolling a few more rotations before settling in the middle of the tarmacked ground.

James hums. “We should change that,” he says, and in the silence that follows Albus hears a seagull from his brothers’ side of the line.

“Okay, James,” Albus says, struggling to fight the smile on his face. No matter how old they get, how far apart they are, Albus thinks they will always teeter on the edge of bickering and not. “But seriously. What’s up? Aren’t you at a tournament right now?”

“I am. In St. Andrew’s,” James says, and ah. It clicks.

“Oh,” Albus whispers, clearing his throat to restore strength in himself. “How bizarre. Is it weird being back there? I mean… I know you go there a lot to play, but it’s the first time since… you know, right?”

There is no response for a moment. Just the sound of James breathing, his footsteps clicking as his golf shoes clatter over cobbled walkways. And Albus imagines, on the other side, all James hears is the rumbling of London traffic. An ambulance. The screeching of a bus as it comes to a halt beside a stop.

“Yeah, it’s the first,” James continues eventually. “It’s strange. I keep walking past buildings I recognise. It’s like dad is woven into the fabric of this place, even though he hasn’t been here in ages.”

Albus smiles. He can imagine that, of course. “Crazy,” he says.

“Anyway,” James sniffs, and Albus can just see him shaking his head to wise himself up. “I just walked past this sweetshop. Dixy’s Sweets – do you remember it?”

Albus stands up straight, smiling wider to nobody except for himself. “Of course!” He says, utterly elated. “Dad would take us there all the time when we visited in Half Term. You’d always get a bag of white mice and I’d always go for fizzy cola bottles. Wasn’t Lily into those herbal sweets?”

James hums. “She was. She’s always been a strange creature,” he murmurs as an offhand comment. “But, yeah. I just went in and had a look around and just the smell of the place took me back to when we were kids. Coming in here after being at the university. Sitting on the grass. Mum trying to get us to behave while we waited for dad to finish lecturing.”

“Those were fun times.”

A second ticks by. “We had a lot of fun as kids,” James declares, and Albus wouldn’t deny it even if he didn’t believe it was so. “We’re pretty lucky, don’t you think? To have so many good memories. To have parents who did so much to make sure we lived a good and happy life.”

“We are and always have been exceptionally lucky,” Albus agrees. He takes a few more steps towards his end destination, wondering if James will go on any further. However, he doesn’t, and so Albus continues to press, “But really, Jamie, what’s up?”

“Nothing,” James insists. “The shop just made me think of you. I’ve been thinking about you a lot recently, actually. I keep seeing things that remind me of you, and I keep telling myself to call or come down and see you. But life is busy, and–”

Albus cuts him off at once, James’ static-sounding voice abruptly shutting off as he silences himself to take in every word Albus says. “I get it, James. And I know you’re about to lead into an apology but you don’t need to,” he says. “Life is life. And you don’t have to be here just because I am. I could always come to you. I think… I think I’ve been too selfish over the years. Always expecting everyone to come back to me, you know?”

The words come as a surprise to Albus as much as they do James. And for a moment the two of them stand still in their respective place, on what feels like opposite sides of the universe, just pondering the enormity of it all. The truth, if there is any, to the words.

Quietly, lovingly, James says, “I’m not sure I agree,” and Albus so desperately wants to hug him. “Life has always kept you right where you are. That isn’t a bad thing.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I mean… it feels like you already know what your answer to that is,” James says, and he adds nothing more.

Albus pauses, and James doesn’t press him for a response.

“Anyway. I, um,” he continues, the background of his call once again underscored by the click clack of golf shoes on pebble stone. “I just wanted to call and see how you were and to ask if you were happy. And – oh! I walked past a bookstore earlier and they had your collection in the window. So I went in and bought a copy and told the girl at the till you were my brother, and you know what she said?”

“No,” Albus says, though the question was definitely rhetorical. “What did she say?”

James’ voice oozes sunshine as he says, “She said you have one talented brother,” in an accent Albus assumes is meant to be Scottish, but sounds a little Germanic in his brother’s non-native tongue. “And said she read the collection last night when they got stock in, and that she loves them all. You’re incredible, Al.”

Albus’ cheeks burn again, and he’s grateful for the breeze against his skin as he turns the corner to his building. “Well, gee. Thanks, Jamie,” he says, meaning every single word. “That makes me really happy.”

“I hope you stay happy for the rest of your life, Al,” James sounds sickeningly sincere, and Albus isn’t sure he’s going to make it through the rest of this day without breaking down. “I hope you stay happy, and that you keep having fun, and you get to keep experiencing things that make you write beautiful and brilliant poetry.”

“Ugh, James. You’re gonna make me cry on the phone. I’m in public, you know?”

“Where are you going?”

Albus kisses his teeth as he pushes the door open, heading over to the mail hatches to check for any deliveries. “My friends and I were in a coffee shop. I did a reading earlier today and we were just having a calm breather afterwards,” he says, holding his phone between his cheek and shoulder as he sifts through the cards and letters resting in his box. He recognises the handwriting on a couple of them, and one looks suspiciously like a credit card bill. Albus shoves that one right to the back of the pile, deciding that will be a problem for tomorrow’s self. Definitely not todays. “I’ve just walked home. And it was a very peaceful walk until you turned up.”

“Love you too, little brother,” James’ voice is half snark and half love. “I’ll leave you be. I just wanted you to know I’m thinking of you. And that I love you.”

Albus smiles. “I love you, too,” he says, and never has he ever meant those words more. “Good luck with the rest of the tournament. You know I’m always rooting for you.”

“Ditto,” James says. And then they hang up, and Albus is all by himself once more. Quiet, at last, at the end of a day that has been so loud. Loud with love, loud with grief. Loud with colours Albus didn’t even know he could see, painted in bright, beautiful strokes by the people he loves most. Technicolour dreams right before his eyes; so, so loud.

⚡

Love comes from within.

For to recognise a reddening cheek or a quivering lip as a signal of love we must have experienced something to compare it to; something to draw from it.

To love the words of another we must first have loved the words of our own;

The declaration we make to ourselves, the promises we make to support our bones on the rocky path that is life.

There is always strife, and pain, and yet through it all we endeavour to feel love.

Why?

No journey needs be made when we are to only look inside ourselves and feel it in its purest form.

It’s golden form; It’s Bronze form.

To love yourself is to guarantee the love you give others is true.

And in loving them you remind them they love themselves, too.

As I kiss you, as I hug a friend, as I smile to a sibling – I make them feel loved.

And, in turn, they love themselves;

They remember who was there at the very start, and who will be there the very end,

Nought but the bones in our body, the hearts in our chest:

Love starts from within, and from there it changes the world.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

⚡

Albus tosses his phone onto his sofa as he lets his front door fall shut behind him. He opens the window to wish in some air, tucks a copy of his book – a special edition printed by the bookshop – into a perfect nook on his bookshelf. He has four copies of it so far; the first ARC copy (which had been sent to the wrong address), a paperback bound version, the final copy, and now this special edition.

He looks to the lower shelves of his case. At the Penguin classics, at the endless editions of Middlemarch he owns. A French version, an Australian press, the first editions Rose has bought for him over the years. And Albus lets himself dream, just for a moment, fingertips dipping into the cool chill of fantasy, of the future; all the copies of his books that could be printed, of some wandering soul long down the line who sees them self reflected in Albus’ words and endeavours to collect the poems like little trinkets. To think of a reality where he could be to someone else what poetry has always been to him.

Albus peels off his shirt and substitutes it for an Augusta, Georgia jumper he’d stolen from James years in the past. The material is plush against his skin, the detergent rosy and right as he hugs his arms around himself and wonders what happens next. It’s as if this day has been all he’s worked towards for his entire life, and the final chapter is coming to a close and the book will end. He’s just waiting for the author to think up an idea for the sequel, and decidedly ignores the fact that the author is him.

Then, something odd.

With a prickling sensation on the back of his neck, he turns around. Stares at his door. He bumps into the coffee table as he walks back towards the entrance, muttering a quiet ouch to himself as his knee aches from the contact. Albus stills, chews the inside of his cheeks. He touches his hand to the doorknob and as the metal chills his fingertips, someone knocks on the other side.

And Albus, for a fleeting moment, thinks he knew this was coming all along. But it still takes his breath away as he swings the door back open and lets bright, bright sunlight into the room. There’s a suitcase on the floor, a passport tucked in his front pocket, but what Albus notices most prudently is the book in Scorpius’ hands, the thumb holding place at what Albus knows is the last poem.

“Scor–?”

“You touched my hand and now you’re all I see,” Scorpius interrupts, staring intently at the words printed before him. “Awake, in dreams, you haunt my every breath. Blue incandescent eyes that guarantee you will suffocate me until my death. You spur in me that childish giddiness, as if we are playing on a playground. I, Patroclus, and you, Dionysus. I’m drunk on your presence, I am knocked down. You are the creature with the burning sting. I know, if I let you, you’d ruin me. If I tied myself to you with some string you’d pull, and pull, until you set me free. But here’s the thing, sweet boy, who looks like the sun…”

Scorpius looks up at him, the book dangling between them like an offering. A peace treaty. A weapon of some sort, maybe. Albus bites down on his tongue, just to feel something, and he shakes his head.

“Finish it,” Albus murmurs. “Please, finish it.”

Scorpius straightens his posture, hovers his index finger over the final line. His voice is so uncharacteristically vacant, so shaky and shy, as he says, “I still want to kiss you when all’s said and done.”

The words hang for a moment, weightless. Scorpius offers the book to Albus, but Albus can’t bring himself to take it. This copy feels different. This one has Scorpius all over it, his fingerprints, the dregs of cologne rubbing off his wrist from where he’s held it all the way back from the airport. Scorpius goes to insist, but he resists. He lets his arm fall to his side, the book swaying like a pendulum between his fingers’ loose grip.

“This is it, right?” Scorpius asks; Albus loves his voice so deeply. Each note strikes deep within him, the sweetest jazz song. “My sonnet?”

Albus nods. “Your sonnet,” he repeats.

“You put my sonnet in here?”

“Yes,” Albus replies, struggling to mask his confusion. The way he wants to recoil at the interrogative tone Scorpius takes. “Why on earth wouldn’t I?”

Scorpius has no response to that. Perhaps, Albus thinks, Scorpius has only just now understood that before the sonnet was for him, it belonged to Albus first. It will, always, belong to him. The words may be for Scorpius, and they may not have manifested without him, but they are Albus’ words. Albus’ thoughts. Albus’ lived experience.

The light in the hallway flickers, and Albus comes to realise that Scorpius doesn’t intend on answering the question.

“What…” Albus manages to muster the strength to continue. “What are you doing here? You’re meant to be in France.”

Scorpius glances to his suitcase, presses a hand over the passport in his pocket. “I know,” he says. “I just… I got through security and went to go get a bottle of water and I saw your book in one of the window displays and I think, then, I finally understood why you never showed me any of it before. Because I was meant to read it in a moment when I needed it most. And I guess I… I knew I needed it there and then, so I bought the freaking book and I sat at my gate and I read through them all but then I got to this. How could I ever get on a plane after reading that?”

“It’s nothing you’ve never heard before,” Albus says. “All my poems about you are like that.”

“Not like this, Al,” Scorpius whispers. “You’d only known me three hours when you wrote that.”

“I did,” he agrees.

“How can you feel like that after three hours?”

“Because… because I guess I knew. Like you knew you needed to read my book, I knew in that moment you were it for me.”

“Why can’t I get you out of my head?” Scorpius' voice trembles on the side of begging. Desperation. Lady Macbeth wringing her hands, Blanche holding her fan.  “You just… I can’t get rid of you, no matter how hard I try. And I’ve tried. Because thinking about you makes me feel heavy with some untouched grief that I didn’t even know was possible. But every time I try to stop, you come back to me in some… some vision. Some grand, beautiful work of art.”

“Scorpius…”

“I see you in every single book of poems I walk past. In every single Celtic torc I look at. I see you when I wake, and I see you when I go to sleep. Not even my sub-conscious can let you go,” Scorpius continues, Albus' eyes drawn to the ring on his finger. “Why? I’ve gotten over plenty of people in the past and yet… you. I cannot get over you.”

“Good,” Albus says.

Scorpius blinks. “What?”

“I said good,” Albus repeats, bolder this time. “I don’t want you to get over me. And I think, deep down, you don’t want to get over me either.”

“Albus…”

“Because you love me, Scorpius,” Albus says, pressing a finger to Scorpius' chest.  “And, like… maybe I didn’t believe it before, and maybe that was a mistake, but I believe it now. I know it now. You love me, and you want me to want you to stay, and you don’t want to get over me because you and I both know it doesn’t get any better than this.”

“But we can never make it work,” Scorpius murmurs.

Albus shakes his head. His finger digs a little deeper into the material of Scorpius' jumper. “Because we’ve never played it fairly,” Albus says. “We never gave ourselves chance to work.”

“I… I don’t know what to say,” Scorpius whispers. “I don’t know what I want, what you want.”

“I don’t believe that at all, Scorpius,” Albus isn't sure where his confidence has come from, only that it bubbles right below the surface, bright red as the blood that courses through his veins. “I know you didn’t get on your plane because of me, and now here you are, standing at my door. If that isn’t the behaviour of a man who knows what he wants then I don’t know what is.”

Scorpius’ gaze drops from Albus’ eyes, and he begins to speak again, “Can I–”

Albus shakes his head, interrupts him with a defiant, “Stop asking permission,” and, then, he kisses him. He has his fingers in Scorpius’ hair and as Scorpius’ arms weave around his waist there’s the weight of the book pressing into Albus’ lower back, in the dip right at the bottom of his spine. Albus all but drowns in the intimacy between the two of them.

Nothing can ever feel as right as this, Albus thinks. There is nothing that can compare to how much of himself he wants to devote to Scorpius Malfoy. There are no words for it, for him, for them. And God knows Albus has tried to find the right sort, to string together the most beautiful words in the world in a way that can make sense of the enormity, the euphoria, of how things are when it’s good between the two of them.

And, yet, he cannot find the way.

Albus doesn’t realise Scorpius has pulled away until he’s saying, “I can’t say goodbye to you again,” so quietly Albus almost doesn’t hear it all. Scorpius presses the back of his hand to his lips, digs the heel of the same hand into his eyes, and all Albus can do is watch.

“What?” Albus asks.

“It hurts so much every time I have to do it,” tells Scorpius, readjusting his stance to rest his forehead on the door frame. What a sight they are, two halves of a whole on either side of a door trying desperately to grasp on to solid ground. “Because we’re going to have this conversation, and I don’t fucking know how it will end – but it will­ – and then I’ll have to turn around and walk out your door and we’ll have to say goodbye again and I don’t want to.”

“Scorp…”

“I don’t – I can’t,” Scorpius insists. His hand starts pressed against his temples, then against his chest, then gestures vaguely into the air. Swirling motions between the two of them to signify something that, for all his best efforts, Albus can’t quite decipher. “I can’t say goodbye to you. Every time I walk away from you it’s like I get this foggy feeling in my chest. Like I can’t breathe for a while; I’m choking on thin air. You look at me and I feel like I can do anything I want, like the world is open for me and as if there is no boundary to the wonders it holds and it’s just so electric. You are electric. But then I go and I turn around and I leave and it’s as if I’m leaving all that potential behind, with you, and I’m left simmering with this painful eagerness of unfed hope. Always wondering what if. Wondering why.”

“Scorpius.”

Scorpius shakes his head, and the book shakes in his grasp, too. “And I just… I fucking hate that our dreams can’t align because I would be nothing without you. I would probably still be in Brighton, working in my dad’s antique shop, knowing I’ve repressed the best parts of me because I was always so scared to stand up for myself. You believed in me before I believed in myself, and your one throwaway comment – that night in the bar – when you told me I could go back and do my Masters in archaeology… it changed the trajectory of everything I am,” (Albus thinks he should say it.) “And sometimes I wonder what my life would be had I not bumped into you on that stupid boat, but then I scold myself for even entertaining that thought because a life without you isn’t a life worth living; it would be a life of dullness and desolation and dissatisfaction. And I know I’m just talking too much and it’s pointless because clearly this – us – isn’t destined to work but–”

(Albus decides to say it.)

“–I want to come with you.”

“–I can’t not tell you how you mean everything to–” Scorpius stumbles over his words, his mind catching up to the rest of the world around him. He blinks, eyes wide and beautiful, and he looks Albus up and down. Looks at him as if he’s seeing him clearly for the first time in his life. “Wait. What?”

“To France. I want to come with you,” Albus repeats, and there’s a part of his brain that doesn’t recognise the voice as his own. But his heart is throbbing in his chest and his ears are ringing from the sheer want of it all, and he knows right then that the voice is his, the words are his, and he means every single one of them. “And be with you. Because, God, isn’t it meant to be that way? You and me? You just said it yourself.”

Albus thinks he can see the cogs turning, the stars aligning. As Scorpius blinks, as he holds the book to his chest, as he tries to catch his breath after coming to the end of what has quintessentially been the race of his life to catch up to Albus; Albus can see it all.

“But… London,” is what Scorpius says, first and foremost. London. “It’s you. You’ve always said you belong here.”

Bullseye. What is perhaps the true villain in the story of Albus’ life, though he will never come to that conclusion until many, many years in the future: London. This city. This beacon of everything. A place he pinned his hopes on when he was a kid and he read Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience for the first time and he decided there and then that he needed to be in the place where it happens. The place where all lost souls seem to migrate if only for the reassurance of knowing they’re surrounded by people wanting the exact same thing.

A place. Belonging.

Albus shakes his head. Reaches over and flats his palm against the back of the book pressed to Scorpius’ chest. The pages and the beautiful embossed covers acting as the only barrier between their incomplete circuit. “No,” he says, believing and trusting the defiance in his voice. “I’ve always thought I belonged here. But I don’t think that has to be true anymore. I think the place I belong is the place that makes me happiest, and if you aren’t here then London cannot serve me as a place of joy anymore.”

A free hand of Scorpius’ drags through his hair, the strands trickling off side to side to the beckoning call of gravity. Of a force pulling them back home, the same force that pulled Scorpius back here. “You don’t need to uproot your life for me,” Scorpius says. “Your friends are here, your family are here – in this country. I can’t ask that of you…”

“You’re not asking me,” Albus insists. Scorpius places his hand over Albus’ on the book, the three threads – him, his boy, the book – resting heavy on each other. “I’m telling you. If you will have me, then I want to be with you in France.”

Albus thinks Scorpius is going to kiss him again. There is a delicate lean forwards, a slight movement of his head. But he stops himself, softens his posture as his shoulders sink, as he asks, “What changed, Al?”

To which Albus smiles, nose scrunched and lips pressed firmly together in a left-tilted curve. “I don’t know,” he confesses, the sweetest sin he thinks he’s got in his soul. “It might be what you said in that car park, about my bubble bursting–”

“No, honey,” interrupts Scorpius, followed by a forward step that all but eliminates any remaining space between them. Scorpius is looking down at him, Albus is looking up; it’s an all-consuming feeling. Albus thinks the one thing he is most selfish for is Scorpius. He wants to be the one and only in the same way that Scorpius is for him. “That was a horrible thing for me to say.”

Albus shakes his head, his nose brushing against Scorpius’ as he moves. “It wasn’t, S,” he says. It is perhaps the simplest promise he’s ever spoken and the one he will keep for the rest of his days. “It was the truth. And then Rose… and Karl, and the rest of them. The last few weeks have run me dry, Scorpius, and when I think about where I want my life to go I realise the only thing preventing the future I desire from manifesting is my selfishness.”

“You are not selfish,” Scorpius insists.

“I am,” Albus refutes. He drops his hand from the book, tangles it in his own curls instead. Pulling some strands free, working through some tangles he didn’t even realise had formed. “It’s always been my way or no way, hasn’t it? Always on my terms. Always here, in this city.”

Scorpius frowns. Albus wants to kiss him. “You love this city,” Scorpius says, a touch of sadness lingering in there somewhere.

Albus clears his throat, and he thinks about the city. About Rosamond and the ducks, about what she came to the city for. If the ducks miss her in a way that she probably misses them, from wherever in the world and it’s parallels she may be. And he thinks about the way that each person comes to this place and thinks they’re going to make an impact, and that they can tame these winding roads into some sort of pattern that makes sense. Before Albus, there was Rosamond, and before her there was perhaps another person who perused their bench.

And Albus is certain there will be someone in the future who will stumble to that place, too. Who will gloss their fingers over the plaque and throw frozen peas at the webbed-footed friends who waddle before them. Because this city isn’t a place that can be changed, it all but incites change within you.

“I love the idea of this city. Of what this city did for me,” Albus says, the words molasses thick as he says them. He drags them out forcefully, as if his soul isn’t ready to accept the inevitability of the future. “I came here as a half-formed version of myself. And I found happiness here – friends for my life, a love of my life – and I cling to that because it feels safe. And I always expect other people to feel that way, too. But I’m just… I’m tired of playing it safe.”

Scorpius lifts a hand and brushes some hair out of Albus’ face. He looks at Albus’ eyes, mesmerised by them, and the softness of his touch on Albus’ skin is a sensation Albus has yearned for since the day he lost the luxury of it on that balcony.

“What if you hate it?” Albus’ breath catches in his throat at the delicacy with which Scorpius speaks. The uncertainty, the self-consciousness. For someone so headstrong, who so recently had been declaring his ecstasy at this new part of his life… it takes Albus by surprise. “What if you come with me and you hate it and you resent me and everything ends up worse than it ever has been before?”

Albus manages a small laugh. “You know that won’t happen,” he assures, hands sweeping up Scorpius’ sleeves and resting against the plushness of his lavender jumper. “You want me to come with you, Scorpius. I know you do.”

“I do,” Scorpius says, and Albus refuses to dwell on those words. I. Do. “But it frightens me knowing you’re throwing everything you’ve ever known, everything you’ve built for yourself, into the air just for me. For a boy.”

“You’re not just a boy,” Albus says, as slow as a leaf swimming dizzily along a brook. “You’re everything,”

Scorpius scratches the bridge of his nose before pressing it against Albus’. “I love you so much, Albus Potter.”

“So…” Albus murmurs, drumming his fingers over Scorpius’ heart. “Will you have me?”

“Of course,” Scorpius says. As simply and sweetly as sugar.

Albus smiles at him, asks, “I can come with you?”

“Yes,” is Scorpius’ answer. Confident, stable. “Please, come with me.”

And this time Scorpius doesn’t ask permission, and Albus smiles into a kiss that – for the first time in his little life – shivers like fireworks. Their first kiss had never been so, nor had their last. Everything until now had possessed a quality of silence, of tranquillity. Albus had been obsessed with the peacefulness of it all, how things didn’t need to be vibrant between the two of them. There needed only to be Albus and Scorpius, and the delicacy of their affection for each other.

But this… this. This is kaleidoscopic. And Albus couldn’t be more thrilled.

Scorpius rests their foreheads together as he stutters out, between some helpless laughs, “I’ve missed my plane,” before kissing Albus once, twice, thrice. Just because he can. Because he’s waited his whole life for something like Albus Severus Potter. “I have no idea where to go from here.”

“Stay,” Albus says, gently pulling Scorpius over the door frame, into the flat. Across the boundary that separated them. Into the warmth of the room, this place that has consumed so much of Albus’ solitary endeavours for the last few months. “Here, with me. Just tonight. Then we can figure it out tomorrow. Make breakfast, book new flights. Tomorrow is as good a day as any.”

Scorpius nods. Albus thinks he hears him whisper okay as he pulls his suitcase in, too. He drops his passport into the key bowl beside the door, and Albus watches with wonder as Scorpius peruses every inch of the room. Looks at him as if he can’t quite believe he’s here. “You still make the best scrambled egg within a five mile radius?” Scorpius asks.

“Well, duh,” says Albus, his words accompanied with a delicious roll of his eyes. “I can’t believe you feel the need to ask.”

Albus steps over to the window and pushes it out a little wider, letting fresh new air swirl between the four walls. He goes to pick his phone up from the sofa only for Scorpius to catch his hand in mid-air, holding it tightly, commanding attention back onto him.

“I promise it’ll be worth it,” Scorpius says. “Coming with me. Starting fresh. I’ll make it worth your while. Whatever it takes, whatever you need. It’s worth it. You’re worth it.”

Albus kisses him, rocking up on to his tiptoes to meet him halfway. “I know,” he says, a ghostly breath passing over Scorpius’ cheeks. “I trust you, with everything. For everything.”

Albus takes a step back and looks once more at this person he bumped into, by chance, all those years ago, and sees at once the face of someone who he would still, to this day, definitely let break his heart a thousand times over. Bright blue eyes, streaky white blonde hair perfectly parted just off the middle of his head and curling gorgeously around his complexion. Elegant fingers laced around Albus’, holding onto him for the rest of their days. Peachy lips glistening in the low light of the room, promising kisses Albus can almost taste for he is so familiar with them.

“Do you want some wine?” Albus asks, gesturing to the bottles clustered on the coffee table. “As you can see, I have quite a few bottles to get through.”

Scorpius laughs, nods. “Of course,” he says, crouching as he looks at the labels and flicks through the bottles. He extracts from the gaggle a specific bottle, handing it to Albus. Albus looks at the writing, doesn’t recognise the brand, and remembers how there is so much about this boy that he still doesn’t know. Even after all this time. “You can pour and I can go shower real quick? It was, um, a pretty exhausting task fleeing back here from Stanstead.”

“Sure, honey,” Albus says, sealing it, for good measure, with a kiss to his cheek. “Whatever you want. Here, I’ll hang your coat for you.”

Albus goes for the coat, but Scorpius stops him once more. He looks at the dress shirt Albus is wearing, something he’d chosen to be fancy for the bookshop audience, and traces his finger over the collar. Letting his touch transfer to skin as he skirts his fingertip over the curve to Albus’ jaw. “You’re the only person in the world I ever want to be with,” Scorpius swears, and Albus wonders how they’d gotten things so wrong in the past. For right here, right now, it all seems so simple. “For the rest of my life.”

“I believe you,” Albus says, once more holding his hands out for Scorpius’ coat. “Do you believe me?”

Scorpius smiles. “Forever and always, Albus Potter,” he says, shrugging himself out of the jacket. He folds it in half, then drapes it over his forearm. “Forever and always.”

Albus takes Scorpius’ jacket from him, hanging it up right by the front door. Scorpius picks Albus’ book up from the side table and handles it as if it’s bronze, pure treasure unearthed from some ancient site, preserved over thousands of years. The door falls shut, and Albus locks it behind him. He turns, looks Scorpius in the eye – bright blue, bold and beautiful – and he smiles. At last, Albus thinks: sunshine.