Chapter Text
"Another bloody year," Harry says moodily around a pair of stolen cigarettes, and Julian says, "Mm." That's it. That's all the conversation they need, and when it's done they simply lean there against the bricks of someone's garden wall in companionable silence, taking advantage of the cool September shade as camouflage to partake of the first sneaky smoke of the term. Harry strikes a match and cups a protective hand around it, touching the flame to each cigarette in turn and passing one to Julian before drawing deeply on his own. He fights the violent urge to cough, and lets out the breath in a slow pluming curl of grey that winds its way up in front of his face and gets whipped away by the breeze.
It's an unspoken understanding that neither of them particularly likes to smoke, so there's very little inhaling and quite a lot of carefully casual posing even though there's nobody else around to see it. An embarrassing thing to be caught doing in any other circumstances, probably, but strangely permissible with one's best friend; a sort of ritual, as solemnly observed at the start of every term as all the other ridiculous traditions the school inflicts upon its boys.
"Do you know what Mr Tompkins asked me?"
Julian's voice sounds slightly scratchy from the smoke. It's the first thing all day that makes Harry sort of want to smile; there's something almost musical about it, the rough rasp laid like a veil over the gentle lilt of his accent. "Enlighten me," he says lazily, making a 'go on' gesture in the air with his cigarette held louchely between two fingertips. "I'm sure it was tremendously witty."
"He said 'Where do you see yourself in twenty years?' Out of nowhere, no 'good morning, Beaufort-Stuart', 'how nice to see you again after this long lonely summer', nothing. In for the kill like a bloody tiger trying to get me to join his politics club."
"I hope you told him to go forth and multiply."
"Not exactly." Julian shifts against the wall, crossing one ankle over the other and nonchalantly leaning there with a sort of fluid, unconscious grace that Harry envies like fury. He has to rehearse his own insouciant slouch before the mirror to make it look genuine. "I told him I'll be living in my castle doing whatever I like, much the same as I do now but older and richer."
"Bet he was livid."
"Called me idle boy then went to bother Whittaker instead."
"That fatuous little whiner. Good luck getting him to understand anything more complex than counting to ten without looking at his hands."
Beside him, Julian breathes out a little sound that might be a laugh. "I've missed this boiling hatred for humanity. Everyone at home is so pleasant."
"Well, there'll be no shortage of it this term, I assure you." Fifth Form, Harry's older brother told him, is a nothing sort of year, the school equivalent of a Wednesday: right in the middle, too old to be one of the youngsters who can plausibly pass off rule-breaking as ignorance, but not yet granted all the privileges of Sixth Form, not as close to escape. It sounds miserable. The days seem to stretch out interminably ahead of them, like a monotonous grey motorway where all the cars are stuck at a crawl. Half term feels like it might as well be a decade away.
(Somewhere coalmine-deep inside himself, Harry knows his misery probably has a considerable amount to do with being fifteen and spending an entire summer listening to the Velvet Underground and reading Baudelaire; but never mind that.)
He smokes his cigarette down, grinding the end dead under his shoe and toeing the crushed remains off the kerb and into the gutter, and pretends not to notice there's still a good two inches of smokeable tobacco left in Julian's when he does the same.
"So where do you see yourself in twenty years?" Harry asks. It's partly jest, to see if it'll make Julian frown or roll his eyes or laugh after how aggravating he'd found the question when it came from their house master, but mostly a sudden and genuine curiosity. There are all sorts of things he's learned about Julian in the two years they've known one another – his favourite colour, bottle green, and writers, H.G. Wells and George Mackay Brown, and the number of times he managed to watch Star Wars on a single ticket by hiding behind a large potted plant when someone came in to clean up between screenings, five – but not this.
"In my castle," Julian repeats patiently. "Doing whatever I like." He laughs when Harry nudges him with his elbow, retaliating with a gentle kick of his heel against Harry's shin. "Alright. I've no idea. Is that an answer?" Harry says nothing, waiting; it feels like there's more, something Julian's putting off saying because he thinks it's strange or silly, and eventually he adds quietly, "Well. I'd quite like to fly."
"What do you mean, with wings? In a balloon? Be specific, I'm trying to visualise it."
"In planes. My grandparents were pilots. My mother too, she races gliders. Or..." He trails off again, looking unsure, and when he finishes his thought he twists it into a sort of joke as if to pretend he doesn't really mean it when Harry's sure he absolutely does. "Imagine flying into space. Or being able to work on the machines that send people into space, or the code and mathematics and maps and logistics and things. I'd like to take Carrie Fisher up there and colonise Mars."
"I expect I'll be dead," Harry says carelessly. He rather enjoys the idea of being thirty-five forever, like Mozart. "I shall be a tortured artist painting complex works of wonder in a freezing attic somewhere and I'll die of malnutrition, or some terribly romantic disease. Consumption, perhaps, or syphilis. Then in a hundred years I shall be rediscovered and hailed posthumously as a genius, and I shall live forever even though my earthly remains are rotting in an unmarked pauper's grave."
(Twenty years later Merlin will remind him of this conversation over his earpiece while he's on a mission in Monte Carlo, and Galahad will hide his face in his hands, groaning.)
"Not sure romantic is the right adjective for syphilis," Julian says, mouth curling up only on one side the way it always does when he's trying to suppress a grin.
Irrationally annoyed that his moving fantasy death is being so irreverently mocked, Harry says peevishly, "Well, I imagine it depends on the person one catches it from, doesn't it?" as he's brushing the brick-dust from the back of his jacket. "I suppose we ought to go and face the music."
"Music," Julian says grimly, "is that what they call it?"
"Shrieks of torment."
"Desperate cries of misery."
"Ugh," Harry says firmly, and goes stomping up the High Street towards their house.