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Sand was too unreliable. The report put it plainly: an impressive methodology in theory—compromised to the point of incompetence by its mercurial nature. In bold, over and over: Unreliable. Insecure. Erratic. Draco comforted himself with the belief that, in another drawer in a different department, a document with his own name likely rendered the same judgments.
Physically he was quite near the novelty. His desk overlooked the platform, almost. It stared primarily at plain brick and the archway over the underserviced public toilets, but if he leaned off the stool far enough that the wobble became near tectonic, when he was a breath away from falling, Draco could make out an edge of the very last carriage of the train.
It wasn’t much to look at. Unrelenting gray even against the bright blue of the sky, ugly angles, another accumulation of attributes he tried not to associate with himself. They weren’t alike for it to be of any use to him, anyway, it didn't really matter how close they were, how much he did or didn’t want more than anything else to go back.
He was busy, anyway. They’d discarded the sand, laid down tracks, prescribed strict regulations, and Draco, the slack face to enforce them. Twenty years in the cramped booth, the hideous gray bow tie. He checked tickets but the passengers kept them. Gaudy and flat—made to be souvenirs.
A few people left them behind. One person. But the tickets were designed to delight the dinner party havers, to fill the empty chests of middle management bureaucratic lanyard-wearers. Draco had tried to ruin the goldfoil of a few under his thumbnail but the shimmer refused to peel, magic unyielding for years. People framed them for their entryways, he thought, placed carefully into a lesser corner, corralled in modest oak to offset the obvious boast. It was a boast, though, plain and simple. Most people could only afford one trip.
It wasn’t the case for Potter. For the living embodiment of gild that refused to give, there wasn't anything he couldn't afford. Nothing he wasn’t immediately offered. The entire earth would tilt if it could, kneeling to offer it all up to him, every last thing.
So—not a surprise that he never kept the tickets. For all the things he ill-advisedly, pointlessly held tight to, he couldn't be fucked with the things. Draco's knuckles nudged his cheek up further while he watched Potter empty his pocket trying to find one. The rest of the litter in it lined up along the little shelf between them like a particularly sad family mantel.
From the fat stack of biographies, Draco might have expected a few dragon scales ripped and still dripping blood, the severed top of Pandora’s box, a stainless steel cock ring. Anything of interest, but the contents of his pocket were astonishingly regular for someone so—him. Gum wrapper. Bent paperclip. The plastic from a packet of cigarettes and then the shrunken tea kettle with a dent-bellied Black crest.
All of it glinted, but everything did under the sun’s drawnout exodus. The back of Draco's boring hands looked like miracles. His desk, the scattered stack of newspaper and his disposable coffee cup all swallowed the bright to blush fluorescence instead of color.
"Any day, now," Draco sighed.
"Sorry," Potter said. Not sounding it. Not bothering to look up, either. He finished excavating the rest of the tea set, five hundred year old hand-carved cups that he probably kept in a cardboard box before shrinking them smaller than his thumbnail and thinking nothing of dumping them in his trousers. He thought nothing of anything.
"Lovely that you can go back, but not all of us have the luxury of a clock that goes whatever direction we want. Before dinner, please, Potter. I only get the one."
His cheeks went round, eyes still locked on the filling sill. "Do you practice those?"
"What?" Draco asked.
Potter looked up. There wasn't glass between them. Draco had filed a thousand complaints by now begging for the barrier but it wouldn't have mattered. The light leaked bliss all over the backs of envelopes, lacquered the laminate, made adoring halos around Draco's raw, ruined cuticles. An obsidian partition wouldn't have done shit about Potter's eyes.
"You know."
The discarded doll, pull-string snips, Potter probably meant. The stern line Draco’s mouth made on his face; not quite strict but set like a shut gate, nothing to convey he looked up at Potter and felt the wordless churn low in him. Ciphered murk in the muscle that said: please, come in. Stay. Please, please—
"If I knew what you were talking about," Draco spoke slowly, stretching the moment like stale gum. "then I wouldn't have wasted the language to ask."
Potter’s voice had the flat, flimsy quality of paper, only curled up at a corner like it was asking to be turned over. "Wasted the language,” he repeated. “You've got an allotment of words, then? How many left?"
With a triumphant little grunt, Potter found it. Another fist-ruined ticket, crumpled to a ball, now dumped dead in front of Draco. He always brought them and he always left them behind. Draco didn't understand anything about him. After the first few years, once the pride in his punctured chest leaked empty, Draco even stopped asking to see them. What was the point? Permission, adoration, infatuation. There wasn't anything left on earth Potter didn't already have.
He kept his lips pressed in a firm line, shrugging when Potter finally looked up and laughed.
"Oh, no. That’s it? You've run out?"
Draco stared, eyes half-lidded. He didn’t allow a single muscle on his face to so much as twitch towards an emotion and kept his shoulders stiff. If he leaned forward, he could smell it: ambergris and licorice. He didn’t have to lean. He’d always favored such a heavy pour, the air exhaling earthsweet from here.
"Shit. I was hoping we'd get a chance to chat, finally. It's been such a long time." Potter slumped down on one bent elbow, his soft arm crushing the heap he'd left on the sill, spread everywhere. His voice wasn't flat at all; it was gauzy, vellum-thin but looking through to something Draco couldn't see. That sort of tease.
Potter smiled. If the biographies were to be believed, he was more than used to carrying on conversations by himself. “If you’ve run dry, then you’ve run dry, I guess. I’ll just have to come back and try again another time.”
Draco kept his face entirely still as something slippery in him whined.
Something the biographies never seemed to mention: Potter had a lazy gait. He slumped wherever he went. Walking away with wide shoulders that needed dragging toward every next horizon line, legs lagging, all of him with that heavy tendency to sink into the moment and be petulant about giving any of it up. He would linger deep enough in the present to slip into the past if he could, and he could.
He did. Almost every day, lately.
Draco banged his shin in his hurry to stand and snatch all the shit Potter had left in front of his desk. Most of it went into the bin.
—
The schedule was both a sun-sullied piece of paper mounted at his desk and a dulcet thing in Draco's brain.
Potter's train got back at 7:07, post meridiem, and the next passenger didn’t arrive until 7:19. Cleanup took the longest. Five minutes of scrubbing his knuckles with the stark-orange scentless soap drooled from the dispenser and then he'd be back at the desk. The patchy pink all over his face, skin sick with sweat, all of it explained away by the unseasonably warm start to June, if someone were to ever ask.
They never asked. And Draco failed to pull himself together after the fact, felt something crack each time, couldn’t stop from going back again to pry himself further apart. It didn’t take a court-ordered therapist to see it; Draco hadn’t ever really gotten past anything. Decades, and still. His chest that mess of terrified wings.
Draco liked things neat and reliable, documented and scrupulous, until he didn’t. Until this. Potter was too vivid to put on a page. You couldn't flatten him, couldn't ever make him any less. Draco had almost forty years of failing to do just that.
Most of Potter’s junk went into the bin. A few pieces Draco kept crushed in his fist, shut with him into the stall, curled and warming in his palm while he pushed one shoulder against the door to test the lock. Some days there was a luxurious amount of time—twenty-two minutes last week where he worked himself up to the edge, biting his lip raw but denying himself the release just because he could—but today he didn’t have the room for indulgence.
He shut his eyes, then the soft noise of the button on his trousers undone, the sigh of zipper’s mouth opening, the feel of his cock heavy in hand. Haphazard and quick, pulled out through the slit in his briefs. He groaned as his thumb found the damp spot he’d left in the silk.
He took the next heavy inhale through the fist overfull from Potter’s pocket. Almost nothing and more than enough to smother himself. Draco breathed and breathed. He stroked himself root to full, leaking head, palm dry and minutes precious, the rush fitting around his grip like a leather glove and squeezing.
Potter went whenever he wanted but time stayed stiff and stumbling in the single direction for Draco. It felt nice, like this, to wield it.
7:10. The throb in his cock was a dizzy-headed sort of pleasure, sticky with his own slick and hard and so close to an ache Draco had to push his hand against his mouth to try and smother the whine. 7:12. His mouth fell open, greedy against the ticket, plastic from the cigarettes and a gum wrapper. Sour nicotine and sugar scraping the sucked-in breath. 7:13. Such an odd, perfect blend. Together with the familiar taste of something deeper, sure and thick like the old stone of the castle or the heat between Potter’s legs.
That was it. The walls that they’d built each other under, cracked rock that refused to fall, sturdy and stricken under a sulky sunset. Potter smelled like school had, like the crumbled brick, like an ending. Like the indolent gloam that poured all over the station at the conclusion of every day.
7:14. Beneath the rest of it, Draco could smell himself.
His shoulder fell against the stall, bracing himself as the pace picked up. He fucked his fist, cock throbbing and hot and nonexistent compared to this. A ticket, the wrap from the cigarettes—Draco panted and his tongue slipped between the crease of a fold. He licked in and tasted himself. Pressed his lips flat and found himself inside the things Potter left behind, himself inside of Potter.
Ambergris and licorice, the cologne he'd been wearing since he'd been old enough to realize it was important to demand attention from every available sense. Draco wore it still. Potter had only acknowledged it the one time, and that was really Draco pinning him to the admission. It was nice to think he could still be relentless about some things, even if it were only the things that didn’t matter at all.
It would never matter: Draco would wear the same cologne every single day for the rest of his life, would wait at a station for a train that never went anywhere until he was barely a body at all, nothing but the empty dents bereft want left. He would never give this up. Now that he’d had him, somewhere, somewhen, some version of him, he would spend the rest of his life trying to. Again and for the very first time.
With the ticket between his teeth, mouth watering from Potter and the relic of himself, eyes closed and lungs brimming with the fill of them together, Draco came.
—
Post meridiem meant after midday. Draco hated the translation. Such a lazy division of a day—all that liquid, sloppy promise, for what? But then, what had it really meant to him, even when he was small? What had he bothered to make of himself with enough promise to drown in?
Potter left late the next day, 10:16 in the morning, and Draco told time in a variety of ways that didn’t bother with midday: Potter left after the second disposable cup of blunt coffee but before Draco’s elbow toppled the third.
Potter left six hours after Draco was comfortable and unconscious in bed with his back to a man who kept insisting that he wanted to make it work. Potter left five hours after Draco’s boyfriend did, though between either there wasn’t a single career aspiration to be found. Potter left just about four hours after Draco sat down in the same ticket-taking booth he’d been sitting down in for twenty years.
The measure didn’t matter. Draco had wasted a lifetime waiting for him, would squander the rest the very same way. Now he just had an assigned, uncomfortable stool to do so on.
But it was new, Potter going back every day. In the beginning it’d barely been once a year but Draco remembered the shock of seeing him show up for the train the first few times, the dropped ink of seeing his face spreading black in his belly. Now he was borderline obsessive, back almost every day, and there was the same dim spill in Draco’s stomach.
The careen towards forty brought something out of him, maybe. A grain of the same fear that weighed mountain-wide in Draco’s chest had sent Potter running for the plushest past he could find to hide in. It was a nice thought. Even Harry Potter couldn’t stand the way a mirror painted age over his face.
Six months ago Draco expected there to be something of a reprimand. The sand, the restrictions, it would count for something. There would be a memo, some impersonal bureaucratic ordinance aimed directly at Potter, to remind him that he had to at least pretend to care about the catastrophic and careless alteration of a timeline. If he’d ever gotten so much as a mumbled warning at a luncheon, Potter didn’t seem concerned.
He went every day and came back doused in the same cologne. Candy and—
“Sperm whale shit,” Draco said once, early in May, the time Potter showed back up sixty-two minutes later than the supposed end of Draco’s shift.
“What?” Too much sun, even then. Draco squinted and Potter glowed.
“Literal shit. That’s what it comes from. Sorry to be crass—”
Potter smiled like they did that all the time, smiling at each other. “No you’re not.”
“—I just thought you might be curious about the origin. It’s a nice word: ambergris. But it’s not a nice thing,” Draco swallowed, half expecting Potter to cut in again, throat tighter and drier when he stayed quiet and grinning. “Did he tell you about that? Or did you not bother asking? Have you said anything about the way he smells at all?”
The warmth on his face didn’t fade, but flickered. Potter took a long time to answer. “I haven’t.”
Smiling at each other. They probably did. Something cratered and moon-heavy sank in Draco’s chest.
With all the suffocating heat, that brutal blush ruining his face, he still couldn’t stop more from coming out of his mouth. “Well. He likes compliments, you know, absolutely melts under the slightest bit of praise. Obviously, you must know that. You’ve always known that.”
“Obviously,” Potter said. He leaned in, slumping like he did, but sure too. Like he was. Hands folded on the sill, hunched in with his bright face close. “You smell good, too.”
Whatever sank before cracked in half then, leaking something wet and needy and worse where Draco’s stomach used to be.
“Well,” Draco repeated. “Like I explained. Shit from sperm whales.”
“Huh.” Potter smiled. He sounded older every time he came back, or he was just sturdier than Draco could ever admit he’d always known. “Does your boyfriend like it? The way sperm whale shit smells?”
“Not particularly,” Draco said, the ground beginning to grow back under the soles of his shoes. Reality rooting in.
“Well,” Potter repeated.
They hadn’t talked about the cologne again, didn’t get anywhere closer to the arching neck or pale thin wrists that wore the scent and somehow called Potter back ten years, god, twenty more likely. Draco was used to hating himself but shuddering, burning jealousy for his own face was something else.
The worst part was he couldn’t remember any of it. At least, if Potter got to keep having him, any him from before, Draco should be allowed to keep the souvenir of it in his own skull now.
Potter brought cigarettes, the same brand that Draco had quit fourteen years ago, but Draco never woke up with a shining memory of Potter’s mouth when he held one out to Draco, if he made any other offer along with it. Potter came back with raw-red welts sucked into his neck and Draco couldn’t remember leaving them. Potter must have fucked him and Draco didn’t know what he felt like, hadn’t ever felt him, couldn’t get even the hazy remnant of an image while Potter had him and had him and had him.
If Draco was ever allowed to set foot on the train, he’d go back, too. After Potter quit the aurors but before he fixed his hair. Maybe earlier, maybe the Potter that showed up for their eighth year, tired and scuffed and so galvanically alive. Draco would break Potter’s nose again. He would shove his fingers into Potter’s nice mouth, smear the smile with his thumb, fill him til he choked. Four fingers, all five, until the drool rivered down Draco’s wrist. Draco would bend him in half, split him open—he’d never be able to forget it.
Once Draco was inside of him, that would be it—the blend of them together. He would never leave.
–
June marked itself in a myriad of ways. Mostly it meant sweat sinking down Draco’s spine, under his pressed shirt, the inside of his thighs in the thick uniform pants, the bow tie. Sullen summer air that didn’t quite give in but refused to leave him alone. Draco had to peel himself up from the nest of newspapers in his booth more often to face the onslaught of tourists heading to 2003, the beaches of Southern France and that lethal heatwave.
The month, this specific day, meant explaining to his boyfriend that he didn’t want a date to the dinner his parents insisted on having with him, too disinterested to summon a lie about the reason. He’d been meaning to end it for months, but Draco was lucky; his boyfriend never asked. Instead he ruined Draco’s hair by running a hand through it, wished him a happy birthday, and left to accept some invitation from some friend to somewhere on the continent for the weekend. The terms of his probation forbid Draco from visiting the past, the future, or anywhere farther than Scotland.
That explained the years-long affair, Draco’s idle fixation. Scotland. He liked the idea of being there, that he wouldn’t have to explain to anyone ever again all the obvious reasons he couldn’t move forward. It was shameless, but he couldn’t remember the last time pride had swelled his chest and that castle was the closest he could get to a train that tore backwards through the years.
He wondered if the younger version of himself ever bragged to Potter about wanting to teach, if Potter went back far enough that Draco still had the all that soon-soured hope in his voice. This was the shit Draco could remember: how he would loll his head and debate about deigning to accept a position in Charms or if it was still only Potions. He used to be that way: loud tone, anticipating a wealth of options, looking forward to anything at all.
“Happy birthday,” Potter said. Interrupting, though Draco quickly smoothed the surprise from his face. He opened his mouth to respond and then closed it. Potter’s cheeks pushed up rounder. “Were you about to say happy birthday back to me?”
“No.”
“Oh. Still plenty of words left, if you're still rationing them.”
Draco frowned. Tired before they started. “What do you want me to say?”
One shoulder hitched. “Some people might go with thank you.”
“As a birthday gift, maybe you could move along and keep from bothering me today. I’m really not in the mood.” Draco frowned. Potter wasn’t pulling anything out of his pockets, just lingering with one elbow bent along this sill.
“Which mood?”
“Whichever one comes with the ability to stand you. I haven’t found it,” Draco’s mouth wrenched. He really wasn’t in the mood. “Or I did once, I suppose, with you being something of a predator and me probably very young and vulnerable, very stupid. But I don’t remember. It didn’t manage to stick.”
Potter didn’t frown, hadn’t pulled away at all. He used to get angry when they were children. Draco was sure of it, though it was impossible to find the loosest thread of annoyance in him now. No matter what Draco tugged. “Okay. So how do we make it stick?”
Draco shut his eyes, stomach unsettled with the spreading clench Potter called out of him. Heavy and empty all at once. Potter always sounded like he was flirting, but it was a safe sort, the way Draco spoke to the barista outside of the station in the mornings. Tepid teasing warm because he’d had him before, not hot from the sort of need that never left.
What do you see in him? Draco was desperate to ask. What does he tell you, what have you said to him? Why haven’t you said it to me? How dare you, how fucking dare you have him, keep him, and I never even known how you feel—
The questions splintered and stabbed into themselves. When Draco looked up, the sharp edge of one bleeding his tongue and eager to be asked, desperate to sink into something soft, Potter was gone.
Not gone. Standing a little far away, easy face, easy in the light. One shoulder lifted and then dropped before he slipped through the bathroom door.
–
The light hummed alive when Draco flicked it on, loud and low yellow, almost enough to make Potter look homely. Human, at least. He reached around Draco to lock the door as though he’d done so a thousand times before but then didn’t do anything more with his hand.
“Well?” Draco asked. He grabbed Potter’s retreating wrist and held hard. As much bite to the grip as any of the questions grinding under his lungs.
“Well,” Potter repeated, and sounded—not nervous, but not so sturdy either. Soft like he felt, no set stone; something Draco could dig his fingers into and really feel. Have.
It wasn’t a thought to kiss him. It was a firmer thing, built before and impatient to be taken now. A memory lingering between their lips, a fastening from forever ago owed to Draco, just waiting for him to claim it. Potter groaned and Draco took that, too.
Potter stumbled when Draco wheeled them around to slam his shoulders into the door. He went easy but kissed back rough, bit Draco’s bottom lip swollen. They were pressed all along each other, the bones of their knees knocking when Draco’s leg pushed in between Potter’s to fit, to squeeze against him. Their cocks rubbed together and Potter still fought him for more. He got a hand in Draco’s hair, pulling him in closer, fingers pushing, nails dragging bright lines down his scalp.
More. They weren’t very alike but they had both been born in the yearning months of summer, both born with the same pit-gutted greed. They always wanted more.
Draco broke off breathless, already tearing at his shirt. He struggled at the collar for a moment before Potter sunk two fingers between the fabric and Draco’s skin. His grip curled and then he tugged, the hook another permanent thing waiting to be plucked out of thin air.
“Leave it on, please,” Potter laughed. “I like the bow tie.”
Draco made a noise like a dog with its mouth full.
Every day, the same stupid strip of silk at the bottom of his neck. A different boyfriend had told him once that he looked like one of the doll’s muggles fisted, pretending to speak through them. Slack wooden jaws flapping. He’d scoffed then and indulged it now, lingering the way dusk’s tongue did along Potter’s shoulders, letting Potter’s hands shape him for a while.
Hot and soft, he stroked along Draco’s jaw, kissed after everywhere he touched. The pressure of his palm increased until another noise spilled out. When Draco opened his eyes, lashes brushing Potter’s thumb, he felt full, finished and heavy. Nowhere near done.
Potter wore ratty jeans, mostly. Sometimes sweatpants the color of Draco’s eyes. The cotton clung to the outline of his cock, always thick-looking but undeniable against Draco’s hip now. Draco bit back another noise as Potter’s thumb felt over the seam of his mouth, dipping inside. Draco closed his eyes and started to suck.
Potter’s mouth was warm and close, words splashing Draco’s cheek. “How do you—ah, Draco. Fuck.”
Draco closed his teeth lightly around Potter’s thumb before he took it back. Wet and gleaming.
“How do you fuck?” Draco finished, voice raw from just the few minutes of writhing up against each other. “It can’t be chess and biscuits you keep going back for. Surely he's shown you how.”
Potter laughed. It was a nice sound. Draco chased it with his tongue, sucking at Potter’s, straining to swallow every little noise he made. Their clothes went in crazed pieces, Potter’s trousers around his ankles, one sleeve still on with the rest of his shirt around his neck, Draco’s button up gaping but the bow tie on. Both of them in their shoes and Draco unable to let go of Potter's bare ass once he’d held it. Kneading and kneading, pulling another moan from him.
“Like that, fuck,” Potter said, “yeah, god. Like that.”
“You sound like a teenager,” Draco laughed. The ages of seething was only melt in him now, a hot, loose thing. They were both laughing, the air bouncing their stomachs one against the other, Potter’s palm spread just above the waistband of Draco's pants but unmoving. Draco put a hand over his and led him. “Is that what he does for you? You get to feel young?”
“Sort of,” Potter said. The decency to sound sheepish.
“I want to know.” With his free hand, Draco fed him his fingers, Potter’s tongue flicking between the seam.
Draco pressed in and his voice came out clumsy and damp. “You will.”
He did bend him over. Potter went onto the marble easily and Draco couldn’t stop staring, couldn’t keep from marveling. Potter easy after all, Potter spread and ready, thighs parting, shivering and soft and all his. Draco watched his brows knit together in the hazy mirror, his lips pursing when he hissed at Draco’s finger at his rim, the quick breach. No resistance at all. “So easy. Does that count as two men in a day? Is that loyalty, or are you just that much of a whore?”
Potter didn’t answer. Couldn’t, had been reduced to an arching spine, one wonderful, long whine. His cheek pressed flat against the marble and the sound spilling over the countertop. Draco took his time. His own hand fucking in, his fingers curled then stretching, stuffed to one knuckle, the next. He pulled out in increments just to feel Potter’s body clench and shudder. Clutch to keep him.
He wasted most of his patience that way, sinking into the split of his fingers, wet at the ridge of his knuckles—not letting himself consider what it came from, who. It was sad. Potter dragged himself twenty years away just to let Draco fuck him. It was so sad. Draco was right here, in the same vivid living moment as him, dying to have him.
His body felt like it would rip itself open trying to get to Potter, worse now that he finally had him. Of course, always. The more he had of Potter the more he needed. It was pit-gutted greed. It was him.
His ass was thick, soft like he was, under Draco’s mean grip though he’d never had a good reason to be. Potter pushed back, hips hitching, begging. He braced himself with one hand pushed against the mirror and moaned while Draco did nothing at all. Kept him open and took more time to look, waited out the shiver singing down his spine just to watch the way his hole fluttered in the open air.
Draco lined himself up, the head of his cock slipping once against the furl, into the slick crease. They both breathed out loud. He didn’t fumble a second time. Potter took it, swallowed Draco down to the root of his dick. The sight of him like that—Draco forgot the entire idea that anything should happen next. The future frayed, the past dissolved, the present too sap-sticky to allow in the next second. He could feel his heart drumming in his cock, through every inch of his body. Potter could feel him like this. He always would.
The first slam of his body into Potter’s was hungry, the rest insatiable. Draco fucked him in short, starved thrusts and Potters fingers curled empty against the mirror. Like this, Draco had him twice: the sight below, spread open and arching up to follow the plunge of Draco’s cock—not enough, never enough—and the one above. Too much, red and wet-faced, panting. Potter had more than he should of Draco, and now Draco had him, too.
He almost managed to pull out before he came, pearl spurting inside and then over his ass in streaks, down the split of him. Drooling into the hair on his thighs. Draco wanted to eat it out of him and keep eating, to swallow every piece whole. His knees gave out and he made a stupid noise, collapsing with his face cradled between Potter’s shoulder blades, cotton covered but glowing with heat. Draco squeezed his eyes shut and pressed deeper, closer, breathing. He smelled the way he always did. The odd, perfect scent of them twisted together.
“Okay,” Potter said, eventually. Some unimportant amount of time. It was Draco’s birthday today, it was evening. June, dusk, the fifth, another train always about to arrive. Draco couldn’t imagine the breadth of a day, any attempt to measure ever meaning less than it did just then. The forward strut of time felt stalled, warm and spilled out all along him.
He pulled himself up enough to fall against the counter. His legs were shaking, the unsteadiness helped none at all by the sight of Potter fumbling his wand out to take care of the mess. He'd made his own. Smeared on the marble and spread, drying on his stomach. Draco's spent cock twitched.
Potter looked young, almost. Almost Forty and sheepish, pulling his trousers up over his ass and watching Draco in the mirror.
“I meant it. Happy birthday, and all that. Forty is a big number.”
“Only for those who struggle with anything higher than double-digits.” Draco was so pink but quite pleased with how little his voice shook.
“I forgot how mean you could be,” Potter mumbled. He was leaning hard on one hand. Pinked, too.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Draco said. He hadn't bothered to clean himself up or do more than pull his trousers slack around his waist. Patience and greed had the same effect. He wanted to keep all of it, every stiff, stale, lovely inch. “I'm much more considerate now than when I was younger.”
Potter swallowed. The jut of his throat bounced. “How do you feel about it? Your birthday, I mean.”
Draco looked up. The bow tie had been wrestled sideways. Above that, he was shining like some of the bright had been scuffed off of Potter’s face. Somewhere near his middle, not chest or stomach but the furthest well they didn’t make a word for, a ruined crack started to fill. Something crumbled and deep and parted coming back together.
“How do you think it feels? You’re not far off.”
“Age is nothing but an accusation,” Potter said. His voice sounded torn, borrowed, like he was reciting a quote from a book he’d found propped up on the back of someone’s toilet.
“Who said that?”
“You did,” Potter said. Smiling. “I mean. You will.”
“How old is he? Really.” Draco asked. Hand left spare and spread empty on the counter but close to Potter’s. He didn’t take it.
“You, you mean?”
Draco’s face didn’t change. In the mirror he was bright and satisfied, bright with that constant clench of a cliff about to erode whole into the ocean.
“I'm not sure you’re supposed to know. And I'm not really interested in that, honestly.” Draco scoffed but Potter didn’t stop. “Or, I don’t know. It’s confusing. But it just means I like you, I think. Every you.”
“He’s older,” Draco said. Finally, out loud. The dread and envy he’d held onto for years writhed, inverting itself. Just as thick but facing the other way. “How much older?”
“That wasn’t convincing enough? Every you?”
“No. Did he tell you that one, too? It’s about as romantic as an inspirational yogurt lid.”
Potter laughed. “I'm really not supposed to talk about it. But I wouldn’t mind talking about other things, y’know, if you wanted to get food or something.”
A muscle in Draco’s jaw twitched. “I’ve got a boyfriend.”
That worked, for a minute. The pleased tilt of Potter's face fell, all of him at an unsettled angle after. “You're shitting me. Still? I thought you broke up with him today.”
“Oh.” Draco felt like he was going to be sick. He was too full, brimming over. No room and still the surplus drowned in: disgust, shock, a low, loud despair. “Oh, that’s what this is? He told you to do this? I'm meant to be—what? A memory, a nice little memento for you both? A souvenir? This was for him, then, not for me, this wasn’t about—”
“Stop,” Potter said, grabbing Draco’s hand, crumpling it like he would a ticket to tomorrow. It worked. It always was impossible with Potter, and under that, Draco had always believed it might work. The panic and fury flickered in his throat, not gone but breathing with him. “That's not why—that’s not how it works. I feel like you know that.”
“I don’t know anything,” Draco hissed, meaning it so much that both of their eyebrows twitched up to hear it. Potter laughed, full-bellied. Draco breathed, blunt and a little too quick, but steadying.
Potter was still holding his hand. He squeezed it and Draco took his back. He was forty today. It was the evening, the summer, before the moon rose but after so many years and years and years. Draco would have him in the future, Draco might have him now.
“Dinner,” Potter said. “Come on, Draco. Please.”
The word strummed a nice chord in Draco’s chest.
“You’ve gone about it all backwards,” Draco said. “Begging for dinner after the shag. Now you’ve had dessert first. Now you’ve seen the end of the story and you’re trying to start in the middle—it's a terrible mess, now. It's really all wrong.”
“That's okay,” Potter shrugged.
How long until Draco got to keep him? Soaking in like the cologne, the earthsweet swallow of ambergris and licorice, was the sullen, certain understanding: it didn’t matter.
What was a measure of forever when laid sideways? The spine of it stretched long, when it was blunted or stuttered, endured or enjoyed. What did it matter how long? Draco would have him forever.
Potter smiled. “I feel like, well—we've got time.”