two souls, converging - Chapter 1 - dustyspines - Harry Potter (2024)

Chapter Text

i. monotony

Albus Potter wakes up on the second of September in his childhood bedroom. His curtains are cloud-patterned, with white and grey shapes repeating across an endless opalescent blue base. They aren’t particularly thick, and so the waning ebbs of summer sun falling over the world trickle through the fibres with ease, painting him in light streaks of gold, hitting the glass animal collection on his bookshelf to cast indistinct fragmented rainbows all over his walls. Walls which are dressed in horror film posters, lyric sheets torn from CD insert booklets, ticket stubs from football games he’s attended.

(Photo booth strips and Polaroid slips all composed of one brunette and one blonde.)

Off the handle of his wardrobe hangs a pressed pair of grey trousers, a short-sleeved blue button-up, and a blazer with the local grammar school’s logo emblazed on the front, right on the left-hand side that rests over his heart. Albus’ rucksack sits by the bedroom door, filled to the brim with history textbooks, a ratty copy of A Streetcar Named Desire, and a pocket-sized orange-coloured Spanish dictionary. He sleeps alongside a plush dragon, all red and green and a little I love Wales! patch embroidered over the pad of his left foot.

The rest of the house is peculiarly quiet, especially considering it’s a family of five who normally reside here, but for this time of month that isn’t anything out of the ordinary. Because Albus’ dad is at work, at the Ministry; his work day starts astonishingly early and Albus scarcely sees him during the working week, only occasional crossings in the kitchen in those dreary hours between dinner and bedtime. His mother is probably at work, too. In fact, if Albus had been paying attention yesterday, he would know she’d had to travel cross country to interview a Quidditch player in advance of their upcoming professional debut. His brother doesn’t live at home anymore, and his sister is waking up at Hogwarts.

Not Albus, though. You thought Albus would be at Hogwarts? Merlin, no.

Albus Potter is a Squib. Has been since the day he was born, and will be until the day he dies. And so he goes to Muggle School, preparing for a Muggle life with Muggle friends in a Muggle workplace. All while being surrounded by magic. All while being a Potter. But we can get to that can of worms later; Albus has to get himself to school.

His alarm rings again, the snooze timer having dwindled down to nothing, and from beneath his duvet, Albus withdraws his hand and taps aggressively over the top of the clock to quiet it. He sighs, sits up, and takes in the silence.

First day of his last school year; perhaps he should make some breakfast.

⚡

Albus is sitting at the kitchen table transcribing his timetable into the back of his brand new leather-bound planner when his mum Apparates into the house. She doesn’t do it in front of him, of course. At some point during the last seventeen years, his parents decided to never Apparate into the front room. Instead, they would Apparate into the entrance foyer, as if to pretend like they’d opened the front door with a key like Muggles after driving home from work, and would then walk into the kitchen.

Albus used to appreciate the thought, but now it sort of grates on him. They could at least pretend to jangle keys if they’re going to be all dramatic about things.

“Hi, sugar,” his mum says, dropping a kiss to his temple when she walks by on her route to the island. She drops her bag on top of the marble, her hair all sorts of wild and windswept, and he smiles at her. “Good day at school?”

Albus shrugs. He’s still in his uniform, save for his blazer which is hanging up in his bedroom. His tie is loosened, top shirt button undone, and his arms are prickling with goosebumps from the draught his mum has walked in with her haste movements. “I guess,” he says. “There’s a letter on the fridge for you to look at. It’s about a university information meeting next week.”

“Next week?” Ginny asks, a little frown between her eyebrows as she steps over to the fridge. “Oh, Merlin. I’m busy that day, darling. I think your dad might be, too. I’ll send an ow– letter to your grandparents and see if one of them can take you.”

Albus frowns, too. “A grandparent?”

Ginny glances over her shoulder at him. “Yeah,” she says, “Is that not okay?”

“Not really.”

“Oh.”

“It’s kind of important, mum. It’s, like, the next three years of my life. You seriously can’t make room in your schedule for one meeting?” Albus asks, trying to fight the irritation brewing beneath his skin. He feels it flaring up, the urge to scratch at his arms to make it all go away. “It’s at five o’clock. Can you not leave work early, or something?”

“Honey, that’s not how adult life works.”

“That’s how it works when James asks if you can go to one of his Quidditch games,” Albus mutters, already packing up his supplies. He folds his timetable in half and slips it into the back of his planner, sweeping his fountain pen into his pencil case, too. Look, he’s still a teenager. An objectively very poorly adjusted one, for that matter. He’s allowed to be angsty sometimes.

Ginny sighs. “Albus, that’s not fair,” she says, all hands on hips and that parental look on her face. “That’s different.”

“Yeah, I guess the rules don’t apply when it’s your favourite son.”

“Albus,” Ginny snaps. Sort of. Albus has learned throughout his life that his mum doesn’t really have the capacity to snap, despite her career as a team captain, team manager and, now, journalist. Either that or she just doesn’t have the capacity to snap at her children. “That’s spiteful. You’re twisting my hand on something I have no control over.”

“You’re making your stance on my life very clear, mum,” Albus says, slinging his rucksack over one shoulder. “Do you even realise how significant that meeting is? Who am I supposed to go to with questions about my future if you can’t even be bothered to come to the first f*cking meeting?”

“Albus Severus Potter, mind your language,” Albus can’t bring himself to look at her right now. He knows what he’ll see, anyway. He’ll see the same expression he saw when the Healers told them it was no use, that they should suspend all meetings since the reality is right there in front of them. It’ll be the exact same, only with a few more smile lines and specs of grey in her hair. “I know this is frustrating for you, but I won’t tolerate that. I will never tolerate that from you or anyone.”

“Okay,” he mutters.

Ginny scoffs. “Really? No apology?”

Albus finds it in himself to look at her. “Will you come to the meeting?”

To that, his mother has nothing to say.

“Cool,” Albus says. “No apology, indeed. I’m not hungry, by the way. You can just make enough food for you and Dad.”

He trundles upstairs after that, dropping his rucksack at the foot of his bed and tossing his books and apparatus on his desk. He sits cross-legged on his bed, looks at the window just as a rain shower passes overhead, and when he is certain that Ginny isn’t going to come upstairs after him, he cries.

ii. agony

James has always been the one who understands Albus’ life the most. Even from the very first day, when his Hogwarts letter came in the post, he didn’t open it in front of Albus. He’s never cast an accidental spell in front of his brother, either, and throughout his stint at Hogwarts the minute he got home for the holidays he left his wand in his bedroom.

Of course, Albus heard him practising magic at night as he did his homework; their bedrooms are next to each other, after all, and the main curse of living in an ancient cottage is perhaps the thinness of the walls. But, unlike with his sister and parents, Albus managed to find a way to be okay with it. It would be nothing but unrealistic to expect his brother to completely pretend like magic didn’t exist when he was at home, especially when his education and future life were on the line.

But there was something about how he tried. How he, a kid, could extend an olive branch to Albus when every adult of note in his life still seemed to struggle to find the words to use around him. After all, it’s not like Albus expected them to completely shut away that part of their life, all he really wanted was for them to try to understand his.

And James did.

While at school he would send home letters asking about Albus’ classes, asking him to send a worksheet as well as his response so James could pretend to be a clever older brother helping with homework. He would only mention magical things if Albus asked directly, occasions which became more consistent over time as they developed a bond so unbreakable Albus isn’t sure anything could snap the string that connects them. They would play Quidditch on the ground during summer, James quickly reverting back to good old football if he ever sensed in Albus a shift to sadness for what he did not have.

Because that’s what nobody else seemed to understand, Albus soon discovered. That he was grieving something. That he would be grieving it for perhaps the rest of his life. Grieving a version of your life you didn’t even know existed is something Albus finds hard to explain; because, really, how can you miss something you never even had?

It’s like a deep sadness, one with a current and a tide. Sometimes the tide is out, and you can go through life as if nothing ever happened. Each breath you take feels normal, and you move with a sense of certainty over the hurdles that you face. But, time after time, the tide turns. And when the water is ankle deep and cold it’s like it becomes the only thing you can think about. Albus would be doing his Chemistry homework, completely fine, but then the tide would turn and he’d be submerged in a body-wide chill as he realised his textbook was not, and never would be, Potions. His history book title would never be followed with Of Magic.

And perhaps it’s not that he’s grieving the magic, or grieving the life he didn’t have. He’s grieving the version of himself that he knows he would’ve been. A Potter, with Weasley blood mixed in there, too. Named after two headmasters. He had the world at his fingertips until they found out there was nothing beneath the skin at all. No magic, just Squib blood.

James got it, though. Miraculously. He got it.

“So,” James says. They’re at the bus station in the town centre, sitting beneath a halogen light as they wait for the number twenty-two bus to come and take them home. They’d just been to the cinema to see some terrible action sequel James had chosen as an excuse to get Albus out of the house. “Have you and mum made up yet?”

“No,” Albus tosses some coins between the palms of his hands, rattling them as if they are dice he’s about to throw. “I’m not apologising for what I said.”

James kisses his teeth. “Even the curse word?”

“Especially the curse word,” Albus says, to which James sighs. James crosses one leg over the other, his knee brushing against Albus’ thigh. Albus would normally shy away from something like this, but it’s James. He could never. “She never understands how much it hurts me unless I get a little aggressive with my words. Maybe if she listened to me I wouldn’t need to swear.”

“Ah, to be eighteen again.”

Albus shoves James with his shoulder. “Piss off,” he mutters. “How do you even know she and I aren’t talking?”

James shrugs, saying, “Because she told me,” as if the nonchalance of it doesn’t fill Albus with ire.

“Did she tell you why?”

“She said it’s because she and Dad have work next week and you want them to come to something at school,” he says, meticulously picking stray crumbs of popcorn from the material of his cardigan. “Is that not the whole story?”

Albus sighs, slumping in his seat. He shakes his head, stares at the starry sky and wonders whether life will be this tricky for the rest of time. “I don’t know why she still doesn’t get it,” he says, eventually. Perhaps a little quietly, for James leans forward and to the side slightly just so he can hear better. “Like… she came to every single Quidditch trial with you, and so did Dad. When you had callbacks, they went with you. I ask for them to come to one meeting and they won’t do it. What use are Grandma and gramps going to be at a meeting about Muggle university? It’s, like, the biggest change in my life and they can’t even find it in themselves to care at all.”

It’s a lot of words all in one go, Albus knows that. And for a moment they hang there in the air, a sad little garland lit from within by the deep embers of frustration Albus paints them with. Shades of blue and red and a little bit of green. Albus almost sees his words among the stars, each sentence forming a different constellation beyond the clouds. He wonders for a moment if he’s been too abrasive, if he has, finally, pushed it too far with James. His brother has always been someone he’s been confident around, someone who has always understood the ebbs and flows of Albus’ emotional state. But everyone has a breaking point; perhaps this one is James’.

It is a surprise, then, when James says, “I can come?”

Albus leans into him, head resting against his big brother’s shoulder. He takes a singular pound coin and rolls it up and down the expanse of James’ leg, skirting it around the rips in his jeans. James is only twenty but it’s as if he’s stomached a lifetime’s worth of wisdom in that brain of his.

He wants to be able to say yes and be done with it. But to say yes to the proposition wouldn’t be to tell the truth. And James is a person Albus doesn’t really lie to. At least, not lies that are believable. “I want Mum and Dad to want to be there.”

James sighs, an arm slinging itself around Albus’ shoulders. “They do, Al.”

“Not enough to make compromises,” Albus says, hushing himself when an elderly couple hobble past them. “I woke up alone on my first day last week, did she tell you about that? Not even a good luck note.”

James frowns. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Albus mutters, slightly regretting bringing it up for even the sheer memory of it stings a little. “I know they can’t take me to the gates the same way they took you, and take Lily, to the train… but a little bit of interest would be nice. Even after all this time.”

“They could take you to the gates.”

“Thanks for the reminder.”

“I’ll talk to them,” James says, clearing his throat before it. “Talk to her.”

Albus isn’t thinking when he says, “She’s always loved you more.”

“Albus… they don’t love you less because of what you are,” James says. The fact he says what instead of who burns a little as Albus processes the distinction.

“They do a really sh*tty job of showing it.”

James sighs. Again.

A bus pulls up at the stop next to them, and with a cautious gait the couple step up onto the vehicle and tap their bus passes and through the dim lights of the interior Albus can see as they hobble to the first row of seats. The husband stands to the side as his wife heads in first, and he holds out an arm to take the shopping bags from her as they both settle into the plushness of the seats.

James breaks the silence again, asking, “Why didn’t you go to the platform last week? You always go to the platform.”

Albus blinks at him but says nothing in return. He hopes he can evade this conversation if he pretends he can’t hear what James is saying, but it’s inevitable. Everything is inevitable when the two Potter boys are talking to each other.

“Oh, Merlin,” James groans, his head falling back against the plastic screen holding up the bus shelter. “What happened? Is it because of Scorpius?”

Scorpius. Just hearing the name gets his heart rate going again. Scorpius Malfoy; what are the words Albus would use to describe him to someone? Irritatingly intelligent wizard born to wealthy parents? Kid you can definitely tell is an only child because he doesn’t have the social skills to know when to stay quiet? A menagerie of all the very best qualities you could instil in a person at the scarce age of eighteen? Best friend? Person he may or may not have complicated potentially non-platonic feelings for?

Honestly, the world is his oyster when it comes to Scorpius Malfoy.

“No,” Albus snips.

“It so is,” James says, a laugh touching the tip of his tongue.

“It’s not!”

James rolls his eyes. “Have you fallen out, or something?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I’m pretty sure your friendship with him is the least complicated thing in your entire life,” James states, and Albus can’t even refute it because it’s true. In a world of terrible complexities, it is only Scorpius that seems to make sense. “You were fine on holiday last month.”

“Let’s not talk about the holiday,” Albus says, perhaps a little too quickly. “How’s work?”

“You don’t care about my job, Albus,” James says, and Albus can’t deny that, either. It’s one of the grievances of his life, really, how James can so easily extend empathy and interest towards Albus’ life but Albus finds it so hard to do the same back. It’s an olive branch he can’t muster up the courage to hand over. “Also, as if I’m going to bring that up when you’re on the edge of a hypothetical cliff right now.”

Albus rolls his eyes. “How did you know I didn’t go to the platform?”

“Lily told me,” James starts, then holds himself in a pause for a moment. He ekes his shoulders up into a half shrug, scrunches his nose, then ends with a shake of his head. “Well, she wrote it in a letter.”

“Of course she did,” Albus mutters, fighting the urge to roll his eyes yet again. He, instead, chooses to fiddle with a loose thread from one of the rips in James’ jeans. He pulls the thread all the way taut, twisting it between his fingers until it coils into a pigtail. “All she ever does is grass on me. She needs to get a hobby. Aren’t there supposed to be fun magical clubs for annoying witches up in that stupid Scottish castle of yours?”

James shoves him in a way Albus is choosing to interpret as playful. “You’re so mean to her,” he says. “She’s your sister.”

“And I’m her brother,” Albus retorts. “That’s never stopped her from being spiteful every day she’s at home.”

“Oh, my God. Albus, what the hell happened–”

“Nothing!” Albus snaps, standing as if to emphasise the dramatics of the whole thing. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and kicks at a pebble, watching as it skitters all the way along the curb before tittering off the edge and falling to its demise down a sewer grate. “Get off my back.”

“Have you spoken to him since we got back home?”

Albus sighs. “It’s complicated, James,” he repeats. Reiterates. “It would require a very long debrief of many things in my life that you are not aware of and I am deeply not in the mind space to handle that right now.”

What Albus says seems to have some weight. Which makes sense, Albus thinks. There is very rarely anything that Albus refuses to talk to James about. They’re the sort of siblings who are unfiltered around each other, perhaps because their social lives have never interwoven in any way, shape, or form. Albus knows James isn’t as close to Lily. For several reasons, of course, there is a slightly larger age gap between them and the sort of relationship an older brother can have with a significantly younger sister is very different to that of two very similarly aged brothers.

But Albus suspects it’s because of Hogwarts, too. It’s hard to keep secrets when your school year is comprised of a very select variety of people. The six degrees of separation perhaps apply to that castle more so than any other place in existence. How could we be related, I hear you ask? Well, you are best friends with this person, whose mother is married to this individual, who is second cousins with my aunt who attended Hogwarts the same year as the person their best friend married did. The lines get a little blurred when you’re dealing with a dying species such as wizards and witches.

(Especially if the magic is wearing thin and not being passed along to all offspring, Albus thinks. Though he doesn’t ever vocalise it. He’s the only Squib any of them know of, after all.)

“He’s your best friend, Albus.”

Albus scoffs, and what he says next is in contention for the boldest lie he’s ever dared speak before James, so bold he doesn’t even feel bad about it. “He’s a convenient presence to have around during the Hogwarts holiday months.”

“That’s not it at all and you know it.”

Their conversation is interrupted by the approaching growl of the bus. The headlights are the awful sort of LED that beam brighter than necessary, and Albus shelters his eyes from the intensity of them as he straightens his back and unearths the rest of the coins from the bottom of his trouser pocket.

“The bus is here,” he states the obvious, looking at James. “Do you have change or do you need me to pay?”

It is James who rolls his eyes this time, holding his hand out, palm-up, for Albus to toss some coins into. “You are the bane of my life sometimes. I swear if I didn’t feel such brotherly love towards you I’d shove you into that lamppost right there.”

“That’s an act of violence, James Sirius,” Albus says, smiling at the driver as they step onto the bus. He tilts his hand over the metal post-box-like contraption hanging off the side, letting the various coins trickle in. The driver waits for the value to pop up on his screen, then taps an indistinguishable button to print Albus a ticket. “I would call the police on you.”

James follows suit, and they sit right on the back row, opposite each other, as the bus rattles them all the way home.

⚡

⚡

December closes in on them very suddenly it’s as if Albus blinked and the lingering threads of autumn all but disappeared behind a magician’s cloak. It’s the heaviness with which the cloud cover hangs in the air, occasional drops of white extracting themselves from the clouds to journey to the great ground below. They build up a thin layer of frost over every single spec of space available to them, burrowing deep into potholes on the roads and hiding in plain sight in patches of black ice over the pavements.

Albus wakes up every morning to a cloudy condensation layer on his window, and each time he peels back his curtains he wonders if he should mention it to his parents, perhaps suggesting they get it looked at. But he never ends up doing it; he knows, or thinks he knows, that they’d just wave their wands and fix it that way. And it’s like he has infrared vision when it comes to that. Like it leaves a sticky residue wherever it’s used, or sucks the light out of whatever it has tainted.

Take the dining chairs, for example. Back when they had been kids, young kids, the three Potters had been bumbling about duelling with wooden swords. The family had not long returned from a day trip to Warwick castle where their parents had allowed them all to buy a sword and an accessory, and that is how they ended up a princess, a jester, and a king running amuck in the kitchen. And it was all fine and dandy, their imaginations bright and eclectic and almost palpable in the palms of their hands, until Lily had slipped and landed on one of the antique chairs, instantly snapping one leg. She tumbled to the ground, too, succumbing to a splinter between the index and middle finger knuckles on her left hand. To this day she still has a scar there.

Albus thought they were done for, almost certain their hats would be taken and the swords confiscated for the rest of the day. But that hadn’t happened. Their parents had rushed in, Harry tending to the wound on Lily’s hand while Ginny checked the other two were okay. James apologised at once for breaking the chair, utterances which Ginny simply brushed off, insisting the chair didn’t matter. In fact, the chair was perfectly fine, she said, tossing a wink in their direction as she took her wand from her back pocket and pointed it at the chair.

The leg reattached itself, the once crumbled joint now perfectly reassembled. Everyone else thought it was enchanting; Albus thought it completely took the charm away from the piece.

It’s snowing outside and he is sitting on that very same chair, one he has never completely trusted since it’s blind date with an unspoken spell. But the others are covered in laundry, jackets, his mum’s work bag that she had flung there earlier in the day. Albus could’ve moved it, of course, but he’d gazed at the leg that had once been broken and decided to just see.

He sits under the kitchen ceiling light incessantly tapping a pencil on the side of a flash card, and from a distance you’d think he was deep in thought about the Cuban missile crisis when he is, matter of factly, wondering why he chose to study History at A-Level.

“Hey, bud,” Albus looks up at the sound of Harry’s voice. “Isn’t it a little late for this?” he asks, gesturing to the textbooks and the multi-coloured cards and the half-empty mug of tea sitting on Albus’ left-hand side.

Harry looks a little frazzled. Well, that’s a lie, a far too generous observation. He looks very frazzled. All heavy under the eyes, cracked and polka-dot red lips from where he’s toyed at them with his teeth. His hair is slowly losing all essence of brunette as more grey streaks paint their way from root to tip. Albus often wonders what Lily thinks when she comes home for the school breaks when she sees her parents for the first time in months. He’s always known that change isn’t apparent when you see it happening in real-time – the same way you don’t really understand that your parents are growing up right alongside you, you just perceive them as being in a different chapter of life – and he only really sees it because he is a very attentive person. But for Lily it must be stark, stumbling off the Hogwarts Express and taking in a few more smile lines and a little less of an enthusiastic lift off the ground whenever they reunite with an embrace.

“Probably,” Albus says, setting his pencil down. “Isn’t your work day contracted to finish at five?”

Harry smirks. “Touché,” he says. Albus watches him pick up Ginny’s work bag, hanging it off the coat rail in the corridor. He sets his own briefcase beneath it, then fills the now-open gap on the seat with his own body. “What’s the occasion?”

Albus shrugs, a little unsettled by this whole thing. It’s not that they aren’t close, that they don’t talk, but Albus knows he’s a problem child. Knows he lives up to the middle kid mythology. “I have a history test tomorrow. A really annoying one. It’s just, like, a memory test of dates and names and all that sort of junk,” he says. For the last few hours, his vision was blurred by numbers. Now, at least, it has a person to focus on instead.

“I was terrible at history. I’d blame the teacher, he wasn’t really… of our Earth, but I was just never that into it,” Harry says, and Albus almost feels bad.

Bad for the fact they can’t just talk like normal parents and kids would. How Harry can’t really sit there and talk about his past and the things he got up to at school because all of it will always end with the realisation that it’s not the same. There will always be a cavernous gap between them, even if they walk the same parallel path which should, eventually, merge into one they will always end up further apart. Worse off.

Being terrible at history because your teacher had been a ghost who didn’t know how to modernise the approach of magical history is very different to being bad at history because every time you look at the textbook you loathe the words you are reading.

“Funny, that,” Albus summons the courage to keep going. “Since you’re, like, in it now.”

“I am?”

Albus laughs, more disbelief than humour. He tilts his head to the side and they both look at each other. Eye to eye, though they aren’t seeing the same thing. “Surely you are modern wizarding history as it’s known, right?” he asks, gesturing vaguely with the end of his ruler to the zigzag imprint on his dad’s forehead. A scar that is still there – has darkened and lightened with sunburn and age and ointments and just the very effects of living a long and complex life – though it is, now, completely botherless. “What else has happened in the last thirty years that hasn’t somewhat involved you?”

“Well, when you put it like that,” Harry says, though he never finishes the sentence. He just stands, the chair leg screeching a little on the ceramic flooring, and he points at Albus’ mug. “Fresh one?”

Albus looks at his watch. 11:32. “Sure,” he says, and it only hits him then how late it really is.

He tosses a cursory glance out the French doors leading to the conservatory. The night is a thick one, almost an opaque, dark mist settling into every crevice of the outdoor world. They have a treehouse at the bottom of the garden, one the previous owners had built and their Uncle George had helped restore when the Potters moved in here. You can usually see the ladder from here, dangling wistfully in the air like tendrils of ivy. It hovers a few centimetres above the ground, dancing back and forth whenever a gentle gust trickles past.

Tonight, though. Tonight it’s as if outside doesn’t exist.

The kettle boils and Albus looks back at his dad and there is a question on the tip of his tongue he doesn’t think he has the nerve to ask. He watches him drop a tea bag into Albus’ mug while tearing the top off a coffee sachet for his own. The water gurgles out the spout as he fills them both respectively – his own a long and narrow piece decorated with Snitches and emblazoned with the catchphrase You’re a Catch! in swooping gold and red letters, while Albus’ is a hand-painted one, from a trip he and Scorpius took to a Muggle pottery painting parlour – and the steam billows up into nothingness as the drinks brew.

Harry places the mugs down onto coasters, a creak in his bones and a grimace over his face as he sits back down and allows himself to relax. Albus doesn’t know how he did it all, how he still does. Back when he could still stomach it Albus would borrow James’ History of Magic textbooks and read over the segments about the War. Accounts of what his parents did but, mostly, the things his dad had to put up with. The spells he cast and the ones that were cast at him, the bones he broke along the way and, undoubtedly, the mental damage that will never really be repaired.

He wishes they could talk about it more, that they could be open and honest with each other. Because deep down something is tethering them together, two little boats clinging to the same shore. His dad must grieve a life with his parents, one he never got to have. A simple life going to Hogwarts and making friends with no heavy label digging into your back, floating over your head like a constant thought bubble. There is an entire version of himself he never got the chance to be; something Albus thinks isn’t too dissimilar to what’s going on here in his own mind.

“It’s almost Christmas break,” Harry says, finally. “Are you going to come to the Platform this time?”

Albus shrugs. “Dunno,” he murmurs. He peels back the wrapping of the chocolate biscuit packet he’s been snacking on all evening, teasing one out to dunk in the pool of boiling hot tea.

“You haven’t not come since Rose’s first trip out,” Harry muses, all sharp edges and deep caverns in the gauntness of his cheeks from where the overhead light fails to illuminate him properly. “What’s changed? You… you’re usually happy to go.”

Albus deadpans. A few crumbs from his biscuit tumble deep into the tea, never to be seen again, but Albus doesn’t notice because all he’s looking at is his dad, right in the face of someone who really doesn’t know him at all, it seems. It sometimes only takes a simple sentence, an off-the-cuff remark the person probably doesn’t even realise they’re saying, for an illusion to be completely shattered.

And, well. As if there was anything left to shatter, Albus supposes.

He is careful with his words, mostly. Albus simply tries to be measured in approach as he says, “I’m never happy to go, Dad. It makes me feel f*cking awful every time I get to that place and people look at me like I’m an elephant that has escaped from its zoo enclosure,” and he knows Harry gets it, that he feels bad within the depths of his bones, since he doesn’t scold Albus’ language. It’s usually their favourite thing to do, tell him off for swearing. “I go because otherwise, it makes the entire family depressed.”

Harry frowns. Then he says, “I thought you went for Scorpius?” and it knocks the wind out of Albus a little bit, the bluntness of it all.

Teens like to think they’re always scuttling about in the darkness when it comes to their parents, and there’s no denying that some things can pass completely unnoticed (see, for example, Albus’ entire mental health deterioration over the last few years), but sometimes, more often than not, they notice.

Perhaps they forget that in years gone by their parents had been doing the same sort of thing. Skirting around the edges of complicated friendships that walk a fragile line between that and more. They recognise the expression on someone’s face when they’re a little too excited to see someone or pick up on a new name being dropped more regularly in conversation.

Albus often thinks that neither Harry nor Ginny pays attention to him much; that’s not really the truth at all. They pay attention, they just may not always end up coming to the right conclusions. It’s funny business, this whole parenting thing. Nobody makes a lot of guides about raising a Squib.

“Well, yeah,” Albus says, a little surprised by the sweetness that hinges on the tip of his very own tongue. “Him, too. He’s my best friend, so of course I go for him.”

Harry nods. Albus drinks feverishly from his cup of tea. It’s coming up to midnight now, and Albus thinks he really should go to bed. It’s not as if this late-night study session will have been of any benefit in the long run. He isn’t even sure he could tell you what year this missile crisis happened at this point.

“You know we’ve never expected you to go, right?” Harry asks. It’s all a little solemn, a little laced with regret. Albus feels awful for even bringing it up. “At the beginning… yeah. I feel terrible about all of those early years. I think we failed you a lot, to be honest. It’s never been easy to know how to go about it.”

Albus scrunches up his nose. He closes his textbook, shuffling the flashcards back into some sort of order. He’s pretty sure he made them so they create a little rainbow pattern, but apparently, his hands are shaking a little bit and he is acutely aware of his dad surveying him over the rim of his age-old glasses and so, in a bid to not make the situation any worse, Albus simply gathers them into a pile and tosses them into the bottom of his school bag.

“I know you’re probably saying this intending to be relatable. Or, you know, offering an olive branch for those things that happened in the past,” Albus says, hugging the bag to his chest when everything is zipped away safely. “But it’s been even less easy for me, Dad. You didn’t know how to go about it? Yeah, I know. Because I then had to learn how to deal with it essentially on my own.”

Harry frowns. Albus notices the way his scar disappears among the wrinkles over his forehead. “I’m sorry, Albus,” his dad says, sounding terribly authentic it almost makes Albus feel bad for feeling neglected to start with. “We failed you.”

“Kinda,” Albus shrugs.

And for a moment or two there is nothing. Just the shuffling of his dad picking up the mugs and rinsing them beneath a lukewarm stream of water, setting them to the side in the drying rack while Albus hooks his bag over his shoulder and digs the heels of his hands deep into his tired eyes.

Harry hunches over the sink, staring wistfully into the garden. Albus wonders if he is seeing something Albus failed to, because when he looked through the glass it was nothing but darkness. Not even a single streetlight to provide a cursory glow over the outlines of their garden furniture.

“I’ll probably end up going,” Albus says, eventually, standing on the half-tile, half-carpeted floor divide between the kitchen and living room. He’s beneath the open archway sectioning the home into rooms, and the kitchen light is almost like a halo over his head. “I mean, aren’t we heading to the Burrow straight afterwards anyway? It makes no sense to have to come back here just to pick me up.”

Harry nods. He smiles. He says, “And you can see Scorpius,” and with it, Albus knows their conversation is complete.

“Yeah,” he says. “I can see Scorpius.”

⚡

Albus passed his history test, of course. He goes to a party the night after to celebrate with his school friends, some of whom he hasn’t really spoken to since summer, and all he can think about is the secrets none of them know of. How, really, nobody in this world truly knows him for who he is.

His parents, his teachers, his friends.

He is living this half sort of life. One side for certain people, the other side for the rest. Some of the people he dances with, the people who he lets pour him a shot even though most of them are still underage, and don’t even know his parents’ names. Don’t know what they do, where he lives. They all laugh it off as if he is some sort of mystery to be solved, one of those brooding figures not too dissimilar to Heathcliff, where he is interesting enough to endure despite his secrecy.

If he thinks hard enough, deeply enough into his mind, Albus can come up with one singular person who knows him. Only one. And he’s not in the room, he is hardly ever around, really. All things considered. Oh, he wonders, how much more that one could know if only fate had rolled Albus a different hand.

Albus downs the shot given to him; he tries to forget, but fails.

iii. hope

He’s nervous. God, he’s so nervous and it’s embarrassing.

To be nervous at the thought of seeing your best friend is perhaps the most illegal-feeling feeling in the entire world. Albus spends far too long in the family bathroom that day staring at himself, fiddling with the way his hair falls over his forehead and where along the scalp his part rests. Which is ridiculous, because who in the world is he trying to impress? Scorpius?

(Albus would scoff if you so much as suggested that, but he also wouldn’t deny it, either.)

The train back from Hogsmeade takes just under six hours, leaving at a familiar eleven o’clock, on the dot. As each hour passes Albus finds himself back in front of the mirror, or another reflective surface, all but acting like an antsy little teenager in those American high school films he watches sometimes, getting ready for prom and panicking that their skin will break out just before their date arrives.

Except there is no prom. And there is, most definitely, no date. So it’s all pointless. Absolutely pointless.

“You look the same,” James says, leaning against the doorframe during what is Albus’ third trip to the bathroom. “Like, exactly the same. The same as an hour ago and the same as a month ago.”

“Nobody asked your opinion,” Albus says. He spritzes some water between the palms of his hands and scrunches it into his hair, hoping to dial down on the frizz that’s bothering his crown at the moment. “Also, you don’t live here anymore. You don’t get to have an opinion.”

(He doesn’t go back in, though. So, take from that what you will.)

They travel to and from King’s Cross by a Portkey, and have done so since the very first trip there all those years ago with James. It had started as convenience, since shuttling all the kids and the trunks into a rental Muggle car all the way to London was just unmanageable, but it slowly dissolved into something more over time. Everything becomes something more when you have a Squib involved.

Apparation was out of the question for a host of reasons – though there are few people he trusts with it – and despite Floo powder falling next in line in terms of accessibility, Albus could never bring himself to use it. Every time he stepped up to the grate and grabbed a fistful of gritty little sediment all he could think of was that, one day, it wouldn’t work. That the powder would somehow sense the lack of magic in his blood and refuse to let him go. The flames wouldn’t burn green but would, rather, lick up his legs in vibrant stripes of orange, and Albus would drop to the floor and watch as the cuffs of his trousers crumbled into a line of ash.

All his family would be gone, and it would just be him, his trousers, and the little piles of ash.

They’re all on the platform, standing in a weird little line as the parents are talking to each other and James is talking to Uncle Ron but Albus, oh, Albus, is only thinking about how this never gets easier. Part of him can’t wait for this year to pass so he doesn’t have to come here anymore. To this cursed platform, this place his once naïve mind truly believed would be a portal to a bigger and better and more magical life.

Albus will never admit it to anyone, but the first time they came after he failed to get his Hogwarts letter he had the tiniest of hopes that just being in the presence of such sheer magic would somewhat bring back to life the dead magical powers in his being. Because, sometimes, that’s what he thinks happened. That he was born magical, but the power died inside him soon after. The source cut off. Whatever the source is, of course. And in his juvenile mind, he genuinely thought that stepping through the wall onto the platform would reawaken that spirit, and they’d all realise it was one big, magnificent mistake and he would be able to board to train and start his new life.

That, of course, did not happen.

And so he stares at the floor as he waits for the train and even when the distant chugging begins to ebb ever closer he still doesn’t look up from the paving slabs. Even as people descend onto the platform and the chaos ensues and a flurry of green, red, yellow, and blue scarves all whisk past him like billowing branches from a willow tree. Even as Lily comes back, Rose. It isn’t a secret that he only comes here for one person, even more so since James isn’t a student anymore.

It isn’t until he smells the ever-so-familiar wafts of mint and bergamot that he looks up, and everything else in the world becomes a blur.

“Oh, wow,” Scorpius Malfoy is saying. His voice is all etches of sincerity, scratchy in the way that twigs are when birds weave them into nests. Albus almost thinks he doesn’t deserve it. He has, after all, been ignoring him for months. “Albus Potter, as I live and breathe. I was beginning to think you were dead.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” Albus rolls his eyes. Maybe the sincerity is only skin deep.

Scorpius raises an eyebrow. He’s utterly electric, even in moments like this. Even when he tilts his head to the side, his slightly longer than usual hair drifting wondrously across his forehead, and says, “You’re calling me dramatic?”

Albus rolls his eyes again. He is fighting the urge to kick him in the shin, though he’ll probably hug him way before that, anyway. “Someone would’ve told you if I died,” he says, expecting a biting comment back though he gets nothing. And, so, he continues. “I was, like, going through some stuff. Trying to find myself, I guess.”

A glimmering ray of sun breaking through the cloud cover catches Scorpius’ Head Boy badge, the reflection dancing across Albus’ eye line. He winces. Scorpius looks to the sky and steps to the side, checking the sun is no longer a hindrance before he humours Albus’ pitiful excuse with a response. “And the process of finding yourself necessitated ignoring me for three months?”

“Okay… I accept that maybe I went a little overboard.”

“A little?”

“Don’t push your luck,” Albus says.

Scorpius, at last, smiles. “I loathe every day of my life when I don’t get to speak to you for at least five minutes,” he says, and it is then that he hugs Albus. Tightly, lovingly. As if he never wants to let go.

“So you’ve loathed the last three months?” Albus asks.

Scorpius nods. “Every single day.”

It is only then, perhaps, that Albus realises the extremity of not speaking to someone for three months. It comes at once, really. Waves of guilt and sadness and regret and anger at himself and anger at Scorpius for putting up with it and still entertaining Albus with the ever present letters and, even here, the smiles and the conversation. It is more than Albus deserves, quite frankly. Most people, if ignored for three months, would wipe the instigator out of their life completely, and it would be an entirely justifiable course of action.

Not Scorpius, though. Never Scorpius.

“Fortescue’s?” Scorpius asks.

“It’s December.”

“Albus,” Scorpius groans, flicking Albus’ nose.

“I’m kidding,” Albus says. He looks over at the rest of his family, all bustling together as they pick up trunks and gently pat cheeks and words about school and lessons and magic ooze out of them as if they’ve been so over-saturated for months they just couldn’t wait until today to talk about these things. He sees a sort of enthusiasm he doesn’t think his parents have ever extended his way on the odd days they come and pick him up from school. And so, with an ease that comes only when he speaks to Scorpius, he says, “Of course. I’ve missed you.”

“You’re the bane of my life, Albus Potter,” Scorpius says. Albus wants to ask what he’s done with his luggage, but he doesn’t really think that would be appropriate given the grandeur of this entire reunion. “I missed you more, and you can’t even argue with me on that.”

“I could try.”

“And you would fail,” Scorpius mutters. Then his fingers are wrapped around Albus’ wrist, his thumb delicately resting rest over his pulse point, and Albus can hardly breathe. “Come on.”

⚡

You’d think, given the abundance of wizards and witches frequenting London at this very moment, that Diagon Alley would be ripe with activity, all but bursting at the seams as families bumble along the cobbles before disappearing behind heavy oak doors to splurge a little before Christmas.

It is, however, quite the opposite. Albus had been startled by the idea at first when Scorpius suggested it all those years ago. Part of him cruelly thought that Scorpius was suggesting it on purpose, as if to parade the Squib around the flocks of burgeoning magicians to make him feel meek about things. Granted, that was before they were Albus and Scorpius but were, rather, two emerging spirits who were in the midst of a complicated dance around each other, not quite knowing where this thing was heading but neither of them being willing to dart in either direction, closer or further away.

Diagon Alley is all but empty on days like this, and the two of them weave past market stalls and skip over stones until they get to Fortescue’s with an ease unseen during every other day of the year. There’s a table in the corner, round and always covered in an old lace doily coloured orange from years and years of sun rays bleaching it through the window pane. Everything inside is a little creaky, the chairs and the tables even down to the ice cream display case which shuts up and down in response to the passing throws of footfall traffic that dash in and out of the shop.

Albus likes this place because, out of everywhere in the alley, it is so decidedly un-magical. The sweet shops stock nothing but Chocolate Frogs, Cauldron Cakes, those Every Flavour Beans, and various other sickeningly magical snacks. The tailor's windows are always showing off Hogwarts robes, the bookstores donning the newest editions of textbooks needed to pass OWLs or NEWT examinations. Every other storefront feels to Albus like a gut punch, like the walls are closing in on him.

But here? Oh, no. Not here.

In Fortescue’s, you can sit down and order basic ice cream in basic flavours in a basic cone and it’s as if you’re sitting inside a Muggle establishment. There are no Firewhisky or Butterbeer flavours, no elaborate shredded Chocolate Frog toppings. It is simple and effective and it’s as if the shop is the only place of normality among a sea of weirdness. To Albus, that is.

Albus sits at their usual table, fiddling with a newly degraded strand of the doily, looking up only when Scorpius returns with their ice creams. Scorpius always has a cone, a scoop of peppermint beneath a scoop of strawberry. Albus will never not turn a frown at that, because who on Earth would willingly combine the two worst flavours of ice cream in one cone? It’s barbaric. Albus frequents the small tub selection, opting only for a scoop of banana and a scoop of chocolate. Normal flavours. Top-tier ones.

They are about halfway through their servings when Scorpius asks, “Did you at least read the letters I wrote?” and Albus sinks back into his chair.

He sighs, stabbing his wooden spoon into his half-melted mound of banana ice cream. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I did,” he says, elbows digging into little preformed divots on the table. “I even penned a few responses, just couldn’t bring myself to send them off. They’re all in the top drawer of my desk, waiting to see the light of day.”

Scorpius nods, breaking off the bottom bit of his cone. “So what’s been going on?” he asks, tipping his head back as ice cream drizzles through the now-formed opening at the base of the cone. Albus shakes his head – affectionately, of course – for this method of ice cream eating reminds him so viscerally of James from their years as kids that it almost makes him want to cry. “You know every detail of the last three months of my life. I know nothing about yours.”

“Rose nor Lily been spilling the beans?” Albus jokes, though it goes as well as a lead balloon based on the foul expression that carves its way into Scorpius’ features. All downturned lip corners and slanted eyes and a tightening of his jaw that Albus has to look away from because, really, why does his best friend have perhaps the nicest complexion he’s ever seen in his life, even when he’s annoyed?

“I have no interest in going to your relatives and acting like I want gossip on you, Albus. I quite prefer hearing it all from you,” Scorpius states, clear as anything. Albus thinks he could throw up. “So please, enlighten me.”

“It’s been… I don’t even know,” Albus says, and it’s true. It’s been the longest and shortest three months of his life. It’s like he’s been gliding over all of it on a cloud, somewhat detached from every single word that has left his mouth and every single action he has made. “I haven’t felt this weird about my whole thing since I was, like, eleven? The day Rose got her letter and I didn’t get mine. I’ve been able to endure it since then, and kind of live in spite of everything going on in my soul. But recently it’s all been coming back up to the surface.”

“Al…”

“It all started with this stupid f*cking letter,” he continues, though he loathes to think about the letter. It’s still on the fridge, actually, just beneath a couple of other forms that his parents have pinned on there since. Forms that are clearly more important than the meeting, than even asking Albus how the meeting went. “From school, to the parents. About a meeting to do with university. Sort of, like, an information session for parents so they can learn the important dates and how to be supportive and what to expect throughout the application period. And I stupidly thought my parents would care enough to come with.”

“They didn’t go?” Scorpius asks, with a specific type of sadness woven in there that takes even Albus aback slightly. They look at each other for a moment then, two spindly teenagers eating ice cream who, to any passing shopper on the Alley outside, could be talking about anything and everything adolescent. School, friends, crushes. All of that nonsense. Except they aren’t. They’re in the pits, actually, they’re always in the pits.

“Did they hell,” Albus mutters. He hates reliving it as much as he hates himself for not telling Scorpius originally. He thinks of that saying – a problem shared is a problem halved – and it feels almost bitter in his throat knowing that he wouldn’t have to be rehashing the nightmare that all but ruined his life a few months ago had he just answered Scorpius’ letters. “Mum was in Wales, or something, interviewing some stupid Quidditch guy. And dad had a meeting with the senior Ministers at the Ministry. James ended up coming with me. And it was, like… the sh*ttiest feeling in the world walking into that hall and seeing all my friends with their parents, picking up leaflets and talking to the teachers, meanwhile mine probably didn’t even remember it was going on.”

Scorpius is frowning at him and Albus wishes for him to stop. Scorpius has always been a thick-skinned approach kind of person. That’s not to say they don’t talk about sensitive things, and Albus has most definitely seen him cry a few times (many times, actually), but when the topic of conversation is complexities to do with Albus’ inherent Squib-ness, Scorpius is very upfront about it. He doesn’t really like beating around the bush, probably because that’s what everyone else has done for Albus’ entire life. The word Squib is very much not in the vocabulary of a lot of people they know, much like how Voldemort wasn’t one for their parents’ generation for a very, very long time. And it has always bothered Albus, because Squib is not a dirty word. It’s just that: a word. As much as witch or wizard is, Pure Blood or Muggle-born.

But, anyway. Scorpius is frowning at him and his sadness is all but palpable in the palm of his ice cream covered hand, and so Albus shakes his head and clears his throat and sits himself upright as if doing any of those things will magically erase the words he just spoke.

“Sorry,” he says, and he feels the lecture coming from far, far away. “That was… a word dump.”

Scorpius shakes his head. Albus thinks there is a moderate eye roll there, too, probably in response to the apology. Scorpius is never a fan of apologising unless it’s both meaningful and absolutely necessary. Though Albus would argue both of those things are true right now, he knows Scorpius will disagree. “You could’ve told me about it at the time, Al. I just… I know that all that clearly isn’t the only reason why you dropped off the face of the Earth, but you know I’m here for you. Always. I might not always know the best things to say or get the details of it all… but I’m still here.”

Albus shrugs. “That’s the thing, though,” he says, dragging his spoon around the perimeter of his almost empty ice cream tub. The last dregs look a little too sad to eat, and so he decides to just mix and mix until the two flavours are combined in kaleidoscope strokes of yellow, brown and beige. “Sometimes I just wonder why I have to go through my life never having someone else understand all the little details of it.”

It’s perhaps a little too deep of a conversation to dive into when you’ve only been in the presence of your friend for an hour or so at tops after being apart for months. There are usually more simple niceties to cover before you delve into these sorts of things – the parts that occupy your midnight thoughts and haunt your footsteps as you stumble, day by day, through life – but that’s never been how the two of them work. Albus can’t recall a time the two of them have ever had a normal sort of friendship. Sure, they do normal things like going to the cinema, watching sports games, coming out to eat ice cream, for example, but the contents of their conversations will forever extend way beyond any of that simplicity.

They’re bound together by a deeper, guttural, sense of companionship. Like two diaries you can purge your thoughts in for the rest of your life and know you’ll never face any semblance of judgement.

“And that’s not, like… that’s not me saying I don’t appreciate you or want you or anything. Because I do, to both of those things,” Albus continues, reaching across the table to tug at Scorpius’ jumper. It’s a green one, three-quarter zip at the top, probably a part of his Quidditch uniform or something like that, but the fibres are soft on Albus’ fingertips and the gentle motion causes Scorpius to look down, then back up into Albus’ eyes, so he can forgive the origins of the jumper just for now. “It just sometimes gets very tiring feeling as if I’m constantly on a tightrope, walking towards something that I, and everybody else in the world, it seems, don’t understand.”

“I do wonder why there has never been better care for Squibs,” Scorpius eventually says, perhaps lulled out of his lapses of silence by the almost pleading expression painted across Albus’ features. He has pulled his jumper further down his arms, the hem lowered to his knuckles, just to give Albus more playing ground. “I’ve read probably every book that mentions them, just to see if there ever has been anything out there for them. But, no. Nothing.”

“And that is surprising to you?” Albus asks. “When has that world of yours ever been welcoming to people who are ever so slightly different?”

“I didn’t say it was surprising.”

Albus sighs. To himself, mainly. To his jumping to conclusions, his constant defensive demeanour. Even after all these years he just can’t seem to let it go completely. “I know, I’m sorry,” he says, again, though this time Scorpius doesn’t seem perturbed by it. “I’ve been in such a sh*t mood lately, it’s beginning to annoy me. I just can’t shake the thought that this time next year, when I’m hopefully at university, I might have not spoken to any of my family for months. I mean, if my parents are putting such little effort into being part of the process and learning about what will happen to me and where I will go and what I’ll study, then how can I expect them to care enough to come and visit? Or to want to come and visit?”

Scorpius kisses his teeth. He reaches over the table to dab a napkin in the corner of Albus’ lips, scrunching it in his fist when he is done. “It almost sounds like you’re planning on cutting your entire family off.”

“Sometimes I think about doing it,” Albus says despite the twinge in his heart after he dared to vocalise that sentence. He thinks he’s a horrible person, sometimes. It just can’t be helped. “I couldn’t even tell you the last time I spoke to Lily about anything other than what mum is cooking for dinner. Speaking of her, Mum and I haven’t really been on good terms since the whole letter thing.”

“Huh? Why?”

“I was a dick. She said she couldn’t make it and I think I was momentarily possessed and swore a bit and implied she loved James and Lily more than me. And I refused to apologise for it, and I still haven’t, so we aren’t really friends right now.”

Scorpius gives him a look. And it’s something even Albus can’t quite put his finger on. Like that space between two lines of a paragraph printed in your favourite paperback book. Back when Albus started secondary school and his English teacher began going on about reading between the lines all he could think of was that literal blank space between lines. And how, in the time it took the author to write enough words to cross over to a new line, a thousand different thoughts could’ve passed through their mind. The course of the whole book could’ve changed. And for as much as we want to tear the words apart and analyse them to within an inch of their life, we will never know everything they thought.

It’s how he feels looking at the way Scorpius looks at him right now. As if he could stare back for the rest of his life, and beyond, and still not quite understand it. He shrinks a little under the perplexity of it, going to withdraw his hand to his lap though Scorpius is quick to place his index finger on the fleshy expanse between Albus’ ring finger and middle finger knuckles to hold him in place. The soft valley between his two joints being tapped on by Scorpius, a dainty little rhythm that Albus can’t discern but is sure has roots in classical music or something else intellectual like that.

“Why is your life capitulating right now? Like, three months ago we were at the beach and it was all fun and games and everyone was friendly and I thought, for perhaps the first time since I met you, that there was some sort of universal peace treaty being extended between your entire family. I don’t understand how one unwinds all that progress in such a short space of time,” Scorpius says. It’s broadly a very honest observation, one Albus would abhor were it coming from just about anyone else.

“Tell me about it,” he says. “Neither do I.”

“It makes me sad thinking about you being here, all sad, feeling lonely and like there was nobody who cares about you and the things going on in your life. I care. I spent every day in that stupid castle caring and wishing I could, like, magic the words out of your mouth to make you answer my stupid letters–”

Albus attempts to interrupt with a quiet, “They’re not stupid,” though Scorpius has never been one to allow for disruptions.

“–but then I don’t wish I could do that, because we agreed I’d never use magic around you a long time ago. So, like. I just spent so much time in that castle moping about. I even watched a few Second Years try and hex one of the portraits because I didn’t have it in me to send them to their Head of House.”

Albus muses on it for a little bit. The image of Scorpius in that big, bad castle, the landscape of many a nightmare for Albus. It’s peculiar to think of the person you love most in this world being so closely entangled with one of the things you hate most in the world. Scorpius is too good compared to the awfulness Albus associates with that school; he can’t picture him as a student there, deeply woven into the fabric of the place and leaving an impact that will be incredibly insurmountable to anyone who replaces him in his respective roles when he leaves next year. Albus, for all his efforts, doesn’t think he has made quite as dramatic strides in his own place. “That’s terrible Head Boy behaviour,” he says, eventually, everything laced with a little lighter sense of joy than any of the words they’ve spoken thus far today.

“I know!”

“I promise I won’t not tell you things from now on,” Albus says. It’s earnest in every way it can be, and Scorpius is nodding as if he’s been waiting for Albus to say that all day. “I honestly don’t know what had gotten into me. Not talking to you for three months is perhaps the most bizarre thing I’ve ever done.”

“I agree,” Scorpius says. “I love you, you know? Half agony.”

Albus smiles. “Half hope,” he takes the scrunched up napkin and drops it into his empty ice cream tub, glancing outside just as a soft fall of snow materialises from the now-white sky above. “I love you. I’m sorry I shut you out.”

“I forgive you,” the earnestness seems to have passed over, perhaps exchanged through the physical contact they maintain even to now. From knuckle to fingertip and heart to heart. Albus isn’t sure; he often feels weightless when he and Scorpius are around each other. He doesn’t entertain the confusion with the luxury of overthinking, though. He doesn’t think that would end well for him. “Please never do it again. You are half my life and more.”

“God, that was sappy,” Albus says, a shameless attempt at changing the subject before they go there. Back towards what led to that event at the beach. The event that sent him into a spiral he still has yet to recover from. Scorpius knows it too, just based on the way his eyebrows momentarily pinch together.

“You’re a prick,” Scorpius lies. He retracts his hand from Albus’ to let Albus pull his jacket back on, tossing their litter in the bin just behind him. He tilts his chair onto its rear legs as he throws it all away, his jumper scaling up an inch or so above the waistline of his trousers. “Half agony?” he asks when all chair legs, and his own, touch the ground again.

“Half hope.”

⚡

They Apparate to the Burrow. Albus hates every second of it, just on principle alone, though he trusts Scorpius to do it safely. He’d trust Scorpius to do anything, and even if the mere act makes him feel weak in the deepest part of his chest, and sad in every fibre of his being, he doesn’t complain the entire time. He loops his arm through Scorpius’, clinging on a little too tightly as if for dear life, and his eyes are screwed shut as they travel from just outside his most favourite ice cream parlour to just outside his grandparents’ house.

The snow has turned to sleet, bordering on rain, as their feet sink into the long grass and Albus’ grip slips from the crook of Scorpius’ arm to, rather, latch around his wrist as he drags them along the eroded destiny path curving through the landscape to reach the door. Beneath the glow of the outdoor lantern, with their foreheads almost touching as they duck under the small portico, Albus dares to look up at Scorpius. Looks at him and sees in those endless eyes of his the same sort of look he saw years ago, back at Rose’s birthday party, and he wonders what in the world Scorpius could’ve seen in a ramshackle sort of human being such as Albus to decide to be his best friend for life.

“Are you sticking around?” Albus asks, reaching up to brush a lacklustre drop of sleet from the arch of Scorpius’ eyebrow.

“I shouldn’t,” Scorpius says. “My dad was cordial enough to let me run off with you earlier. I don’t think his generosity would extend to anything after eight o’clock. Plus, you know, I’ve missed him, too.”

Albus smiles. “That’s fine,” he says, biding his time before he has to knock on the door to be let in and to leave this boy behind. “I’ll see you soon, right?”

“Of course,” Scorpius murmurs, as if it was obvious. Which it was, perhaps, but Albus still wants the reassurance anyway. “You’re coming to that New Year’s party, right?”

Albus hums. He presses his lips together and all around him is a peculiar buzz, one he seems to spend his entire life trying to forget. Trying to endure. That party. It had been mentioned in one of Scorpius’ letters during the three months of Albus’ isolation, and while he had pondered it at first over the passing weeks it’s begun to morph into something a little sinister in his head.

“Everyone else is going. Like, people you know. People you like,” Scorpius continues, ever the one to see right through Albus’ escapades. “Rose is going. Yann and Polly, the others. I’m sure even James has been given an invite, all things considered.”

Albus fiddles with the zip on Scorpius’ jumper, teasing it all the way up and all the way down. Partly because he wants to, but mainly because he can’t stand the idea of looking at Scorpius right now and pretending like he wants to go to this party. Because it won’t work. Anything he says will contradict the look all over his face, the reluctance laced into every single thing he is doing right now.

Albus knows it; Scorpius knows it, too.

“Would you believe me if I told you I wanted to?”

“Wanted?” Scorpius asks. “Yes. Will? Less so.”

“Okay,” Albus murmurs. “Because that’s where my head is at right now.”

“You don’t have to,” Scorpius assures. Albus hates himself for not being normal about any of this. “I want you to, obviously. And everyone else wants you to, as well. They miss you the same way I do.”

Albus raises an eyebrow. “The exact same way?”

Scorpius rolls his eyes. “Obviously not the exact same way, you loser,” he says. Then they lull into a peaceful silence, just looking at each other as if remembering the way their best friend looks for the first time ever. Which is, honestly, what this sort of feels like. A friendship built upon the foundations of years’ worth of summer days and scarce moments scattered among long-distance school terms always feels a little like chasing clouds. It’s weird how Albus feels he knows everything about Scorpius though they spend so much time apart. “Please think about it. It’s fine if you don’t end up coming, but just know it’d be much nicer with you there.”

“I’ll think about it,” Albus says. “Just for you.”

“Thank you, Al.”

Albus looks at the door. He really doesn’t want to do it.

“I’m going to walk away from you now,” Scorpius is saying as he steps from beneath the shelter and is cast into the shadows of the night. The sleet is all up in his hair and his hands are raking through it as he spins on his heel and looks back at Albus, a smile all over his face. “Because if I don’t go now then my dad will disown me and that would be rather inconvenient.”

“Well, of course,” Albus says. “We can’t have you getting written out of the Malfoy family will. What would happen to the Manor peaco*cks?”

“You’re irritating beyond belief.”

“You’re still smiling, though,” Albus grins, finally knocking on the door. “I’ll see you later?”

Scorpius nods. “See you later, Albus.”

Then he is gone, and the door is swinging open, and Albus really, really wishes he could feel like this every single day. Light, loved, laughing. He would bottle it if he could, carry it around for the rest of his days.

⚡

Christmas at the Burrow has been a tradition for Albus’ entire life, and then some.

Perhaps it’s because there is only one set of grandparents to appease, and so there is no pressure of having to swap and share holidays with all family members. The Weasley-Grangers, for example, are only present every other year at the Burrow, and Albus will selfishly say he prefers the years where they are stopping with the Grangers in their Muggle house somewhere well away from here. Not because he dislikes his family, or anything of the sort, but when the house is over-populated it becomes feverishly easy for Albus to spiral. And Christmas isn’t a time when anyone should feel miserable, especially not in your own home.

Albus gets to stay in his Uncle Ron’s old bedroom, sleeping on a tiny foam mattress laid on the floor while snuggled up into a raggedy old sleeping bag. James gets the bed, of course, though they usually spend the waning night-time hours talking or playing Uno – James’ favourite Muggle game – or mulling over an extended match of chess while the floorboard overhead creaks under the ghostly footsteps beholding them.

They all trickle down the stairs on Christmas morning, bright and early, and the kids sit on the floor dispensing gifts and goodies while the parents and grandparents rest on rocking chairs or nestle among crochet-patchwork pillows, gathering disposed wrapping paper in a black bin bag to be tied off and thrown away later in the day. Albus loves Christmas the most because it is, for all intents and purposes, the least magical of holidays. Or, at least, the easiest one to forget magic exists during.

Sure, his siblings are getting magic-adjacent gifts; Lily often unwraps new books or Gobstones sets and James’ spread is littered through and through with Quidditch gear or tricks from their Uncles’ joke shop. But Albus’ own are the complete opposite, and as he peels away tape and unwraps the brown paper wrapping idiosyncratic of his mother’s gift-wrapping style it is as if magic fades away into nothingness. Albus can pretend, for just a few moments, that everyone around him is opening classic horror DVD boxsets, newly printed clothbound copies of his favourite classic books, a new glass animal for the collection on his bookshelf.

Christmas feels safe, so whimsical that even the charmed baubles dangling off the spindly arms on the tree can be ignored in favour of some hot chocolate or a classic song oozing through the radio speakers.

The last gift Albus unwraps is always the one in peaco*ck-patterned paper. He has no idea where Scorpius sourced this stuff from, especially not enough stock to last almost seven years, but for every celebration, without fail, there will always be one under the tree for him.

“Here,” James says, reaching under the tree to grab the gift for Albus. “Any ideas?”

Albus shakes his head. “None,” he says, carefully pulling a strand of the bow to release the ribbon tied around all sides of the box. “He’s a closed book when it comes to stuff like this.”

“What did you get him?”

Albus’ fingers pause on a taped down seam of the gift. “He saw this jacket in a film we watched together during the summer holidays. This horror film, you won’t know it, but the main guy has this deep red corduroy jacket he wears for the majority of the latter half,” he says, thinking all things Stanley Hotel and whatnot. “Anyway, Scorpius said he loved it. So I found one in this random charity shop a couple of months ago and I bought it for him.”

“Weren’t you ignoring him two months ago?” James asks.

Albus rolls his eyes. “We were still friends,” he says. “I was ignoring him but I never had intentions of ignoring him forever. He knew that.”

James throws a balled up wad of tape at him. “You’re weird.”

Albus doesn’t entertain him with a response. He, instead, peels back the layers of tape and paper and pulls out a purple velvet box with a little tag looped through the clasp. In swooping, sloping, curving letters, all red ink and distinctive handwriting that could only belong to one clumsy left-handed being, is scribed Cujo? Another friend to join the menagerie – S.

He teases open the top half of the box and pulls out a glass figure of a dog. A St. Bernard, to Albus’ eyes, the main body entirely crystalline though the ears and patches around the black dot eyes are composed of caramel coloured glass. Albus thinks a little part of him shatters there and then. In a good way, of course.

Because beneath the longing for a ‘normal’ life, a life where he could look over at Lily’s gifts and share in them and they could play Gobstones together, is an understanding that he wouldn’t want life any other way if it meant he wouldn’t have Scorpius. Wouldn’t have this magical boy, in every sense of the word, willing to learn an entirely different way of life just to have Albus around. Wouldn’t have someone who never shows up with his wand, who never even mentions magic unless Albus mentions it first. He often wonders if he and Scorpius would’ve become friends if they both were at Hogwarts, and most of the time he believes they would. But not like this.

Not in the life-consuming, soul-affirming, life or death kind of way.

Albus holds the figure up to the Christmas tree and the flashing garland lights flicker through him in a cascade of beauty, leaving little colourful dots on the palm of Albus’ hand, scattering all the way up along his wrist. He looks to his left and sees his mum. She smiles at him.

Albus smiles back.

⚡

“You’re coming?” Scorpius sounds so positively elated Albus feels faint. The invitation to this party told everyone to meet in the park outside Godric’s Hollow where various Portkeys had been set up to transport them to the hotel and pub where this event would be taking place. Albus hadn’t confirmed or denied to Scorpius that he would come, mostly because until a few hours ago he didn’t even know himself. So as they walk into the park and Albus finds himself gravitating towards Scorpius just by sheer coincidence alone, the smile on Scorpius’ face is every single shade of genuine possible.

It’s worth it, though. Pushing through the fears of not being enough while also being the centre of attention because he isn’t enough is a task Albus debates on the cusp of every single wizarding world event he is invited to. Quidditch games, family events and reunions at various pubs scattered among Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade. It’s a constant back and forth of wanting to be included, to spend time with his family, while knowing that if he elects to be involved he is essentially welcoming in an evening of misery.

Sometimes those nights don’t feel worth his while, but ones with Scorpius do.

“I am indeed,” Albus says, allowing himself to be hugged as Scorpius deploys his arms around Albus’ waist and lifts him a few centimetres off the ground. He’s never normally one for physical contact. But for Scorpius? Well, there is always an exception to the rule. “I can’t promise I’ll have fun, though.”

“You’re with me, Albus,” Scorpius says; Albus loves him so dearly. “You know we always have fun.”

When he’s placed back on the ground Albus allows himself to look Scorpius up and down. He’s wearing a pair of jeans Albus recalls them picking up in a vintage sale a couple of years back, worn down at the knees from trips up and down the ladder into the treehouse at the end of the Potter’s garden. He always rolls them up two times, the cuffs just skirting the very top of his curved ankle bones. They’re a washed out grey colour, were much deeper back in the day, and Scorpius wears them all the time with different t-shirts and different jumpers depending on the temperature. Tonight it’s a simple black tee with a pocket sewn over the left hand side. Scorpius has it tucked into the jeans, and layered overtop is the deep red corduroy jacket that, until a few days ago, had lived in Albus’ wardrobe. Slotted in at the end of the rail between Albus’ school blazer and his thick winter coat he saves for snowy days.

“You're wearing the jacket I got you,” Albus states, dragging his fingers up and down the side of the sleeve. It’s exactly as soft as he can recall, though a little tighter as the material sculpts itself to the curves of Scorpius’ arms. “It looks nice.”

“It does?” Scorpius asks.

Albus nods. “Totally.”

“Well, thank you,” Scorpius says, and were it not for the dimming evening light the blush that simmers over his cheeks would be much more visible than it currently is. “For that and for getting it for me. I really love it.”

Albus beams. He picks off a speck of dust from Scorpius’ shirt, flicking it away into the looming darkness. He’s always been a little shorter than Scorpius, so that his eyes are just about level with Scorpius’ nose, and in moments like these – bizarre, off-hand displays of comfort and low-level intimacy – he has to stand there while Scorpius looks down at him and he fights the urge to try and read his expression. Because it’s so very hard to do that sometimes. Scorpius is Albus’ favourite book, even though there are metaphorical passages he has yet to master the understanding of. “Let’s just hope it doesn’t send you mad.”

Scorpius quirks a smile. A tug of the corner of his mouth forcing a dimple to carve itself into the very depth of his skin. “Hm, you’ve got a point. Maybe it’s a bad idea we’re going to a hotel in the wintertime.”

“Eh, it’s not abandoned or completely isolated from all human contact, and I’m pretty sure nobody has previously murdered their wife and kids there,” Albus poses, arms crisscrossing over his chest as he steps to the side, onto a slightly higher part of the field, just so he can be level with Scorpius. “I think we’ll be okay.”

“What in the world are you two talking about?” James, out of nowhere, asks. A small valley has formed between the gaggle of students all waiting to jump from one place to another, though none of them either care that Albus is there or haven’t had time to notice yet.

“Nothing,” they both say, glancing at each other with equally humoured expressions.

James rolls his eyes, co*cking his head to the side to urge them closer. “Touch the key,” he deadpans. “It’s going soon.”

⚡

The party is held at this hotel in East London, on the cusp between where the Muggle community ends and the recently developed wizarding community begins. Post-war, according to the books Albus read before he stopped being able to digest anything to do with magic, more magical hubs began to pop up around the country as people moved on from such levels of tragedy and decided to set up base somewhere new. Somewhere clean.

It’s a slightly rickety looking place, though the interior is plush and all sorts of brand new. Kitschy in the sense of trying too hard to be kitschy. The art is peculiar, hanging slightly off-centre in the middle of patterned walls. The lanterns dangling from the ceiling are tulip-shaped, alternating between different shades of blue, red and yellow, and music thrums from the back room where the bar is set up. Albus isn’t too sure how someone managed to book this place out under the guise of hosting a party for predominantly underage people, but he isn’t about to torment the logistics of something when he has Scorpius Malfoy clinging to the sleeve of his jacket as they weave their way through an already too-big crowd to get to the drinks tables lining the side of the room.

The whole ordeal reminds Albus vaguely of his Year Eleven prom. He’s always been a little awkward about the prospect of proms, since it feels like an astoundingly American thing that has somehow traipsed its way across the ocean over the last few years. But they’re never as lavish or important or culturally significant as those in the States seem. There is no crowning of kings or queens, no elaborate proposals or intense dress-shopping sessions. It is, first and foremost, just an excuse for drinking while listening to very questionable music.

But, anyway. This party feels very much like that, down to the horribly sticky air and the sickly smell of spirits loitering in the crevices of each piece of furniture. The clothes are all seasonably inappropriate and the music is something Albus feels like he should recognise but, astonishingly, doesn’t though it all dissipates into nothingness when the overhead lighting rig spins patterned flashes of red and gold and white and blue all over the place.

“What do you want?” Scorpius asks, face pressed terrifyingly close to Albus’ ear to ensure he is heard over the music.

“Something fruity,” Albus shouts back. He has a finger hooked through a belt loop on Scorpius’ jeans, anchoring the two of them together as the room fills more and more with dregs of students arriving at the touch of ever more Portkeys. Just how many people are coming Albus doesn’t know. Exactly how the invites were dispensed is also something Albus does not know. He is choosing to ignore it all, though, in favour of focusing specifically on Scorpius. “I don’t know, it all looks weird. Where are the normal drinks?”

Scorpius looks at him. “What are you considering a normal drink?” He asks. “Because I fear you won’t be getting one of those here.”

“It’s all your stuff, right?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call it my stuff, as if I single-handedly decide to create magic,” Scorpius says. He turns back to the table and pores over all the choices before picking up a glass of pinky-orange-coloured liquid. A little like a sunset in summer, all glossy shades of warmth crisscrossing over each other as time ticks on. “Here, I think that’ll do.”

“I know you didn’t single-handedly create magic,” Albus says, taking a tentative sip from the drink afterwards. Scorpius is right, it will do.

Scorpius hums. “Well, of course,” he says. “But I don’t go around pulling faces at Muggle things saying that’s all your stuff. It’s just stuff to me. Alcohol is alcohol, at the end of the day.”

“It’s not just about the alcohol.”

“I know,” Scorpius says, stepping to the side when a fresh group of people step up to the table. “It’s about the principle of it, and all that. We’ve had this conversation a million times.”

“Then why are you commenting on it specifically now?” Albus asks, allowing himself to be led by Scorpius to a smaller pocket of space between the edge of the dance floor section and the start of scattered tables that have been set out.

“Because we’ve been here for five minutes and I can see you’re already starting to hate it because you’re looking at it too black-and-white,” Scorpius says, it sounding a little like a whisper over the throbbing bass. “Everyone here is just a person. This whole thing is no different to the parties you go to.”

“Compared to those parties this one is probably better.”

“And why is that?” Scorpius asks.

“Because you’re here.”

Scorpius smiles. “Duh,” he says, throwing a cursory glance over his shoulder. “Dance?”

iv. disaster

They dance for a bit and they drink a little more and at some point between the hours of ten and eleven Albus seems to forget where they are. Perhaps it’s the light or perhaps it’s the tainted alcohol or perhaps it’s the simple fact that Scorpius makes everything always feel a little bit easier to manage. But he lets himself relax, he lets himself get a little too comfortable.

All it takes is one little thing underneath the flashing lights, sandwiched between melodic thrums of a guitar from someplace North on the stage, for everything to take a terrible little tumble.

It’s some random guy he’s never seen before, decked in a Holyhead Harpies shirt and a pair of jeans Albus would describe as a shade too tight for him, saying, “Hey, you’re that Squib, right?” while Albus is at the drinks table that sends the evening into disarray.

Albus blinks at him, foolishly thinking he misheard him. “Um, I’m sorry,” he says, wishing he had Scorpius there to scold him for apologising. “What was that?”

“You’re the Squib,” the guy repeats, pointing at him with a half empty bottle of something that looks like beer but is more than likely emblazoned with a wizarding world logo. “The Potter one, yeah? You look just like your dad, so it’s pretty obvious. You’re, like, fable at Hogwarts. We talk about you in class sometimes.”

Albus doesn’t think he has sobered quite as quickly before in his life as he does here in this place. The drink he picked up is immediately back on the table and he keeps his hand atop the table cloth for both balance and as a reminder that this is happening to him. He is being stared down by a guy in a shirt for the Quidditch team his mother used to play for being lambasted for being a Squib. On New Year’s Eve, by the way. Just in case anyone needs the reminder.

“What’s your point?” Albus asks.

The guy has the audacity to look offended. “Woah, I’m sorry. You look annoyed.”

“And you’re surprised about that why exactly?”

“Because I just told you you’re, like, popular at Hogwarts,” the guy is laughing as he takes a swig from his drink and Albus is still failing to see how anything he is saying has anything to do with Albus. “I thought you’d find it cool.”

“Why the f*ck would I care about what happens up there?” Albus asks, again, though his patience is fraying like a too frequently used rope and he is somewhat wishing for someone to come and save him.

The laugh is almost robotic at this point, two lightweight, distinct ha-has punctuating the pauses between beats of the newest song to play through the speakers. The two of them stare at each other, and Albus feels it. Feels the flick, the gear switch. The change. “Mate, there’s no need to get pissy at me for trying to have a conversation,” the guy continues, holding his hands up in an all-too-innocent way. He strangles the bottleneck between his index and middle finger, the whole glass dangling as his body ricochets with nervous laughter. “All I said was you’re a Squib.”

“Who the f*ck even are you?” Albus snaps. He braves a step forward, and the guy takes one back. “You come up to me and point out something about me that has no relevance to anything, clearly trying to set off some sort of argument, and you expect me to not get pissy?”

“Sheesh, no wonder your parents never talk about you if you act like this when someone tries to–”

Drink. Face. Glass. Shattered. Then, silence.

Just the two of them – the guy with drips of fruity liquid sliding down the bridge of his nose, dappling over the material of his shirt; and Albus, chest all sorts of heaving and mind every single fragment broken and years’ worth of resentment bubbling up at the top all over again – staring at each other. Albus flexes his hand, stretching out the muscles as if confused at what they just did. He looks at the glass on the floor, the snapped up jigsaw pieces that look, in this glossy light, like sprinkles of confetti.

Albus goes to say something, to move away or to go for another shot or to fall to the ground in a heap of nothingness, but there is a hand grabbing the sleeve of his jacket and then James is standing in front of him and, God, how he wishes he had stayed at home.

“Woah, woah,” James is saying though the words all but float through Albus, it’s all so blurry right now. “Albus, what the Hell?”

That snaps him out of things. “How are you blaming me when you don’t even know what happened?” Albus asks. He pulls James’ hand off him, shaking out his elbow to reinstate the crispness of his jacket.

“You throw a drink at someone and you wonder why I think it might’ve been your problem?” James snipes, though the way he gently brushes glass off the cuff of Albus’ sleeve all but counteracts any harshness in what he is saying.

Albus gestures at the guy, still standing there in his sodden shirt though he begins to look more and more irritated as time ticks on. “This guy’s a f*cking asshole, that’s the problem,” he snaps, dragging the side of his hand over his forehead to wipe away little beads of sweat that have built up. Around them, regrettably, a small crowd is clustering, people leaning into their friends and muttering things that Albus doesn’t need to hear because he knows. He already knows. “Do they not teach you social skills at that sh*tty school, or something? You all think it’s normal to waltz up to someone and comment on what makes them different?”

“Albus, stop,” James mutters, prodding a finger into Albus’ chest. “You’ve been drinking–”

“That’s nothing to do with it, James,” Albus says, unclear how this entire escapade has gone from Albus being targeted to him being the culprit. “I thought you were on my side.”

“I am, but I can’t be on your side when I don’t know what’s happened.”

The guy chooses then to speak, having the audacity to say, “Your brother is crazy, that’s what happened,” while wringing out the bottom of his shirt. The Harpies print darkens with the moisture, and in the lettering all Albus can think of is his mother’s face. The way she’ll look at him if she ever finds out about this. Which she will, of course, because nothing ever remains a secret when Albus is involved. “Is asking people about their blood status these days illegal? He’s completely bizarre.”

Albus tries to step forward again but James buffers him, an annoyingly Quidditch-strengthened arm holding him back like a level crossing barrier. “You implied that my parents are ashamed of me for being a Squib and don’t think me fighting back is justifiable?” He says, bordering on a yell at this point. Hey, he’s already torn his limited reputation to shreds, why not go the rest of the way? “Why the f*ck are you still here?”

James’ grip loosens, and when Albus looks at him he sees a frown. Sadness. Regret, maybe? Albus can’t really tell. “Did he really say that?”

“Yes, James. Do you not believe me?” Albus asks. He doesn’t mean for the sarcasm to ooze its way in there, but sometimes his mouth has a mind of its own. “He said no wonder my parents never talk about me if I act like this when someone tries to talk to me. Am I excused for throwing a drink at him now?”

“That’s not true, Albus,” James is murmuring. He has a hand on Albus’ cheek, redirecting Albus’ sight to James’ own eyes, and for a moment or two it’s just the two Potter brothers looking at each other and everything else fades to nothing and Albus, all at once, is back in their bedroom as kids where they talk and play chess and have fun and there is nothing out there to hurt them. Nobody out there to make comments about things that make Albus want to die a little bit inside. “They’re not ashamed of you. You don’t believe a jackass like that, do you?”

“Hey,” the guy yells. Albus is separated from James when the guy shoves his brother; he knows, then, that this is all getting a lot worse. “All I did was ask a simple question.”

There’s something in James’ face that falters. His eyes, maybe? They go a little duller. His cheeks carve inwards and his lips are pulled into the finest line Albus thinks he’s ever seen. “You asked a stupid question that had nothing to do with you. Why are you still in my brother’s face?”

“You know you’d be nothing without your name, right? I mean, look at him. He has the name and he’s pretty much nothi–”

Albus wants to say he thinks James punches the guy, because there is a crunching sound that blends into some gasps but as Albus steps back he finds the sole of his shoes trampling over the shards of glass so maybe that was the crunching noise? But then he looks around and the guy is keeled over the drinks table with a hand to his face and James is shaking out his fist, knuckles a little split and threads of blood trickling down his arm, traversing the embossed lines of his veins like road markings on a map, and the picture comes to Albus a little clearer than it had a moment or two ago.

And, then, mint. Bergamot. A hand on his cheek and blue eyes up in his, though only for a second because Scorpius is then going over to James and wrapping his fingers around his wrist to assess the damage to his skin and he’s looking at the guy, then to Albus, then to the glass. There’s too much looking and not enough talking and then James is trying to step forward yet again but Scorpius has a hand on his chest and Albus sees then, for the first time ever, what he imagines Scorpius looks like when he’s at school.

Authoritative. Stern. All-consuming.

“James,” Scorpius warns, and Albus watches as some blood from James’ knuckles drips onto Scorpius’ sleeve, though it blends into nothing amongst the corduroy dye. “Oh my, Merlin. What the f*ck is happening?”

Nobody answers him, not even the crowd. Not even the guy. Scorpius picks up a napkin and presses it over the tiny lacerations on James’ fist, and someone from a few rows back goes over to the random guy – the instigator of all this, Albus wants to say – to do the same thing. Napkin to nose, another one sponging up the drink on the front of his shirt.

Scorpius redirects his gaze to Albus, and all Albus can do is shrug. “Albus? Al, Merlin, what?” he asks, his voice all fraught around the edges and coloured with the most vibrant shades of desperation. Behind him, Rose and Lily and a couple of others Albus vaguely recognises have appeared.

Instead of anything productive, Albus asks, “Why didn’t you tell me people talked about me at school?”

“Huh?” Scorpius says. “What are you on about?”

Albus swallows, thinks about whether he wants to go into this. But then he looks around at the crime scene, at the glass underneath his shoes and the droplets of fruity drink that somehow ended up over him and the fact his brother just assaulted someone on private property, and he figures that nothing could make this night worse, so why not go into it. “That guy just told me you all talk about me in class sometimes. That I’m fable at Hogwarts,” he says, teeth clenched the entire time so the words come out more like a hiss than anything else. “You never thought that was important information?”

Scorpius levels with him, head tilted to the side, a look of pure confusion all over his face. “No, I didn’t. Because nothing that happens at Hogwarts has ever been important information to you,” he states, clear as day. “Why are you mad at me?”

And maybe it all boils down to this. Maybe it all culminates in that one moment because even though Scorpius wasn’t there for any of it, even though he has never participated in any of it, Albus can’t hold it in anymore. “Because people are gossiping about me and you never even let me know. Neither did he, or my cousins, or my sister!”

“You think I enjoyed hearing people talk about you?” James snaps, finally. He throws the bloody napkin on the floor and holds his arms out, utterly aghast. Albus really wonders what people are going to think when they hear about this through the grapevine. “Albus, I’ve spent twenty years watching you be sad about this whole thing, why in Merlin’s name would I come home and talk about it?”

Albus, in spite of his best interest, all but bellows, “I still have a right to know! It’s about me.”

“No, Albus!” James flares, and it takes Albus’ breath away for a beat or two. “It’s petty nothingness that would’ve done you no good hearing about it.”

“You don’t get to choose what is and isn’t good for me.”

“I’m your brother, Albus. I get to do exactly that when it concerns me,” James says, pointing at Scorpius as he says, “So does he. Calm the f*ck down.”

“Why are you keeping secrets from me if it’s petty nothingness?” Albus asks.

Scorpius sighs. He’s pressing a fresh napkin into Albus’ palm, and it’s only then he realises he himself is bleeding. From what, Albus doesn’t know. But it stings as Scorpius applies pressure, stings more than the words he’s being told. “Why would we tell you any of that? It’s irrelevant, Albus. You get mad when one of your relatives casts a spell on accident in front of you, in what world would it ever be a good idea to tell you people talk about you?”

“Because–”

“And for the record, if I ever hear anyone talking about you I send them straight to McGonagall,” Scorpius deadpans. Albus almost wishes he’d shout at him, or something. Get a little angrier. It would perhaps make things more digestible if they weren’t so plainly spoken and apparent. “Get outside now and take a glass of water with you. I’m not talking about this while you’re like this and I won’t continue this conversation until you’re outside, drinking water, and James doesn’t have blood on his knuckles. Go.”

⚡

His grandpa once took him outside when he was sleeping over at the Burrow to show him the constellations. They had a Divination textbook, one that belonged to his mother when she was at school, and they sat with a flask of tea between them and a packet of bourbons in Albus’ hands as his grandpa pointed out the stars. As he tried to show him the invisible lines that connected them all.

Albus couldn’t pretend to see them, all he could linger on were the names. Andromeda, Draco, Perseus. Orion, that one rings a bell, too. But, oh, then his grandpa takes Albus’ hand, points it at a cluster just to the left and says, “That one, Al, that one is Scorpius.” And even if Albus didn’t know it then – for he was, after all, only eight years old – he sensed it. And so every night he would pray for crystal clear skies so he could peer out the window and stare up at the vastness above just for the potential chance to see Scorpius.

Now, he is outside the hotel, sitting on the curb with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. He looks up at the sky and he sees Scorpius. Moments later, Albus senses that, too, he is joined by Scorpius. A presence beside him, bones that pop and breath that is heavy and pertinent. A head that rests on Albus’ shoulder and a gaze that follows where Albus’ leads.

“That guy went. I don’t know where, I also, frankly, don’t give a damn,” Scorpius whispers, as if afraid to break the peculiar peacefulness that lingers out here in the cold. Because, goodness, it is so cold. “James’ hand is fine, I think he’s lucky it’s so busy because none of the staff heard the whole thing go down. Otherwise they would’ve kicked everyone out.”

“Maybe that wouldn’t have been such a bad thing.”

Scorpius retracts his head and turns his body so he is facing Albus. Albus stays staring at the sky. He can’t quite bring himself to look at Scorpius right now, to see in his face an amalgamation of sadness and pity and annoyance and every other expression under the sun. He likes Scorpius best when he is smiling, and he knows, right now, a smile is not what he will see.

“People don’t talk about you that much anymore, Albus,” Scorpius says. It’s terribly soft, the two of them lit by the singular circle of the street light above. Scorpius is endless shades of gold and Albus worries he pales in comparison. Worries that the kindness is wasted on someone like him. “Back in the day… sure. Your name cropped up every now and then. It was worse when James was around because he would bite back. A bit like he did in there. It’s just… people being people.”

“It’s people being rude, Scorpius,” Albus murmurs, surprised by his own inability to muster up much of anything. “I have nothing to do with any of them. Why do they care?”

Scorpius shrugs. He reaches down to pull a tiny shard of glass out the bottom of Albus’ shoe, flicking it down the gutter to his side. “Because it’s you, Albus,” he says. “Because your parents are Harry and Ginny and because with that comes far too much baggage that I wouldn’t wish on anybody. It’s the closest thing they’ve had to Golden Age wizarding drama since the War-era students all married off to each other and started having kids.”

“What do they say?”

“That’s not important.”

“What, Scorpius?”

Scorpius groans. “Like… just stupid stuff. Wondering if it was a Dark Magic curse that killed the magic in the Potter family. Or what would a Muggle Potter look like? It’s just stupid school gossip, Albus.”

“But it’s not,” Albus isn’t sure how to make it make more sense. How do you communicate the soul-crushingness of being ousted to someone who has no idea what it feels like? At least not on this level. On a level where you don’t belong anywhere, not really. Too weird to fit in with the Muggles but not magical enough to fit in with the wizards and witches. It’s an impossible game. “It’s just a metaphor for what the rest of my f*cking life is going to be like. I’m never going to escape it. It doesn’t matter how little I get involved, or how few people I talk to about it. My name and my lack of legacy will always precede me no matter how hard I try.”

“People gossip because they’re boring and prejudiced,” Scorpius asserts, so much it’s almost like he believes the words he is saying. “The people who matter don’t care. I don’t care. James doesn’t care. Despite what that guy said, your parents don’t care. I know you will want to disagree with me, but they don’t.”

“Then why don’t they publicly acknowledge me?”

“Seriously?” Scorpius scoffs. He prods a finger into Albus’ knee, tapping it incessantly until he gets Albus to look at him. Then, well. Then he dismantles every single part of the evening into tiny fragments, moments that Albus almost dares to be convinced by. “You and your brother just got in a fight with someone who asked about it and you’re wondering why your parents don’t bring it up? Why would parents ever want to bring attention to something that people will use as an opportunity to be spiteful towards their children? My parents kept me hidden for years because people thought I was Voldemort’s kid. Does that mean they didn’t love me? No. it was the complete opposite. I felt more loved because I knew they were protecting me from something I didn’t have the capacity to understand at the time.

“And maybe you aren’t there yet, and maybe you never will be. Because this is a lot more complicated than anything my parents went through. But at the end of the day, your parents are doing just that: protecting you. James just then protected you. Even Lily does. I do. This whole thing… it’s sh*tty, Albus. And I hate that it troubles you so much. I wish you could see that your worth is not determined by whether or not there is magical power in your veins. You are so much more than the things you are not.”

The light above them flickers. They both look up at the same time. When it restores itself Albus looks at Scorpius but Scorpius is looking at the sky. Albus thinks about the things he could do, the things he should do. He should thank him. Hug him. He should put a hand on Scorpius’ shoulder and look at him earnestly and tell him he doesn’t know where he’d be without him. Should scold him for sitting here with the Potter Squib instead of being in there with the people who deserve his friendship.

“I feel like I’ve ruined this evening for everyone,” is what Albus says instead, because he’s utterly awful at not being the victim.

Scorpius shrugs, then reinstates his head on Albus’ shoulder. Albus, in turn, rests his on top of Scorpius’, temple to crown. “It’s a terrible party anyways,” he says. “Have you been listening to the music they’re playing? It’s awful.”

“How long is it until midnight?”

“Twelve minutes.”

Albus sighs. Says, “I wish I wasn’t a Potter,” because he knows Scorpius won’t berate him for it. Knows Scorpius gets it, deep down, the hurt of it all.

“You don’t mean that,” Scorpius says, because it’s true. “Don’t let bad people make you do bad things, Albus. You’re better than all of them.”

“Why do you put up with me?” Albus asks. As he speaks he smells the richness of Scorpius’ shampoo and it feels to him like the only thing that makes sense in his life. Scorpius Malfoy, this enigmatic being. The only thing Albus looks at and thinks he understands. “Like, God. All I do is make things complicated, I ignored you for three months because I was spiralling about the future and even now all I do is complain about sh*t that has nothing to do with you and you still stick around. I don’t know why.”

“Would you rather I not?”

“Of course not. I don’t know where I’d be without you,” Albus says. He feels Scorpius’ arm loop through his own, and in that moment they’re just two very complicated, very confused boys, staring at the sky, taking in the constellation one of them was named for many moons ago. “You, like, saved my life. Or something like that, but to a much less dramatic effect.”

“Well, then,” Scorpius utters, gently pinching the skin beside Albus’ wrist bone. “You did the same for me, Albus. Even if you don’t see it.”

Perhaps he doesn’t see it now. But Albus thinks he will see it, eventually. Maybe even later that very night, lying beneath his blankets and staring at the ceiling as he wishes for sleep to come over him. As he lies and he thinks about everything going on in his life and he retraces every single step he has taken to get here. Somewhere in that journey he will stumble upon the day he met Scorpius, the conversations they had then that led to the conversations they have now. Then he will have to go back further, to days gone by when he didn’t know this blonde kid. And it’ll be then, really, that he will see it. Those days where he was truly lost. Lonely. Where he imagines Scorpius as being the exact same thing. Then he will understand that what they have going on is very equal, and very necessary for both of them.

“Besides, I put up with you because I love you, by the way,” Scorpius continues, shivering a little in the cold. Albus wonders if the jacket isn’t warm enough, and he resents himself for not thinking about that beforehand. “You are my best friend, you realise that? Someone doesn’t stick around for seven years unless they care deeply. To me, you are just Albus. My favourite person in the world. Nothing else matters as long as you’re nice to me.”

“But I’m not, always.”

“Neither am I,” Scorpius shrugs. Albus peels off his own jacket and tosses it over Scorpius’ shoulders. He’s never been one to feel the cold, but Scorpius always has. “But it’s complicated sometimes.”

“I always intend on being nice to you,” Albus states. “It’s just… loud, sometimes.”

Scorpius smiles. Albus feels it on his shoulder, the way that Scorpius’ mouth turns up and his cheek muscles contract. “I know, Albus. I’ve known for seven years,” he says. Then a little bit of silence, enough for a car to trundle past, followed by a bike, followed by a fox. “Do you want to go back inside, or do you want to go home?”

“What do you want to do?” Albus asks.

Scorpius ponders it for a little. “I want to stay outside, watch some silly little fireworks, and then go home,” he says, to which Albus frowns.

“I thought we were having a sleepover?”

“We are?” Scorpius mutters. It’s something that shouldn’t be a question, but is because the two of them aren’t quite on the same page right now. “Your home is as much a home to me as the Manor.”

Now they are. “Okay, that sounds like a plan,” Albus says, tightening his grip on Scorpius’ arm. “Fireworks, and home.”

The two of them look at the sky and watch as a cloud passes over Scorpius. Not the one down here, though. This one is as bright as he always has been; Albus doesn’t think there is anything that could dull his shine.

⚡

“Bath?” James asks.

Albus is sitting at the desk in his room, laptop screen all bright and blue in his eyes. James has his arms crossed over his chest, leaning against the back of Albus’ chair, chin resting atop of Albus’ head. Albus isn’t sure what the time is, nor does it really matter right now. His fingers are hovering over the trackpad of his laptop, the mouse teasing the edge of a box that says submit.

The two of them are staring at five options listed on the form, Bath at the top and Anglesey at the bottom, three more sandwiched in between. Albus looks at the words and tries to imagine them in real time. Tries to picture the roads that weave through the towns and the landmarks that break them up. The classrooms and the people he doesn’t know yet. Tries to imagine up a life that he hasn’t even had the opportunity to dream about because he’s spent those whimsical years of his life longing for something that was never, ever going to be.

“Yeah,” Albus says. “Their English and Film Studies course just sounds… perfect, honestly. The rest of them are okay, sure. But when I went there, on that school trip, to Bath… something clicked, I guess. I assume it would be similar to how you felt when you got to Hogwarts for the first time. Finding somewhere you felt like you could belong.”

“I wish you felt like you belonged here,” James says. Albus feels him press a kiss to the very top of Albus’ head. “Because you do. Even if you don’t believe it.”

Albus shrugs.

“Now, for the record, my geography isn’t the best,” James continues. “But all those places… they feel pretty far away from here.”

“Surely distance doesn’t matter when you have the literal capacity to teleport.”

James flicks him. “I meant for you, loser,” he says. “Bath… Plymouth… Anglesey, Swansea, Bournemouth. They’re decent chunks of travel away from home.”

“Maybe that’s the point.”

“You don’t have to isolate yourself from this place, Albus. It is as much for you as it is for us,” James says. “Don’t get me wrong. I will always support you in whatever you want to do, and I will come and see you even if you refuse to let me in the door. But I’d hate to watch you turn your back on something that belongs to you just because some sh*tty people in this world have made you doubt yourself.”

Albus shakes his head. “I’m not… I’m not doing it because of that,” he says. His voice is strong enough that it surprises even himself. “I’m doing it because I’ve never once in my life felt like I’ve been in control of who or what I am. When I was born I was the middle Potter child, most likely going to be the mischievous Hogwarts cretin. Then when my magic f*cked off, I became the Potter Squib, the boy who would never be. The boy who was a plague upon his family, his parents, the legacy they’ve worked their whole life to maintain. I’ve never had a say in what people think of me, and the more I linger around here – London, Scotland, everywhere else magic has left a mark – the more of my life I waste away not giving myself a chance.

“I want to be in control of the way people perceive me. I’m sick of something I am not dictating the way that my life is. Does that make sense?” Albus asks.

James drapes his arms around Albus’ shoulders, nodding into him. “Of course it does, little brother,” he says. “It makes complete sense.”

“Bath feels good, you know?”

“I know.”

v. recalibration

Albus does a lot of things in those formative months that see time pass from January to April.

He submits his university application form, for one. He prints off a copy of the list of places he’s applied to and pins it on the fridge door using a novelty magnet they picked up on holiday in Rome many years ago. It’s one of those photograph holding magnets; the frame is a reimagining of the Colosseum moulded out of grey and brown plastic, the inner, bare rectangular space possessing a photo of the five of them hanging about outside, smiling at the camera. Albus looks at the photo and stares at his younger self and wonders what was going on in his mind at that point. Wonders if, even then, he was as vastly unhappy as he tends to be these days.

He revises for mock exams and sits them with varying degrees of success. His English exams go phenomenally, which is expected, really, because he knows A Streetcar Named Desire like the back of his hand, and so writing long and languid essays about the use of props within the text comes to him like a second language. Less can be said about his Spanish exams. Apparently he all but forgot every word in that language as he sat there in the exam hall for the listening part of the examination. The words were all but a jumble, going in one ear and straight out the other. History, too, was fine. His flashcards worked out, in the end, it seems.

He goes to a few parties here and there on the weekends and none of them end in such disaster as the New Year’s one. Sure, nobody knows he’s a Squib there and sure, Scorpius isn’t present to make things interesting. But he has moderate amounts of fun at all of them and in the twilight dusk when he stands outside and talks to these people from other schools whom he has never met before in his life he sees flickers, fragments, of what life could be for him in September. Making harmless conversation with new people, people who may become more important to him than he will ever know.

He lives life exactly how an nineteen year old should. Because, oh, of course. He also turns nineteen in February. February twenty-third, to be exact. Scorpius sends over a card and a small gift all the way from Hogwarts, and his grandmother bakes him a lemon cake, just the way he likes, covered with candles he blows out to the backdrop of a cacophony of applause muddled with a terrible rendition of Happy Birthday to you. As they sit around the table – Albus, his parents, his grandparents, James – Albus finds himself longing for normality more than he thought he would. For a normal birthday party where friends are there and music is playing and he is able to go out and do things that aren’t planned or predetermined by the adults in his life. He longs for a version of his reality where his best friend can be here. And not in Scotland, so very far away.

Albus does a lot of things during that time. But what undercuts all of it, circled and highlighted in bright red strokes, is a deep, insurmountable longing for Scorpius Malfoy.

(He tries to not think about it. Think about the way he misses Scorpius’ head on his shoulder or his stupid shampoo or the threads of bergamot and mint that follow him everywhere. His smile, his laugh. His words. Tries not to think about how he’s been missing Scorpius for seven years, at this point, but, God, has it ever felt this hard?)

⚡

Easter takes a lifetime to arrive. The day to night cycle drags at a pace so feverishly slow Albus begins to wonder if he’s wasting his present wishing for the future.

He is already at the Burrow with his grandparents, setting up sleeping bags and mattresses and dressing beds in Snitch-patterned duvet covers. The kitchen is a ramshackle mix of snacks set up in ceramic bowls and pitchers of lemonade sweating in the squares of sunlight cast on the table by the windowpanes. His grandpa is outside moving picnic tables and hammocks with the subtle flick of his wand and Albus uses that as an excuse to tumble upstairs to throw open all the windows.

There is an ever-present mustiness in the Burrow these days, perhaps because these bedrooms are so infrequently used in this day and age. Albus wonders if, one day in the future, his own childhood house will become something like this. Three bedrooms that become spares, littered with storage boxes his parents toss in there when they can no longer find it in themselves to put things in the loft. If his bedroom, his one sacred space in a home that feels so utterly other to him, will be tainted with magical memorabilia once he isn’t a permanent resident. His posters stripped and his bookshelf emptied only to be filled instead with outdated magical textbooks, Quidditch strategy guides.

He hates the thought. Only a little bit, but it’s still there nonetheless.

Albus hears the crack before he hears the laughter. He all but throws himself back down the staircase, pulling open the door in a similarly dramatic fashion. And then he’s stepping out, only in socks, onto the warm turf and peering past the mass of family members bumbling towards the door until he sees him.

“Hi,” Scorpius says, trunk dragging helplessly behind him. He’s incandescent, always. “You look very – oh, jeez.”

Albus has his arms around Scorpius’ shoulders perhaps a millisecond too quickly, but Scorpius’ are soon looped around Albus’ waist and Albus’ feet are lifted centimetres off the ground and, he thinks, f*ck worrying about being too eager. This is his best friend.

“I’ve missed you so much,” Albus says, voice all sorts of muffled from where his face is pressed into the fabric of Scorpius’ shirt. “I don’t know why.”

“You don’t know why?” Scorpius asks. He sets Albus back down and has a hand brushing his hair back from his face moments later. “I’m offended.”

“No,” Albus laughs, pressing back down one side of Scorpius’ collar. It must’ve upturned at some point during their hug. “I always miss you, obviously. But it was so much this time. It felt longer than normal.”

Scorpius hugs him again. “I love you.”

“Come on,” Albus says, taking Scorpius’ trunk from him. “Before someone tries to steal our room.”

⚡

Rose’s birthday falls on the third day of the Easter holiday. Their time, so far, has been consumed by revision out in the garden, revision in the kitchen over breakfast, revision in their respective rooms. While Rose is practising charms in the safety of her Aunt Ginny’s old bedroom and while Scorpius is out in the shed with his Potions kit, Albus spends the majority of his time tucked into a hammock with his trusty orange Spanish dictionary open to his left, and a notepad open on his right. If it weren’t for the overabundance of sheer stress pouring out of every single one of the kids right now – even Lily, with her OWLs, is pacing more often than usual – Albus knows he would be upset by the sheer presence of magic. It’s in every corner of this place, even seeping into the room he and Scorpius share.

Textbooks left on the floor, wand haphazardly tossed onto the bed while Scorpius showers before they go to sleep. It’s absolutely everywhere and, truthfully, Albus is proud of himself for how well he’s handling the entire thing.

Anyway, with Rose’s birthday comes a day of respite for all of them. Sure, they spend an hour in the morning nose-deep in pages and Albus is sure they will all spend another hour there before they call it a night later, but their parents have essentially banned studying just for the sake of celebration.

“Happy birthday, honey,” his Aunt Hermione is saying, hand to cheek and lips to temple as she sets the birthday cake on the table in front of Rose. “We love you so much.”

Albus glances around the table as they sing for her and as she opens presents and it strikes him then how odd it must be that among a wash of blood-bound relatives, Scorpius is the only non-Weasley there. How he has always been there, really. Since Rose’s first Hogwarts birthday and even now, at her last. And whether it is for his benefit, or whether Rose and Scorpius are actually a lot closer than Albus has ever been privy to know, Albus isn’t sure. All he knows is Scorpius is eternal, probably will be for the rest of their days.

His Aunt Hermione cuts the cake and hands out portions. Albus and Scorpius share a slice, because Albus isn’t keen on fondant icing but Scorpius could eat it by the sheet. Scorpius, similarly, doesn’t like strawberry jam between layers of cake. So the two of them, combined, can just about manage one slice without leaving any waste.

They sit at one of the picnic tables outside drinking lemonade and picking at their slice of cake while Victoire, with one of Teddy’s film cameras, takes photographs of Rose with various people, with the gifts they got her, with flutes of champagne and lemonade and everything else in between.

“How was your birthday?” Scorpius asks, gliding his fork through the layer of fondant to peel it off Albus’ side of the cake.

Albus shrugs. “Nothing like this,” he says, mouth full with a mouthful of vanilla sponge and cream. “A bit quieter. But nice enough, I suppose. My birthdays have been exactly the same since the day I turned eleven, pretty much.”

Scorpius hums. “I’ll be able to spend your birthday with you next year,” he says. “First time ever.”

Albus stabs his cake.

“In Bath,” Scorpius continues. “Or, I guess, wherever you decide to go in the end.”

“You have a lot of faith in yourself to not be busy in February of next year,” Albus says, attempting humour but failing quite dramatically.

Scorpius taps his fork on the edge of the plate. “I mean… I’m just trying to say that I’m not going to be in freaking Scotland, quite literally trapped in a castle with magic gates stopping me from coming to see you. I’m sure I’ll be busy, but no level of busy will stop me from making my way to you.”

Albus thinks. It’s there, right on the tip of his tongue.

He shakes his head. He hums. He picks up another forkful of cake and the two of them remain there, sitting opposite each other on a rotting picnic bench, thinking exactly the same things but not quite crossing into the reality where they can speak of them. Not quite yet. Not quite.

⚡

A few days later – Albus really loses track of time this week – they’re all sitting in the front room playing Exploding Snap. Well, all of them except for Albus. Albus sits on one of the armchairs, Scorpius cross-legged on the floor immediately in front of him.

Scorpius is leaning back against the chair and Albus has his chin resting on top of Scorpius’ head and he wants, so badly, to be able to participate. And he could, if he tried. He could say he wants to play and they would make space for him in the circle and he’d shuffle in right next to Scorpius, a hand of cards dealt to him, and he would play.

But that won’t happen. Because Albus can’t bring himself to say it. To say he wants it. He can’t connect the lines between want and action. It’s as if there is a repulsing magnet point in him stopping his pole from connecting to this other one in front of him. Two Norths trying feverishly to connect but being forced to take a wide berth, prevented by something none of them understand.

Albus thinks he understands, though. He is what stops it. His mind, the things he thinks all the time.

Scorpius slaps down a card, yells Snap!, and inevitably wins the round. They all laugh, oh, how they laugh and, oh, how electric their unfiltered youthful joy is. Albus gently shakes Scorpius’ shoulders, pats his cheek. Scorpius tilts his head back and looks up at him. He smiles, all brightness and goodness and everything Albus used to think the world would be filled with before he was monstrously corrected at the faint age of eleven.

“You’re good at this,” Albus says.

Scorpius shrugs. He’s entirely composed of small moments in times like this, times of comfort and cosiness and quiet. A jigsaw of shrugs and sniffs and scratches on the bridge of his nose. “That’s what happens when you’re captain of the Exploding Snap club at school, I suppose.”

Albus’ eyebrow startles upwards. “You’re in an Exploding Snap club?”

“I’m in many, many clubs.”

“You never mentioned it,” Albus says.

Scorpius hums. “You never asked.”

He turns back to a brand new round of the game and Albus slouches against the back of the armchair. He floats away, very far away, from the conversation at hand. From the vibrations of the game and the laughter and the giddiness everyone else save for him seems to possess.

Albus wonders how long he can go on like this. A half-life. Neither here nor there. Wonders how much longer this path will lead before it forks off and demands from him a decision he doesn’t want to have to make: with them, or without them. With it or without it.

Albus doesn’t know. He really, really does not know.

⚡

Albus loves this time of year. The time when the sky stays bright just a little bit longer and the evenings begin to crisp up with a gentle lathering of warmth long after the sun has started to set. Where the sky burns orange and pink and the birds that flutter about long ways away are nothing but inky paintbrush strokes dirtying the harmony of the expanse hanging over them.

Just after dinner the kids ransacked one of the sheds and pranced towards the bottom of the garden with broomsticks under their arms. They divided themselves into mostly equal teams, James offering to referee because, really, how fair would it be if a professional player resided amongst the participants? Albus sits on a swing dangling from an oak tree branch, legs a few centimetres above the turf, toes of his shoes occasionally brushing through dandelions and kicking their seeds up into the sky.

He watches them play Quidditch. Watches them throw the Quaffles and watches as Scorpius, alert like a cat sensing something lurking within the skirting boards, scours the sky for the Snitch. When he closes his eyes in long, passing blinks he finds himself struck in a daydream, one he doesn’t necessarily want to partake in but one he, similarly, cannot shake off. A daydream where he’s in the stands, he’s wearing a green jumper and has streaks of green and silver face paint over his cheeks. He feels woozy – half from the height and half from the exhilaration of it all – and for a moment or two he forgets about his hypothetical Care for Magical Creatures homework because his best friend is in the sky, on his broomstick, and every single little thing about it is electric.

And then, when Albus opens his eyes, he crash lands here. He toys with a button on the very bottom end of his cardigan. A star-shaped button. He drags his fingers around every single curve, prodding the dull points into his fingertips.

He looks back up at the sky and finds Scorpius. The wind has tossed his hair back off his forehead and his smile is abundant all over his face, in the curve of his lips, sure, but also in the redness of his cheeks and the creases by the sides of his eyes. He has his jumper pushed up to the bend of his elbow and Albus doesn’t need to see the palms of his hands to know the skin is brittle, worn away from endless practice sessions up at that school of his. Further worn from excessive use of his wand, of flicking through textbooks and pulling books off a higher shelf in the library for a second-year who can’t quite reach up there yet.

Albus wonders whether it’s normal to know someone to such lengths. To see them from so far away and still know the very fibres of their being. But then he thinks back to the other day, the Exploding Snap event. How he didn’t know that very simple fact about Scorpius. But, then, he thinks of how there are things Scorpius doesn’t know about him, too. Doesn’t know about the hockey team Albus was part of for a couple of terms at school. Doesn’t know he tutors some kids in English and rallied for a Film Club to be established in the extra-curricular hours.

He oftentimes yearns for a life where they could know absolutely everything about each other. To be able to see each other in these obscure moments that don’t organically come up in conversation. Then, on the other hand, he muses on whether they would be as they are right now were the circ*mstances different. They, perhaps, wouldn’t feel the need to lounge with each other for almost every single day of their respective term time breaks if they’d been in each other’s presence for the whole school year. They maybe wouldn’t sit in the tree house and talk about nonsense all hours of the evening, because what else could they possibly need to talk about when they share a bedroom at school?

Albus wonders if he would have read Persuasion if he was a wizard. If he would know Spanish. If he would’ve watched The Shining that one time as a twelve year old when he had the house to himself and wound up too scared to go to the bathroom before going to sleep. Because, without those things, he wouldn’t be Albus. He most definitely wouldn’t be the Albus that Scorpius is friends with. Wants and chooses to be friends with.

It gets rather exhausting. Always on a tilting scale, debating the intricacies of hypotheticals that will never in his wildest dreams come to fruition. Almost as exhausting as he imagines a game of Quidditch is.

Scorpius’ team wins, of course. He grabs the Snitch right in front of Hugo’s face and they all, one by one, engorged raindrops of various different, languid colours, trickle down to the ground. James collects the broomsticks, Scorpius releases the Snitch for a moment and watches as it whizzes around, enjoying a few more moments of freedom, before being tucked back into the antique box of supplies that lives under the sofa in the Burrow’s living room.

Albus kicks the floor and sets himself swinging again. He watches as Scorpius’ fingers hook under the bottom hem of his jumper, as his arms crisscross over themselves, as he peels the jumper off and uses it to wipe his face clean of sweat. His undershirt, a white one that Albus vaguely recognises as belonging to James, is sodden, patches toning flesh-coloured as the fabric sticks to his skin. Look away, Albus thinks.

(He never listens to his well-intentioned thoughts.)

Scorpius waves to the gaggle of Weasley-Potter-Granger variants and walks, head down, eyes cast, all the way over to Albus. Something shifts – the weather, a cloud in the sky, the beat of Albus’ heart – and it indicates the start of something completely different.

Albus digs his heels into the dirt and brings himself to a stop just as Scorpius stands in front of him, all long legs and toned arms and a tall frame blocking the setting sun from blinding Albus any further.

“Well,” Albus says. “Hi.”

Scorpius smiles. “Hi,” he says, slinging the jumper over his shoulder. “You look very content over here.”

“I’m coping,” Albus muses, lifting a hand to gesture to the neckline of Scorpius’ undershirt. “You look warm.”

“Roasting,” Scorpius says. He pauses for just a moment, lifting his hands above his head to stretch out his muscles and eke out the weariness in his bones.

Albus swallows. “And yet you’re here, talking to me, instead of having a shower.”

“I’ve been separated from you for hours–”

“–it was not hours.”

“Forgive me for wanting to look at you for a little while before I have to go do boring, life maintenance things.”

Albus scoffs. He drags the toes of his shoes through the dirt, etching into the surface random spirals and circles and love hearts. Scorpius watches him do it, the ends of his hair sticking together, damp strands bonded by lingering beads of sweat.

Albus draws an A, then he draws an S, and then, finally, he looks back up at Scorpius. “Boring life maintenance things?” he asks, his fingers trickling up and down the braided rope that connects the swing base to the branch overhead. The rope that keeps him floating. “I’d classify talking to me as that.”

Scorpius’ arms lock over his chest. They push the material of his shirt further into his skin, more and more patches fading to shades of peach as the fibres dampen and his skin bleeds through. “As boring?”

“Of course.”

“Ah, Albus Potter,” Scorpius sighs, all melodic and wonderful and etchings of silver among a plain, grassy expanse. He sounds peculiarly calm. Albus had anticipated frustration, a bit more resistance. He is met, instead, with coy compliance. “How wrong you are.”

Albus hums. He thinks about it for a moment. As he looks at Scorpius and lets his gaze fully traverse the lines of his body, all the way down to his well-worn sports shoes and all the way back up to the perfect arch of his eyebrows. The way the skin around it is deckled in shadows cast by the leaves overhead. One eye is bright blue, lit only by the sunset, while the other, a perfect leaf-shaped cut out lying over the left hand side of Scorpius’ face, looks greyer. A darker grey. Albus thinks about it, then he says, “You look really nice today,” and, amazingly, the world doesn’t implode.

On Scorpius’ face, a small smile. Just the left corner quirking up. “I do?”

“You look nice most days, obviously,” Albus corrects, his fingers busying themselves once again with his cardigan buttonholes. “But… I don’t know. You look moderately more happy than usual. Your eyes are all sparkly.”

Scorpius nods. Says, “Because they’re looking at you,” and something, somewhere in the world, explodes. Albus is sure of it. Something in space is perturbed. The astronomical definition, of course. A celestial body sent a little off-course, for reasons currently undetermined.

“Oh, God,” Albus scoffs, coughing and laughing away the moments of silence that seemed to last so long. “That was atrocious.”

“You loved it,” Scorpius says, lifting a leg to gently kick at the swing and start Albus rocking back and forth again. “You love me.”

“Scorpius Malfoy get your sweaty paws away from me before I hit–”

Scorpius continues forward, though. He puts his hands on each parallel rope and goes to lean in but accidentally misplaces his weight and, rather, falls through the gap, falls onto Albus, flips them both over the base of the swing and leaves them lying in the dusty dirt below. As Scorpius sits up, a picture of panic on his face, the swing rocks back and hits him in the back of his head, just for good measure.

“Oh, Merlin,” Scorpius says. Albus knows he’s truly panicking by that alone. Merlin. It’s something he tries to not say unless he absolutely cannot help it. “I didn’t mean – I forgot you were on a swing. Are you okay?”

Albus is laughing, shaking his head. He sits up and rakes his fingers through Scorpius’ hair, brushing out the dirt and picking out stray pieces of grass that have wound their way up in there. He licks the pad of his thumb and swipes it over the top of Scorpius’ cheekbone, over a tiny weeping cut that now staggers through his skin. He uses a leaf to clean the blood off his own hand, and when he looks back at Scorpius they are, to put it bluntly, a little too close. “Shut up,” he whispers, because Scorpius is close enough the words don’t warrant anything louder. “I’m fine. You’re absolutely mad, you know that?”

Scorpius shrugs. He pools his jumper in his lap, pinching the centre of his undershirt to pull the material away from his skin. “You wouldn’t have me any other way,” he says. Albus can’t argue it, wouldn’t even do so anyway. Why would he? It’s the truest thing that has ever been spoken. “Half agony?”

“Half hope. Always, half hope,” Albus assures. “Even if it nearly f*cking kills me.”

He stands up first, holds out his hands for Scorpius. Scorpius takes them, leverages his weight onto the balls of his feet as Albus pulls him up. They dust down their trousers and check their palms for any more wounds, and as they begin the meagre walk back to the Burrow, back to the chaos of the whole thing, Albus wonders what will happen to that celestial body that got moved. Wonders if it means anything for him, down here. Just an ant in this big, bold world. Just a simple ant trying to make sense of it all.

⚡

That night they eat homemade pie. They pack up their supplies, the Hogwarts kids digging through the laundry baskets to find their freshly washed robes. They slip their wands into their trunks and stack their textbooks in neat piles to the side.

Albus tosses his dictionary into his rucksack. He is careful with his battered copy of Streetcar, gently sliding it into the book sleeve his brother got him for Christmas one year, before tucking it into the very back compartment. He has no wand to find, no quill to put away. He finishes packing the earliest, and so he busies himself with perusing the dusty spines of his grandpa’s bookshelf as a way to block out the noise from behind him.

“You don’t have to do this again,” it’s his mum, by his side. She has her hands in her pockets and her hair tied back into the tiniest ponytail Albus thinks he’s ever seen. “You won’t have to put up with it anymore.”

Albus nods. “I know,” he says. “I can’t wait.”

Ginny kisses him on the temple. She goes to leave but Albus hugs her instead, face pressed into the softness of her jumper, arms wrapped so tightly around her he is surprised she doesn’t suffocate. They stand there for a little while, mother and son, bound together by something unspoken and yet never more greatly understood than it is in that specific moment.

“I’m really sorry,” Albus murmurs. “For the last few months. Since September.”

He feels, rather than sees, Ginny shake her head. “No, honey,” she says. “I’m sorry. I have no reasoning for it, no excuses. I have nothing, which is perhaps still not enough. I’ll be better from now on, okay? We can both be better.”

Albus nods. He is surprised to feel tears on his cheeks when he lets his mum go. She wipes them away with the cuff of her jumper. “When they’re all gone,” she continues, one hand underneath Albus’ chin, keeping the two of them looking at each other. “You can tell me about Bath. We can go… together, or with your dad. I want to see it.”

“I want you to see it too,” Albus says. “I’ve wanted you to want to see it.”

“I do, honey,” Ginny assures. “I really, really do.”

Albus believes her. Believes everything she says. Even believes in himself, too. Believes that he can be better, for her and for himself. For his future, and whatever it will entail. Maybe it won’t last long, maybe it won’t even see out the rest of the evening. But just then, standing in front of his mother, feeling seen for the first time in months, Albus believes.

vi. two satellites colliding

They’re by reeds, cast out next to the long grass. Albus and Scorpius, the two of them. Scorpius has a rucksack slinked over his shoulders and he is looking wistfully up at the sky above and the only noise that passes around them is the gentle whispering breeze caressing the reeds, rustling them about, sending them ticking side to side like the singular hand on a metronome. Albus’ arms are crossed over his chest and he stares at the endless expanse that is Scorpius’ back as his muscles adjust to the weight of his book bag and he spins languidly on his heels. Circles and circles, taking everything in. This landscape he’s been privy to for almost seven years now.

“You’re so lucky to have a place like this,” Scorpius muses.

Albus scoffs, albeit quietly. “Coming from the boy who lives in a mansion.”

“A mansion haunted and silenced by the loss of my mother is so utterly incomparable to something like this,” Scorpius says, gesturing to the Burrow. Albus glances at it, looks at the shoebox windows all bright and golden, lit from within by various lanterns and candles. It’s a discombobulated sort of building, but even from a distance you can still feel the warmth of it. The friendliness. “I’m so grateful that your family let me come.”

“Any home of mine is a home of yours, too,” Albus says. He steps over a little closer to secure a button on Scorpius’ bag that had popped open. “And, for what it’s worth, I find the Manor as warm and welcoming as anything else. Possibly even more than my own home.”

Scorpius is looking at him in that way. His cheeks sucked inwards, little concave dips where the fullness usually is, and Albus knows he’s biting down on the skin. His eyes are sighs personified and Albus wonders how much one can take of all this before they get exhausted.

“Don’t look at me like that, S,” Albus says, pushing Scorpius in a way he hopes is interpreted as playful but knows, deep down, comes off much more desperate. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Albus rolls his eyes. “Weren’t you supposed to be Apparating away from here, like, ten minutes ago?”

“That was before my best friend started talking with the expression of a kicked little puppy dog. You expect me to walk away when you’re being all melancholy?” Scorpius asks.

Then they’re toe to toe again, literally. Scorpius’ boots tap against Albus’ trainers, and Albus dares to joke and rocks back so he can settle his rubber toes on top of Scorpius’ faux leather shoes. To gain a few centimetres so they are ever so slightly closer in height, but Albus still has to look up. Always looking up at Scorpius, seeing a face he knows so well and loves so deeply though with every glance he swears he spots something new. A different freckle, a new crease by the side of his eye from where he has smiled so much.

“I guess I just thought you’d be used to it by now,” Albus says. It’s very gentle, very delicate. As if he’s speaking in the presence of a card tower, afraid that a little too much breath will send it hurtling to the ground. “I’m always sad. You know this.”

Scorpius’ mouth does an odd thing. It quirks, and it’s as if he wants to say something but he holds back. Steps back, quite literally. The hypothetical card tower shatters and Albus can’t decide whether to desperately try and rebuild it or to leave the cards to dance away in the breeze.

Scorpius makes the decision first, though, saying, “So,” as he twirls on the spot again, his eyes settling back on Albus after his complete revolution.

“So,” Albus repeats. “I guess I’ll see you at the platform, then? Before you go back?”

Scorpius nods; it is all so very strange. “I guess so.”

“Cool,” Albus says. It’s slow and cautious and drags on a little too long and even as he’s standing there Albus thinks to himself that, even for him, this is awful social interaction on his behalf. Not his best work in the slightest.

“Cool?” Scorpius asks. Sharp, daring. “Really?”

Albus is lost. It scarcely happens that he feels like this around Scorpius, as if there is somewhere he can misstep. They’re usually always walking the same path, and in the times they are not they will still only be mere millimetres away from each other, fingertips constantly in range of touching. Conversations with Scorpius Malfoy are just about the safest things for Albus in this world; feeling like this is more foreign to him than anything.

“Albus,” Scorpius continues. The reeds rustle, goosebumps all over Albus’ arms. He begins to wish he had brought a jumper out with him. “Are we really going to continue like this?”

“Like what?”

Scorpius groans. Lets his head tip back, Adam’s apple all contoured by the distant wash of lantern light coming from the Burrow. He looks butterscotch out here, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Then he restores his posture and looks at Albus and the illusion goes away as quickly as it had come. “Pretending like it didn’t happen,” he says, and Albus knows where this is going. He dreads it, but he knows. “I feel like I’m walking on egg shells around you… I never in my life thought I’d be uncomfortable around the person I care about most in this world.”

“I’m not pretending.”

“Yes, you are,” Scorpius continues, a little desperately. Ragged at the edges. Aghast in a way Albus doesn’t think he’s ever seen him before. “You ignored me for three months as a way to pretend like it didn’t happen and now, when you’re forced to see me, you still won’t talk about it. You won’t even… you slept on the freaking floor instead of sharing a bed with me. How is that not pretending?”

Albus stumbles over various words he can’t verbalise, thoughts he can’t articulate. Because he’s running through a maze with no end in sight, simply bumping into dead ends and when he turns to retrace his steps he comes face to face with the very thing he was running from in the first place. “I just thought you’d be more comfortable–”

“I f*cking love you, Albus,” Scorpius says. Penny dropped. New land has been conquered and both of them know – it’s in their eyes, in the glassiness and the deer in headlights-ness – that there is no coming back from wherever this leads. “And not in the way that everyone thinks I do. In a friend's way.”

Albus watches him think over the words. Watches his face scrunch up, his nose all upturned and dismayed. Watches him shake his head, one rucksack strap falling off his shoulder. Albus, on any other day, would reach over and reinstate it. But he worries that right here, during this particular night, he would get a little burned.

“Well, that’s not entirely true, because I loved you as a friend first. But now it’s… it’s so much more. It’s so much louder, and intense, and even when I don’t want to think about it I have no choice because it demands to be felt. When you’re here, when you’re not. When I’m here, when I’m in that stupid castle.”

“Scorpius…”

“And either you’re completely blind and really have never noticed or you’re decidedly acting like you don’t see it,” the way Scorpius breaks it down borders on spellbinding. It reads to Albus as almost humorous; he has spent a decent chunk of this break wondering whether they actually know each other as well as he has always thought and now, here Scorpius is, completely dissecting everything and showing in big bold strokes that he knows. He sees. “Because, surely, it’s obvious? You think I come here every year to spend time with your relatives? Merlin, no. I see them every day at school. I come here for you, I’ve been coming here for you since the day we met at that stupid birthday party.”

It’s coming. It. They both know it. Scorpius’ chest is heaving and Albus’ has never been so still, and it takes him back to the beach and the whimsy of it all. The way, one moment, it was just salt breeze in his hair and the stagnant bitterness of dried seaweed flying through the air, and it was something so normal and so familiar and so safe. And then there was it and a door all but opened in front of him and took both of them down to a brand new path of life and Albus still feels as if he’s stumbling about down there. Tripping over his feet in the Edges, in Narnia.

“I kissed you, Albus,” Scorpius says, and with it Albus feels it. The way his chest tightened, the way it felt so normal and so right and so completely opposite to how he thought it would’ve felt when he used to let himself wonder about it late at night. Just the maybe of it all. Because he never thought it would transpire. Never imagined it would cross from daydream to reality, from suggestions to genuine impressions. “And maybe I got the wrong end of the stick, but at that moment it felt like you enjoyed it as much as I did. Was it really that repulsive in retrospect that you’d rather ignore it than talk to me about it?”

Albus perks up, offended on his own behalf at that. “Scorpius, no. It was… it was the furthest thing from repulsive.”

“Then why won’t you acknowledge that it happened?” Scorpius asks.

They pass the ball of frustration between them and in between bursts of agitation Albus almost finds himself laughing because, honestly, they have never communicated as poorly as they are right now. It’s almost like keeping secrets and hiding half your self from your best friend will never actually do you well in the long run. “Because if I acknowledge it and it becomes real then it means I’m letting you trap yourself in something that you shouldn’t have to waste your life in.”

“Albus, I’ve told you a thousand times that I stick around because I want to,” Scorpius says. It’s rough around the edges and firm in a way that takes even Scorpius back, and maybe they’re coming to the crux of some deep set issue here. Maybe they’re stumbling upon a path they haven’t traversed together. All overgrown and dark and intimidating.

“You know how people talk about me. You admitted that much at that New Year’s party… what people say, what they think, the way they treat someone just because they’re a Squib,” Albus thinks he feels a little bit of rain in the air, half-there suggestions of droplets that tap the surface of the brook just to their left. It’s as if when he says Squib the world starts to open up, starts to match the energy being exchanged on the ground. “You really want to get tangled up in all that? In the politics of it? In living a life of halves, because if you’re with me you can’t reach your magical potential? I’m planning a life completely detached from magic, Scorpius. I want to get the f*ck out of here and never come back unless I absolutely have to. And I cannot, in good faith, drag you into that. It is a waste of your potential, of your breath, and of your life.”

Scorpius shakes his head. He has his fists balled up, nails curving crescent-moons into the palms of his hands. “It’s not up to you to say what will and will not be worth my while,” he says. Even in times like these, when they’re somewhat at each other’s throats, there still isn’t much ire tangled in either of their voices. “What if I say I want that, too?”

“But you don’t,” Albus insists. “You’re going to Healing school. You told me that before you kissed me and that’s what started this whole mess in the first place.”

“Healing school? That tipped you over the edge?”

“Yes!” it’s a yell, but not a shout. It’s some sort of manifestation of years’ worth of difficulties Albus hasn’t let himself feel. Things he’s buried deep, hidden below the idiosyncratic layers of his personality, of the very things that formed the foundation of his friendship with Scorpius. “Because it was verbal confirmation that you plan on carving out a reputation and a life for yourself intrinsically linked with magic in its rawest form, and for as much as I wish I could, I cannot be part of it. It’s not fair to you or to me. I am so ridiculously sad every day I wake up and have to look at magical textbooks on shelves, when I see someone’s wand lying on the coffee table. How can we ever navigate a life that will be like balancing on a tightrope for the rest of our days?”

The rain intensifies. It’s visible. You can hear it on the ground, on the material of Scorpius’ backpack. It seeps through Albus’ canvas shoes and he half expects someone to shout to him from the doorway and beckon him back inside before he catches a cold.

Scorpius, holding tightly onto the one remaining backpack strap slung over his shoulder, says, “So you planned on throwing me in the dirt the minute you left school, then?” and Albus kind of wants to die. “Seven years of friendship down the f*cking drain?”

He blinks. Once, twice. He could go for a third time but a droplet lands in his eye and he has to wince instead. “What?”

“Say I didn’t kiss you, say you didn’t spiral. Say we both got to the end of our final years and I still went to Healing school and you went to Bath or wherever the hell else you’re running off to,” Albus wants to bite back at the implication of running off, but he can’t. What would he even say to refute it? His exact reasoning to James for choosing those places all boiled down to something akin to running away. “How would we have stayed friends? I’m assuming that wasn’t part of your plan.”

“It’s not the same thing at all and you know it,” Albus says.

“How? How is it not the same?” There’s exasperation all in it. In the way Scorpius looks at him, head tilted to the side. Eyes wide and bright and blue despite the misery in the air and the darkness in the sky. They’re clutching at the same thing, desperate for the same thing, Albus thinks. They are so very close to hitting the nail on the head. “This isn’t a normal friendship and you know it. Nothing we do is normal. The only thing that separates what we have from being something more is the lack of a label. Something that I never pushed for because I never thought it would be reciprocated.”

“This is getting us nowhere, Scorpius.”

Scorpius, with a bit of snark so unexpected Albus takes a literal step back, asks, “Was your plan to just use me for seven years of friendship, then? To make you less lonely in the summer holidays?”

Though, it seems as if he regrets the ferocity of it quite soon after. His shoulders crumble into themselves and his free hand is all up in his hair, fiddling with his parting, pinching his bottom lip. Albus thinks they’re in a parallel universe for a moment or two; how is this Scorpius who is saying these things? How is this Albus who is taking it without fighting back? He’s usually first in line with some witty remark. But maybe that’s it. He’s used to these sorts of things with Scorpius being underlined with humour, with some sarcasm that braids their conversation together with threads of joy. There’s not a lot of that going on right now.

“Seriously?” Albus asks. “Is that how lowly you think of me?”

Scorpius shrugs. Albus fights the urge to glare. “I’m just feeding back to you exactly what you just said to me,” he says, a lot less bite and a little more dismay. Confusion. It settles over Albus like a scratchy blanket, all the guilt and regret. The meanness which he had possessed in saying the things he did. The things that were unspoken. “I want to know what your plan was for us before I kissed you.”

“I thought…” Albus starts. Though he can’t finish. He shakes his head, bits of rain flicking from the tips of his hair as he does so. “I don’t want to tell you, because you’re already mad at me and I don’t want to make it worse.”

Scorpius frowns. “I’m sure it can’t possibly get worse than being told your best friend of seven years intended on cutting you off the minute he got the opportunity to,” he says, and a bit of Albus dies there and then.

“I didn’t have a plan, Scorpius. Because I thought you’d go to Healing school and make new, cooler, wizard friends who you have more in common with and that you’d not need me anymore and you’d be able to live out a better version of your life without the burden of a Squib clinging to your coattails,” Albus abhors the way he himself says Squib. As if it’s dirty, something to be scowled at. It goes against everything he’s spent his life believing, spent his days fighting to make everyone else see. He betrays himself as much as he betrays Scorpius and as much as he betrays their friendship. Honestly, he thinks, if he were to look in a mirror right now he doesn’t believe he would recognise the person looking back at him. “Okay? Are you happy now? I didn’t have a plan because I knew I wouldn’t need one.”

“Why wouldn’t I need you? Scratch that, actually: why wouldn’t I want you?”

“I can’t make sense of my nonsense, Scorpius. All I know is I feel this sh*t and I try and understand it but I can’t,” Albus says, and something fizzles out. Not the love, not the pleading nor the desperation or the fire to fight for something neither of them knows the meaning of. But some of the anguish, the hint of betrayal that had just now been there in the creases between Scorpius’ eyes. The intensity of it all.

There is, instead, peace. Some sort of understanding. A bridge, crossed. A lock, opened.

“I would never grow tired of you. Ever,” Scorpius states, suddenly stepping in front of Albus and prodding a finger into his chest, into the fabric of his shirt, right over his heart. “I want you in my life forever. Has that not been clear the entire time we’ve been friends?”

“Sort of?” Albus admits. He wonders if Scorpius can feel the rattling of Albus’ heart against his ribcage. Wonders if the beats pass through his skin and thrum into Scorpius’ fingertip, heavy on Albus’ shirt, all but penetrating into his soul. “But it became crystal clear when you kissed me. And I guess it scared me, because for as much as I can pretend to be okay about everything when I’m around you – because you make me feel okay – I can’t lie and say the fact I’m a Squib doesn’t get in the way of every single decision I make. You kissing me, and me liking it, was just… an opening to something that scared me because I knew my Squib-ness would make things too convoluted.”

For the first time in a little while, Scorpius laughs. Airy, soft. Bewildered. “I don’t care about complexities,” he says. “All I care about is you.”

“You don’t need to be involved in my mess,” Albus says, circling back to the sh*t that started this conversation to begin with.

“It is our mess, Albus,” Scorpius mutters, heavy emphasis on our. “I got myself involved in this.”

Albus blinks. He is startled at how close they are again, how he looks up and Scorpius is right there. Within touching distance, where any breath Albus makes that is too ragged will roll over Scorpius’ cheeks and fluff up his hair and blow that stray eyelash on the bridge of his nose off his skin. “I’m so confused, Scorpius,” he admits. Quiet, hesitant, and gentle. “Are we fighting right now or not?”

“I don’t know.”

He thinks. As they look at each other, the rain now pouring around them, Albus is all but certain they’re thinking the exact same thing. It’s in the quiver of their eyebrows and the desperate twitching of their hands from where they rest at their sides.

f*ck it, Albus thinks. He has nothing to lose; he knows, deep down, Scorpius isn’t going anywhere.

“Will you be mad at me if I kiss you right now?” Albus asks. It’s the boldest sentence he thinks he’s ever posed in life and yet, in spite of that, the words feel so right. They roll off his tongue and they’re splattered with a semblance of confidence Albus doesn’t feel should belong to him. And yet, somehow, it does. “It feels wildly inappropriate all things cons–”

Then, all at once, there are hands on his cheeks and there’s mint and bergamot all over him, drowning him, suffocating him, and it takes Albus a moment to register it all but when he does he manages to find his grip on Scorpius’ backpack, of all things. One hand clutching the material of that and the other trying to decide whether to rest on Scorpius’ waist or around his shoulders and, really, for something he’s thought about a weird amount of times over the years (what, can’t a boy ponder his best friend sometimes?) he feels grossly underprepared.

Which is, in hindsight, probably how it should be. Authentic and a little messy and a bit like two people who are trying to figure out how to walk around each other. Albus always thought that people who were good together fit together perfectly. Like a finely broken piece of ceramic, or marble split down the centre, where you can press the two pieces together and they lie there, seamless. But this doesn’t feel like that. Scorpius’ palms are calloused and worn and feel ever so slightly rough against Albus’ cheeks and there are no perfect curves or crevices anywhere along Scorpius’ torso for Albus’ hands to find residence, and it takes Albus a moment to get over the panic – isn’t it meant to be easy? Isn’t it? – and realise it is fine.

Because, if there are more opportunities in the future, he’s sure he will find those spaces. That’s the whole point.

It’s raining on them and the air is rich with a culmination of dirt and brook water and the re-emerging scents of their conditioners as their hair soaks and Albus couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess at how much time has lapsed between Scorpius interrupting him – kissing him – and the two of them parting. Looking at each other, sort of seeing where the other has landed. Albus is, quite frankly, amazed he seems to have landed on two feet, that he is able to look at Scorpius without his vision dizzying, without colours flashing all over his eyes.

In keeping with his whole attitude this evening, all the mental f*ck it’s he’s been thinking, he kisses Scorpius again. Twice. He ponders a third but thinks that might be pushing his luck, so Scorpius does it for him instead.

“I still think this is perhaps your worst idea ever,” Albus says. The tips of their noses are almost brushing, and cutting across the palm of his hand lies a rectangle of embossed redness from where he had clutched the strap of Scorpius’ rucksack to keep himself upright. And Scorpius goes to roll his eyes so Albus flicks his cheek and continues, though he knows his words are wasted because Scorpius will never agree with him. “Me? Really? You know what people will say. What they will call you.”

Scorpius hums. His nose is all scrunched, his lips pressed together. He shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders, a thousand little movements that are so vibrant to Albus. So visible and audible as he hears the crinkle of Scorpius’ jacket, as he watches a raindrop tremble down his cheekbone. “I’ve been called worse, Albus.”

“But what about in the future, when you’re trying to get work and–”

Scorpius shushes him. Stares at him. “Respectfully, Albus, since I know this is something you overthink a lot, I don’t give a f*ck about the future,” it’s blunt and bold and wonderful and Albus wants to roll his eyes but he can’t bring himself to do it. Can barely stand the thought of looking anywhere but Scorpius, even though an eye roll would feel really good right about now. “We are literally nineteen years old. The future does not matter. At least, not in the way you’re thinking about.”

And Albus tries to believe it. Deep down, somewhere lost in the abyss of his soul, he thinks he does. Or, at least, he thinks there is the capacity to believe it. To Albus, someone whom the present has always felt painful for, the future is something he dreams of. Regularly. Days of mystery, days where he is able to detach from the preconceived ideas of himself and etch out something new. He hates to think of tarnishing the future for someone else just by being around, by being something nobody else wants him to be.

“Albus,” Scorpius continues. His fingertips are ever so slightly damp, rain tainted, as he brushes a few strands of hair out of Albus’ face. He leaves a little trail of rainwater over Albus’ forehead, an invisible path under which the depths of Albus’ skin burns. “I don’t know how to make it make more sense to you.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Albus admits. “And I wish it was easy for me to say yes.”

Scorpius wets his lips with his tongue. “Why isn’t it?”

“Because I’m me.”

“That’s exactly what I want,” Scorpius murmurs, a barely there whisper. It’s all it needs to be, though. Albus is already so close he can hear every single breath.

“Okay,” Albus says, at long last. “Fine, okay.”

Scorpius smiles. “Okay? So, yes?” he asks, somehow managing to step even closer. If they were planets – or one planet and one moon, maybe – they would perhaps be crashing together at this point. Orbits destroyed as some undeniable force drags them together. Perturbs them.

“Yes,” Albus’ words are measured. A teaspoon of salt being added to beaten egg yolks and sugar. “But you can change your mind whenever you want–”

“I won’t,” Scorpius interrupts.

“–and I’ll try to not be all Albus-y about it.”

Scorpius’ eyebrow dances up. It’s tantalising to watch the emotions etch into his features, the way his lips quiver and his smile lines come and go like tossing and turning tides. “I like it when you’re all Albus-y about things,” he says, a hand underneath Albus’ chin to tilt his entire face up. “It’s cute. You’re cute, among a plethora of other adjectives.”

Albus hums. He isn’t sure if he’s still alive at this point; but, on the contrary, it’s been a very peaceful death if he is in fact no longer of this world. “I feel like it should be weird hearing you call me cute,” he says. “But it’s not.”

“Because it’s us, Albus,” Scorpius states; Albus kind of wants to kiss him again. “It was pretty inevitable, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know, maybe,” he muses. “I’ve spent a lot of the last six years in a constant state of anxiety, so. Things are a little blurry to me.”

“Mhm. I can tell,” Scorpius teases, and Albus finally finds it in himself to roll his eyes.

Scorpius’ laughter which follows is all shades of vibrant amongst the horrors of the weather around them. Albus is sodden, Scorpius’ backpack has darkened at least two hues. His boots are shiny whereas Albus’ canvas trainers need tossing in front of the fire for three hours or so to stand a chance at drying. There is a raindrop loitering on Scorpius’ cheek, and Albus sees it as his civil duty to kiss it off.

“You looked really fit the other day,” he says, catching Scorpius by surprise with the suddenness of it. “After Quidditch. Just… you know. Thought you’d like to know. In case it wasn’t obvious.”

Scorpius is smiling at him in a way Albus doesn’t even recognise. Which is quite an accomplishment, all things considered. There’s a softness about it, a lightness. Then he says, “It was pretty obvious,” all teasing and gentle and like a sparkler heating up and crackling specs of light into the air above. “But thank you.”

“You know what, never mind. I take it back,” Albus says, gently flicking Scorpius’ nose and extravagantly walking away as if to underscore his point. “Get off my land before I banish you.”

Scorpius laughs. Breathy, happy. He follows Albus with arms crisscrossed over his chest, their footfalls silent on the sodden turf they travel across. “Your land?” he asks. “I’m about eighty percent confident your grandmother would choose me over you any day of the week.”

Albus spins on his heels, rocks up onto his tiptoes and looks right at him. All cross-eyed and everything, summoning visions of real Scorpius and a hint of a ghostly second Scorpius right next to him. “You know, just because you’re my boyfriend now doesn’t mean you’re exempt from being kicked in the shin.”

“Is that what I am?” Scorpius asks, fingers hooking into the belt loops on Albus’ jeans. Roots him in place, a statue beneath the pouring rain. God, Albus thinks, they’re both going to come down with something at this rate.

“Is that what you want to be?”

Scorpius tuts. “Well, of course,” he says, somehow pulling Albus just a little bit closer so he can kiss him again. Will it get old? Albus doesn’t know. Will this ever feel real? Also another thing Albus doesn’t know. “Though, I’d like to revisit the definition and make it so I can’t be kicked in the shin.”

Albus hums. “Jury’s out, unfortunately,” he sighs. There's a lot he doesn’t know at the moment, but he thinks he doesn’t really mind. Against his best intentions and contrary to the way he has led his life thus far, he really doesn’t mind the mystery of it. “I guess I can put that clause on hold for a few days.”

Scorpius beams through the darkness, through the rain and through the skies opening up around them. “You’re my favourite person,” he declares. Albus loops his arms around his shoulders and lets Scorpius lift him up onto his tiptoes. As if he’s soaring in the rain, or something like that. “In this whole, entire world, and beyond.”

“I know,” Albus murmurs, right into the crook of Scorpius’ neck. Somewhere he didn’t think he’d ever be, but a place he is, similarly, in no rush to vacate. “Ditto.”

⚡

Albus can’t make it to the platform.

He has an annoyingly lately scheduled in-person revision session at school on the day the train leaves. Sure, it’s for Spanish, his worst subject, and sure, it will end up being very helpful. But it very inconveniently gets in the way of his whole saying-goodbye-to-Scorpius thing, so he spends the resulting day feeling stupendously rotten.

While he’s slumped in a classroom listening to a Spanish-spoken tape being played over and over again – the words slowly making more sense but still, beneath it all, passing through him like a ghost – he knows, somewhere way North of here, hurtling through the British countryside and gorging on snacks surrounded by his friends, is Scorpius. Scorpius who he did not get to see, to hug.

Who he will not get to see for six weeks now. Honestly, life is hard.

When he gets home after a tumultuous bus ride the house is still empty. Kicked under the sofa, scuffed on all sides and dust jacket torn, is a textbook Lily has left behind. One she will, inevitably, write home asking for. Care for Magical Creatures, Albus thinks he sees on the spine, a subject she goes on about so much it almost makes Albus consider suffocating himself in a pillow or–

It hits him.

Writing.

Albus wanders into the kitchen and pulls open one of the various junk drawers, digging through it until he finds a piece of parchment and a tea-stained envelope. He looks at the windowsill, at the little hatch through which the post owls stick their beaks to drop letters and take treats as payment. At the slots where one can line up envelopes to be taken away.

Albus sits down at the dining table, on the chair the Potter kids broke years and years ago, and he does something he hasn’t done for a very long time. Something he didn’t think he would ever really do again: he writes.

vii. the letter chronicles

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viii. reunion

Albus finishes his last exam on a wonderful Thursday. He empties his locker for the last ever time, stuffing leftover pieces of paper and empty water bottles into the base of his rucksack. He leaves the locker key dangling in the door, and somewhere deep in him, there is a little twist of a knife in his heart. Of the seven years’ worth of days he’s spent walking up here, opening this door, organising books and letters and pencils and everything else among the abyss.

He says bye to some of his friends, though he knows he’ll see some of them on results day or possibly at a party here or there, but he doesn’t promise anything to any of them. He has more pressing plans for his summer, anyway.

Albus walks out the door, into splendid sunlight, and as he gets to the top of the path and walks through the gates he sees them. Standing by the bus shelter, rocking a little side to side as they wait for him.

His parents. Harry and Ginny. Harry has a bottle of lemonade in his hands and his mother has a paper book bag in hers, and as Albus walks towards them they both smile. They hug him and they hand him the goods – inside the book bag, it turns out, is a small leather-bound collection of Austen’s best quotes – and Albus can’t even pretend to not be surprised.

“What…?” Albus starts. “What is this?”

“This is something we should’ve started doing a very long time ago,” Harry says. “How was your last exam?”

Albus shrugs, still a little lost for words. “It was… good. Yeah, it was really good,” he says. “It was on poetry, which I like to think I’m pretty good at.”

“Good,” Ginny says. She kisses his temple and, in what is a very strange experience for all three of them, they get on the next bus directing them all straight home. Albus has to pay the fare for all three of them, confirming to him that they did not get to the gate by Muggle transportation, though he finds himself not minding too much. All that matters, at the end of the day, is they were there. “So you think you’re going to pass?”

Albus nods. “I do.”

“And get into Bath?” Harry asks.

Albus sips his lemonade. “I think I will get into Bath.”

⚡

He’s on the Platform.

He’d be lying if he tried to say there wasn’t a little bit of sickness swirling in his stomach, crawling through his veins and sending him a little woozy. He doesn’t think there will ever come a day when he is truly content with the way his life is. He might be able to endure it, wade his way through life mostly balanced, but acceptance and contentment still feel just ever so slightly beyond his grasp. Wispy clouds he reaches for, yearns for. His fingers glide right through them, desperate, helpless.

But, and there is a huge but this time, it doesn’t feel like an abyss anymore. Like a pit he will never emerge from. Because there is light at the end of every single tunnel, and he senses the exit to this tunnel of his longest ever nightmare coming soon. Close.

Albus shakes his head, opens his eyes. The train is there and, through a cloud of steam billowing around, accented by laughter and flashes of smiles, from the chaos emerges the sun. Brightness, beauty. Endless life in the palm of his hand.

“Hi,” Albus says, throwing his arms around Scorpius’ neck. He’s outrageously happy, not even noticing when Scorpius’ Head Boy badge pricks him in the arm. “Fancy seeing you here.”

Scorpius tosses his eyes to the back of his head. He’s still smiling, though, cheek to cheek and whatnot. “I never in my life thought I would see you smiling on this train platform,” he admits, looking down at Albus. Has he grown over the last three weeks? It sounds impossible, but Albus swears their height difference isn’t normally like this. “Hi, you.”

“Hi,” Albus repeats, rolling up onto his tiptoes to kiss him. “I’m smiling because of you, by the way.”

Scorpius scoffs. He picks up the handle of his trunk and steps out of the way of the passing traffic, students rushing to go home and start their summer holidays while others are still desperately searching for their parents. “You’ve been coming to see me for six years and I’ve never made you this happy,” he says. “I know there’s something else.”

“Honestly?” Albus asks, reaching up to flick a speck of lint off Scorpius’ shoulder. “This is my last time ever having to come here. I can’t even pretend like it isn’t a massive weight off my shoulders.”

Scorpius softens. Hugs him again, tighter. A little bone-crushing in a good way; Albus almost wants him to do it all over again. “You’re, like, the coolest person I know,” he says. It’s a little like stepping out the door on a beautiful summer morning, the air still crisp but the heat already beginning to burn through the clouds. Like knowing the day is in your hands, that there is nothing out there to stop you.

Scorpius sort of always feels a lot like that.

“I am?” Albus asks. “Well, thanks.”

Scorpius smiles. “You are always welcome.”

“How was the boat ride?”

“Nostalgic. Bittersweet,” Scorpius says. Before he speaks there’s a glimmer of something in his eyes. Perhaps bewilderment, moderately stunned silence. Of a good kind; it makes Albus feel a little proud. “I cried a little bit. I know you can’t imagine it but I will miss that place. It was, for all intents and purposes, a home for me the last seven years.”

Albus kisses his cheek. Scorpius is sweet, always sweet. “I can’t imagine it for me, but I can imagine it for you,” he says. “Believe it or not, Malfoy, I do have the capacity for empathy.”

“I know you do,” Scorpius says. “I really, really do.”

He looks over Albus’ shoulder at something. Albus doesn’t need to follow his gaze to know what. He reaches over and peels Scorpius’ luggage from his hand, grabbing the handle of his trunk for him. Scorpius looks down at Albus’ hands, then his gaze trickles all the way back up to Albus’ eyes. They look at each other – how many hours of their lives have they spent looking at each other, Albus wonders? – and Scorpius pauses. Stuck in action, tongue between his teeth.

“You can go say bye to your friends if you want to,” Albus says, all sweet sugar and the most sincere version of himself that he has ever been. “I get you all summer. What’s ten minutes apart?”

“You sure?” Scorpius asks.

Albus nods. “Of course. I’m brave,” he says, sticking his tongue out at Scorpius. “I’m cool, as you say.”

“The coolest,” Scorpius says, kissing Albus once more just for good measure. “I love you. Half agony?”

“Half hope,” Albus says. He thinks – as Scorpius walks away from him and heads over to his Hogwarts friends, the ones Albus also knows but has never really been a part of, ones he wonders if he would know better in some alternate universe – that he should really read Persuasion again, just because.

⚡

A week into the summer holiday the Potter family go to Bath.

Albus shows them the campus, shows them the libraries. Shows them the cinema just down the road from one of the student accommodation set ups. As he tours them around this place he fell in love with a while back, this place he knew in his soul would be the X that marks the spot for the start of the rest of his life, it becomes more pertinent.

Written in fable, maybe.

“I can see you here,” James says. They’re eating meal deal sandwiches in a park, sipping on bottles of water and soft drinks to combat the forthcoming heat. “It suits you.”

“I think so, too,” Albus murmurs.

And he does. He really does.

⚡

Seven years’ worth of effort in a singular brown envelope.

He’s done it before, of course. GCSEs feel like the end of the world until you complete them and start A-levels and then suddenly you feel foolish thinking that the tests you just did were the pinnacle of your life because nothing compares to this new challenge. And then the cycle repeats over and over again as you complete A-levels, your degree, your first job and so on and so on. Life is a funny little thing, a fickle little being. Cyclical, déjà vu, over and over testing your limits and seeing if you’ve learned anything from the last time you went through something similar to this.

“You’ve got this, sweetheart,” Ginny says, gently rubbing the space between Albus’ shoulder blades. “Whatever happens, we love you.”

Albus nods. He lets out a breath, swallows thickly. He tears open the envelope and teases out the slip of paper with his grades on.

“Oh my, God,” Albus says, his hands shaking and his eyes getting all watery because God. Thank everything for this. “I passed. I passed all of them! Better than passed.”

His mum takes the paper from him while his dad hugs him, while James hugs him. While he lets his dreams about September start to materialise, to feel like something he can look forward to and touch and change and know.

“You’re amazing,” James says. “So amazing.”

They take turns with the sheet of paper. Take turns hugging him and shaking his shoulders and telling him how much they love him and how proud they are of him. And perhaps it hasn’t been like this the entire time, and maybe part of him will resent that for a while to come, but that doesn’t matter right now.

Because he’s trying. His parents are trying. They are all trying so very hard and for the first time in a long time, Albus thinks they may succeed.

⚡

“So?”

Scorpius smiles. “What do you think?”

“What do you think?” Albus asks.

“I’m so happy for you,” Scorpius says, arms around Albus’ waist. Picking him up, spinning him around, kissing the curve of his neck. “I knew you’d do it.”

“Ditto,” Albus says. “I love you.”

ix. paradise akin to hope

Summer feels different this year. It feels tepid, whereas in years gone by it has always been outlined with something sinister. Like a looming storm, way off on the horizon, grey clouds circling him and lightning strikes threatening to startle overhead. To remind him that he has always been in this monotonous version of hell, going over and over the same things, crawling slowly towards the start of a cycle he has hated since the day he turned eleven.

But, alas. Not this year.

This year there is no storm. Only open skies, bright oranges and blues and tinges of green very early in the morning before the weather has decided exactly how it wants to play out. There is no platform in his near future, no reminders of magic. No sitting at home while his sister casts magic or his parents talk about their days at the Ministry. There is… peace. Potential. The rest of his life spreading endlessly out for him.

Most importantly, though, there is Scorpius.

In every beat, in every word, in every decision he makes: there is Scorpius. They talk about Scorpius coming to Bath at the end of September, after Albus has settled in and unpacked, just to see the town and explore. Albus even suggests coming to see him, too. See how he’s doing at Healing School, what he’s learning and where he’s living. They go shopping for bedspreads and kitchen cabinet supplies, cutlery and glasses and towels decorated with sausage dogs and squirrels. It’s a little bizarre, and Albus continues to watch for the other shoe to drop, for when he tumbles head first to the ground and realises none of it is real; none of this happiness is real.

But it never comes.

They’re in the treehouse at the bottom of the Potter garden. Ginny had sent them up with bottles of lemonade and a pack of UNO cards and a basket full of snacks. Scorpius’ favourite ones, Bertie Botts and Liquorice Wands, and Albus’ favourite ones. Freddos, Starburst. All the goods they could ever need and more.

Albus hasn’t realised it yet, but the jumper he stole from Scorpius’ overnight bag before they came outside, the one that is hanging loosely off his collarbones right now, is a Slytherin Quidditch one. Scorpius has on some random t-shirt, the sleeves rolled up identically to how the cuffs of his jeans are. He’s summer in a picture, tanned skin and sun-bleached hair and freckles all over his cheeks. Albus wants to close his eyes and capture it forever, how Scorpius looks. How this feels.

“How are you so good at this?” Scorpius asks, sighing as he tosses a card down on the pile between them. They’re sitting on a ratty little picnic blanket, shoes off and socks all fuzzy from the friction.

Albus shrugs, putting down a card that makes Scorpius have to pick up two more. Scorpius groans, all abrasive and huffy as he picks two cards from the deck and adds them to his hand. “I get a lot of practice, gorgeous,” he says, and the game continues on. Yellow card, red card, a card with the number two on it. The corners are worn from years of use; Albus thinks these cards are almost as old as his friendship with Scorpius. “I’m sure you’d beat me at any wizarding game.”

“Hm, not sure,” Scorpius muses, pausing before his turn to reach over and grab a Starburst from the bag beside Albus. He delicately unwraps the little cuboid-shaped package, perfectly flattening out the coloured sheet of paper before popping the sweet into his mouth. “You’re pretty good at all these things, to be honest. I’m good at snap, that’s about it.”

Albus hums, leaning over the playing space to kiss him. “You’re too mean to yourself,” he says it quietly, delicately. As if scared to break something sacred were the words to be too brashly spoken, too accusatory. “It’s very odd. You’re normally very egotistical, in a good way. You feeling okay?”

“I dunno… it’s weird. I think, as August drags on and we get closer to September, I realise that I’m about to dive into a pretty big fishbowl,” Scorpius admits. Their faces are still tilted into each other, Scorpius leaning back onto his arms as Albus rests his own hands on Scorpius’ lap. As he looks up at him through his lashes, and Scorpius gazes straight back down. “Hogwarts is very small in comparison to… well. In comparison to everything.”

It hangs there in the air. A cloud, perhaps. Or a meteor suddenly appearing from nowhere and hurtling to the ground with no specific destination in mind. The fire burns brightly in Scorpius’ eyes and his words are laid so barely out on the table, all cards in play. Theoretically, of course, for his actual hand of cards is face down on the blanket while the two of them talk.

“But you’re one of the most talented fish out there,” Albus says, eliciting a snicker from Scorpius and an eye roll from himself. “And, yes. That didn’t come out as I thought it would – more cringe and less sweet – but you know what I mean. You could be in a room of thousands and still be the brightest spark in there.”

Scorpius kisses him. Says, “You’re sweet,” as an interlude to his affections.

“You’re perfect,” Albus states, reasserting his position on the opposite side of the blanket. “Even if you’re sh*t at card games.”

“Ugh, I know,” Scorpius groans, again having to pick up a few cards in response to Albus’ move. “There are just too many rules. I don’t know how James enjoys this so much.”

They fall into a lull. A peaceful one. Albus wins the next round and they immediately deal out another spread, all quiet and tense and lips pursed as they peruse their options and toss cards into the middle, all faux nonchalant. Albus has a thousand tricks up his sleeve, and Scorpius has nothing left in the tank. And so when Scorpius places down a card to tell Albus to pick up cards, and Albus immediately sets another on top, doubling the punishment and handing it right back to Scorpius, Scorpius scowls.

At the cards, obviously. Never at Albus.

“See! How do you even know how to do–”

The cards are floating.

It starts with just the ones on top of the playing field, but then the rest of them follow suit. Then the ones in Scorpius’ hands, followed finally by Albus’. Hovering, spinning around, as if strung from the ceiling by invisible thread. Pieces of a mobile hanging over a child’s crib, drifting in the waning summer breeze that trickles through the slats in the wood holding the treehouse together.

Albus looks at the cards, watches them rise and rise like two-dimensional balloons. His cards, his seven year old cards. All coated in magic and drifting away from him. He thinks he should feel sick.

“Oh, f*ck. Merlin, Albus,” Scorpius says. He blinks and the cards fall to the floor and Scorpius hurries to pick them all up. His face is a thunderstorm, eyes grey and stormy in a terrible bittersweet way. There isn’t anger there, necessarily, just dismay at his own actions. Regret. “I’m so – I didn’t mean… I forgot I could do that. I would never–”

Albus cuts him off with a hand over his mouth. A kiss to his cheek; a shake of his head. Scorpius’ wand is in his bag, in the house. Albus knows it for a fact, because he watches Scorpius withdraw it from his inner coat pocket everytime he comes into the home, slipping it into the back compartment of his overnight bag. It’s been a ritual for years, ever since the two of them were allowed to start having sleepovers.

Scorpius’ wand is never in his hands; his magic is never intentional or dirty or cruel.

“It’s okay. Stop, shush,” Albus says, surprised by the strength in his own voice. In the lack of a waver. “It’s fine. I know you didn’t mean it. You never do anything like that on purpose.”

Scorpius blinks at him. “Are you sure?” he asks. “Honestly, you know my wand is inside… I never do wandless magic, ever. I’d never do it in front of you.”

Albus can’t not smile at him, all rattled and awry. It shouldn’t be fun to watch the person you love stumble over their words, but perhaps an exception can be made to that rule when it’s them trying to remind you of how much they care. “I’m completely sure. It’s fine, Scorp. I promise,” he swears, setting his hand atop of Scorpius’. The one clutching the cards. His left hand, dominant hand, the one he holds his wand with. “Besides… I think it’s high time I start getting used to seeing it. If we’re going to be, you know, us. It’s inevitable that there’s going to be magic. I can’t ignore it forever.”

Scorpius frowns. It isn’t a deep one, not carved into his bones or anything like that. But it’s still there, flickering in his eyes. “I don’t want you to feel bad.”

“I won’t,” Albus says, a little sterner this time. He takes the cards from Scorpius and slips them into the box. He thought they’d feel different, sticky maybe or textured or like some residue lingered over the card. But there was, astonishingly, nothing. “I’ll get to the point where I won’t. I have faith in myself.”

Scorpius’ frown breaks, his features reinventing themselves in a smile, instead. “How did we end up here, huh?” he asks. “You, me. With all our differences, and whatnot.”

“Mhm, I’m not sure,” Albus shrugs. They’re sharing a glass of lemonade, two straws leaning proudly like flagpoles against the edge. Albus leans down to his straw, takes a long and luminous sip. Scorpius watches him the entire way, all starry eyed and freckled smile and everything Albus has loved for as long as he thinks he’s had the vocabulary to describe something akin to it. “Maybe someone in control of our destinies thought we needed a little company so we weren’t so lonely. I’m glad they pushed us in each other’s direction.”

“Me, too,” Scorpius says, eyes flickering between Albus’ own and Albus’ lips. Albus thinks he can guess where they will settle, especially right now. “Best thing to ever happen to me.”

Albus thinks about Bath. Thinks about all the steps that got him here, to this place, to this boy. Thinks about a version of himself that thought he’d never make it, that thought he would die before he ever had the chance to see life in such a curious light. To see life as something filled with potential, rather than one wasted. If he could go back, if he had a say in the way things were, he can’t promise he wouldn’t change some things.

To this day, Albus thinks he would take being a poor wizard over not being one at all.

But, that will never happen. So it's a pointless task to labour over. Besides, he only thinks those things because he knows no singular decision, no one change to the journey of his life, would ever take Scorpius away. They’re woven together in the tapestries of each other's lives in every single possible universe, Albus knows it. Magic or not, Squib or not. They’re bound to each other and bound for each other. Two parallel railway tracks, spreading off into the distance, slowly veering into one. Two souls, converging; it’s what they have always meant to be.