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The greys are most noticeable in the thin light of morning. Harry hums lightly as Draco runs a hand through his hair, pulling him from the half-sleep he’s been dozing on Draco’s pillow. Draco pushes Harry’s hair away from his forehead, letting it catch the sun as it falls, strand by strand, back into place. The greys are scattered and rare; they’re easy to notice, and easier to ignore.
Harry mumbles something indecipherable and pulls Draco close by the waist, burying his face into Draco’s chest. From above, the greys are all the more clear, like the faint scattering of stars in a sky polluted by city light. It’s not the first change Draco has noticed, but it’s the first one he’s let himself admit is there.
“I should get out of here,” Harry says, pushing up into a seat. He always does this — offers to leave the morning after, just in case Draco doesn’t want him around. Draco always wants him around, but he doesn’t always let himself ask.
Draco backs off of the bed, the floor of his flat ice cold against his feet. “Come with me.”
Harry follows him into the bathroom, and Draco guides him into place in front of the mirror. Draco had pulled on a t-shirt when he woke up, but Harry is only in his boxers, and his body displays what Draco has been steadfastly ignoring — freckles and sun spots that weren’t there before. A faint scar across his collarbone that Draco doesn’t remember, long since healed over.
“What are we doing?” Harry asks.
“Look,” says Draco, taking in their reflections. “Just look.”
Harry stares at Harry, and Draco stares at Draco. Then Harry stares at Draco, and Draco stares at Harry. Harry was inside of him last night, and this feels significantly more intimate.
“What?” Harry says. He turns to Draco, but Draco keeps staring at the Harry in the mirror — the angle of his jaw, his thick, arched brows.
“You’re older than me,” Draco murmurs.
Harry looks back at himself. He leans close to the mirror and pushes a hand through his hair, his eyes bearing a glimmer of novelty and a complete lack of vanity. He runs a hand down his face. It was subtle enough to ignore, but now as they stand next to each other, it’s incredible it took Draco this long to really see it.
The hardest part about shagging an Unspeakable is that they’re not allowed to speak of anything. Draco knows that Harry works in Time. That’s just about the most Draco can ever get out of him. He works in Time, and while he’s out there in all of that time, it is as unforgiving to him as it is to anyone.
“When’s the last time you saw me?” Draco asks.
Harry discovers the greys that scatter his hair. He plucks one out and holds it in front of his eyes. “Dunno,” he says absently. “Don’t exactly have this penciled in.”
“I saw you two months ago,” Draco says. “When’s the last time you saw me?”
Harry turns to him. He’s still holding the grey hair in his hand. “Two months ago.”
“Yeah,” Draco says. “But when’s the last time you saw me for you?”
“I’m not sure,” Harry says.
“Yes, you are.”
Harry drops the hair into the sink, lost amid the light blonde strands of Draco’s. “A while, I guess,” he says. “A few years.”
Draco is struck with the uncanny feeling of being naked in front of a stranger, or having his name called and turning to see someone he’s never met in his life. “How many is a few?”
“Three?” Harry says it like a guess. He says it like there’s a reward for getting the answer right.
Draco sits on the bathroom counter. The morning had felt hushed in the blur of mundanity. Now, everything around him feels novel, crystal clear and sharpening in his mind the way things do the moment a glass falls off a counter and shatters. Draco parts his legs, and Harry steps between them, resting his hands on Draco’s thighs.
“Do you know how old you are?” Draco asks. It is not the first time Harry has gone on a mission. Three years here, three years there, and for all Draco knows, Harry has become a decade his senior while Draco was sleeping.
“I try not to keep track,” Harry says, cracking a smile. There is the thinnest line that etches into his cheek alongside it.
“Guess.”
“Maybe —” Harry says. “Twenty-six?”
“Twenty-six?”
“Twenty-seven.”
Draco runs a single finger down the side of Harry’s face, brushing against the hair on his temples, where the greys are most concentrated. Harry is six years older than him. Draco feels much younger than twenty-one now — so young, and so ignorant to what he’s just realized he’s on the precipice of. Harry presses a kiss onto his collar.
“I need to go,” he says. “Are you alright?”
But the answer is that it doesn’t matter. He’s just a kid, and even back when Harry was a kid, too — which is to say, two months ago — it wouldn’t matter what Draco thought, anyway. Harry always did precisely what he wanted to do.
Draco kisses him. They don’t kiss, much, when they’re not fucking, and rarely then. Draco kisses him anyway, because he wants to know if there’s something else that’s changed, something deeper than hair and skin. But if there’s something there, it’s deeper, too, than taste.
*
Harry is older the next time Draco sees him, but that’s not the first thing Draco thinks. The first thing Draco thinks is that he hasn’t realized until now that he never thought he’d ever see Harry again. He’s gone the way so many Unspeakables do — quiet, then quieter, then nothing but an echo.
Draco was never really allowed to want amidst all that fucking. Harry had never suggested once that he wanted wanting. So when Harry disappeared, he didn’t allow himself to wonder how long it would be before he saw him again, if he ever would.
But it’s easier to forget wanting a ghost. When the ghost is standing in front of you, bathed in the amber wash of a Diagon streetlight, keeping hands and mouth obedient is herculean.
“Fancy seeing you here,” Draco says, and is astounded that his voice comes out level. He focuses hard on the task of locking up the astronomy shop he’s been working for, grateful that it’s dark. The key scratches the sides of the lock as his hand shakes before he finally slots it in and twists it to the side. He can’t bring himself to look back, but can’t make himself look away, for the itching fear that Harry might vanish if not constantly watched.
“Thought I might find you here,” Harry says.
Draco finally turns. Harry has stepped out of the light of the lamp, his features forgiven by darkness. “What is that supposed to mean?” Draco asks. Like Harry might have some sort of preternatural vantage point, what with all of those years he spends out in the timespace. Like Harry might have any desire to watch Draco from it, even if he could.
Harry doesn’t answer. He looks up at the signpost for the shop. “I don’t remember you being particularly interested in astronomy in school.”
“I’m surprised you remember school at all,” Draco says.
Harry smiles. Now, there are two lines — one on either side of his face. “Cheap shot,” he says. “I’m not that old.”
He looks at least thirty-three, ten years Draco’s senior. Draco can’t bring himself to ask for specifics. His mind is still hanging onto the fact that Harry wanted to know where to find him. If Draco could even bring himself to ask questions, it’s not as if Harry would answer them. He thumbs at the cold metal of the key in his hand. “Care to prove that?”
Harry proves it once right at the inside of the door of the darkened shop, where he pushes Draco up against the wall and fucks him with such urgency that Draco doesn’t have time to wonder how many other people came between the last Draco he fucked and this one. Then he proves it again, arching a foot up onto the desk beside him as Draco takes him slowly, indulging in each of Harry’s hot exhales against his collar, the tangled little whimpers he makes when Draco refuses to speed up. Harry must want this — Draco, indulgent and painfully slow — or he wouldn’t have come here. He wouldn’t have found him.
Draco thinks they might talk at some point, but they never find the time. He takes Harry in under the fluorescent light of his flat when they finally make it back to his, after they both admit to themselves that an hour together isn’t enough to compensate for the years apart — two for Draco, more for Harry. Harry looks around at Draco’s perfectly unchanged flat like he’s never seen it before.
Draco thinks about asking him why he decided to grow his hair out — just past his ears, so different from his short Ministry crop. He wants to ask when he changed his glasses frames to gold rims, which Draco always thought would suit him better, but never got around to suggesting. He wants to ask when he started dressing in muted, dark tones; if it was just today, or if it was part of the job. He wants to ask whether he thinks it will ever stop, whether he thinks he will ever come back to this time to stay. But what did Draco think — that they would have a life together even if Harry did?
Harry snaps Draco out of his thoughts, taking him by the hand as they stand in his kitchen. He looks down at Draco’s open palm as if he were about to read it.
“What are you doing?” Draco asks.
“Nothing,” Harry says absently. Draco shudders as Harry runs his thumb along the soft, thin skin at the centre of his palm. He thumbs a circle into it, and then drops Draco’s hand, looking up as though he’d forgotten Draco was attached to it.
“You’re always so bloody cryptic,” Draco says.
“It doesn’t have to be cryptic,” Harry insists. “Maybe I just like your hand.”
Draco has never understood Harry’s sense of humor, and has never had much patience for it. “How long do you have?” he asks.
Harry takes him by the wrist, leading Draco to the corridor. He apparently at least remembers where Draco’s bedroom is.
“The night,” Harry says. “At least the night.”
The scent that Harry leaves between Draco’s sheets and on his pillow is the same as it always is — rich and musky, and impossible to completely describe. He wakes Draco with a kiss on his shoulder the next morning and fastens his belt with decided hands as Draco watches through his haze.
Draco rolls half his torso off the side of the bed and catches Harry by a belt loop, pulling him closer. Harry cocks his head down at him, and Draco rolls onto his back. They look at each other like that for a moment, Harry smiling gently, and Draco wonders what he must look like to him — like a child, without the faintest idea of what’s ahead of him.
Harry leans down and kisses him on the forehead, like a father tucking his child in to sleep. “Next time.”
“When do you reckon that’ll be?” Draco says. It comes out all the ways he didn’t want it to — needy, and a little mean.
Harry’s face hovers above his. There is a surety in his eyes that Draco can’t remember from when they were the same age. He kisses Draco’s cheek, right next to his mouth. “As soon as possible.”
“When will that be?”
Harry laughs onto him. He kisses Draco on the lips, too brief to be a goodbye, though Draco knows it is anyway. “As soon as possible.”
*
Harry has always had an uncanny ability to find him. Draco doesn’t move away from London solely to put this to the test. He moves because there is a position open with a wizarding astronomy institution in Edinburgh that he happens to be extremely qualified for. If it means that Harry has to put a bit more effort into finding him than usual, that’s none of Draco’s business.
Harry is sitting at a table in the far corner of the institute’s library two weeks after Draco turns twenty-five. It’s a small, rectangular wing of the building, with a wall of books on one side and a wall of windows on the other. It’s late — late enough that the library is technically closed to the public, though students and professors fill the silence with diligent sounds of writing and erasing. Harry sits in the light of a desk lamp, his head propped up on his hand as he looks out the window at the thundering rain.
Draco has had a taste of it, now — a life lived without him. Three years are enough to make Draco question whether he really needs this, how long he could live without it. Apparently, two decades have answered those questions for Harry, who found that he couldn’t live without Draco, or that he wouldn’t.
Harry has become sturdy and solid, with a quiet grace about him, and a thin, groomed beard that’s dotted with speckles of grey. He is the type of adult that starts with a capital A — that mystical age of Hogwarts professors and Hogsmeade shopkeepers that Draco never thought he’d live to see. When he smiles up at Draco, crow’s feet crinkle the sides of his eyes.
“What are you doing here?” Draco asks. His armful of books make him feel like a schoolboy.
Harry looks down at the book open in front of him. It’s upside down. A jokester’s touch. “Studying,” he says.
“In Edinburgh,” Draco says.
“Is that where we are?”
Draco drops his books down beside Harry. All of it feels quite silly, suddenly, even if it is his life’s work — like he’s down here, staring up at the stars and hoping one day they might turn to look back. He’s embarrassed that he didn’t take something else up, like charm development or potioneering. Something with results you don’t have to wait for.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Draco says. “It’s late.”
“Shhh,” Harry says, looking over Draco’s shoulder. “People are trying to work.” He grins that same mischievous grin he perfected at seventeen. “Sit down.”
Draco sits across from him. He doesn’t want to see Harry up close. If he had to, Draco might guess forty-five. But Harry does everything well. He probably ages well, too.
Maybe they needed to be somewhere that fucking isn’t an option so they could actually talk for once. Draco finds this to be a particular challenge when Harry looks so infuriatingly good with a beard. He can tell from Harry’s eyes that he’s having a similar line of thought, and wonders distantly what Harry sees in Draco’s twenty-six-year-old body; whether he was chasing that youth, or was growing tired of it.
“So you still haven’t shaken the astronomy?” Harry asks.
“And you still haven’t shaken the disappearing act?”
“I’m not the one who moved countries,” Harry points out.
“And yet you still managed to find me.”
Harry winces slightly. It’s the first time Draco has seen a frown on this face, lines etched across his forehead as his brow knits. “Would you rather that I stopped?” Harry asks.
This feels startlingly like the type of question they’ve both always tried to avoid. But it was easier to pretend that every time they slept together was an accident before Harry started following him across the timespace.
Draco stands up. “Do you want to go outside?”
It’s pouring rain. The noise of water slapping against the concrete crowds out the thoughts in Draco’s mind. They stand beneath the narrow breezeway connecting the library to the observatory, and Harry squints out at the sky, which is an angry shade of thunder grey.
The sound of rain begins to make Draco feel a bit crazy. There’s so much water in the air, and he thinks that if he breathes too much, he may start to drown. Harry’s hand is wrapped around a pole that supports the awning, and rainwater trickles down it and onto his fingers and into his dark sleeve.
“So,” Harry says, as casually as though they were old friends reconnecting, though only one of them is old. “How is the teaching life treating you?”
“I’m in research. I don’t teach,” Draco says. “And I really don’t plan to.”
Harry’s eyes drop contemplatively to the space between them. “That’s right,” he murmurs to himself with half of a smile.
Draco doesn’t have the patience for any of this right now. “Tell me about it,” he says. “Tell me about where you go.”
“I can’t,” Harry says immediately. “You know that I can’t.”
“That’s rubbish,” Draco says. “You could tell me if you wanted to.”
“Then maybe I don’t want to.”
The man in front of him is middle-aged, and still as petulant as the eleven-year-old child Draco met all those years ago. Draco wants to push him out into the rain.
Harry cracks an infuriating smile. “Or maybe you already know more than you think.”
Draco has always hated riddles. “You’re going back in time,” he says. “To fix things.”
Rainwater collects in the sleeve of Harry’s coat and spills back onto the ground.
“Or you’re going forwards,” Draco says. “To muck up the future.”
Harry snorts lightly. “I’m doing enough of mucking up the present.”
“Then I don’t understand,” Draco says.
Harry drops his hand, running his other along his sleeve to dry it with a charm. He takes a step closer to Draco. “It’s some of both,” he says. “And a little bit of neither.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Draco says. “Do they train you to talk like a sphinx with the Unspeakables?”
“Yes, in fact,” Harry says. “Sphinx talk is the first day of education.”
Draco crosses his arms.
“It’s a bit of backwards, and a bit of forwards,” Harry says. “But it’s also quite a lot of into.”
“Into,” Draco repeats.
“Time,” Harry nods. “Time wasn’t meant to be altered the way we’ve learned to alter it. Using Time-Turners is sort of like —” He makes his hand into the shape of a gun, using the other to point it at the wall of the observatory. “Sort of like shooting a gun through all of it. Time, you know. And if you do it too often, you end up with a lot of rubble on the ground that someone’s got to sweep up.”
Draco can feel the incredulity on his face. “So you’re a janitor.”
Harry laughs. “A janitor upon whom the very fabric of existence relies. Yeah, something like that.”
“Fucking hell,” Draco says. “It’s always got to be big with you, hasn’t it? Wasn’t enough to kill Voldemort, you’ve got to go around sweeping up the fabric of existence t—”
Harry cuts Draco off with a kiss. Draco makes a small sound of surprise against his lips, and then it’s over, and Harry steps away. “Sorry,” he says politely. “Continue.”
Draco’s mind is fluttering. He touches his cheek where Harry’s beard has prickled against it. “What the fuck was that?”
“I’ve just been waiting a long time,” Harry says. “Really, though, please go on.”
If it’s a distraction technique, it’s working. Draco glares at him as he struggles to pull the question he’s had for years to the forefront of his mind. “If you’re so all powerful,” he grumbles, “then why are you here now?”
He hopes Harry will understand what he means: Why are you here at forty-five if you could have been here at twenty-five?
Why are you making me watch you disappear?
Harry’s face falls slightly. “I don’t have complete control over it,” he says. “I come as often as I can.”
Draco’s throat feels full. This is not their usual script, which generally consists of fucking and not addressing the potential of anything else, let alone the fabric of the spacetime or the possibility that Harry might be bending it to see Draco as often as he can.
Draco. As if they were in love.
“And all that time you’re gone,” Draco says. “It’s real to you. You’re living it.”
“Of course I’m living it,” Harry says.
“In different times,” Draco says. “In different places. And with different people.”
Harry kisses him again. All of this kissing, and Draco is going to lose his ability to think at all. This seems to be Harry’s hope, and it’s working alarmingly well.
It’s a new sort of kiss — slow and gentle and unsubdued by lust. Harry wraps his arms around Draco. They’re thick and sturdy, like the limbs of an ancient tree.
Draco stomps on his foot.
“Ow!” Harry cries, hopping on one leg as he grabs his injured foot with the other. “The fuck was that for?”
“Stop bloody kissing me while I’m trying to ask you a question!” Draco snaps.
“I didn’t hear any question,” Harry says.
But Draco knows he did, because when Draco asked it, it sounded louder than the rain and the echoing peals of thunder, even if it was hidden beneath his words. It’s why Harry kissed him. Because he didn’t want to answer.
Harry drops his foot to the ground, and drops the act along with it. “What are you asking me?”
“You know what I’m asking you.”
“Pretend that I’m very stupid,” Harry says.
Draco rolls his eyes. “I don’t have to pretend.”
He takes Draco’s hand, as if they aren’t in the middle of a conversation. He holds it palm up, and runs his thumb along the center. Draco is nearly distracted by the memory of Harry in his flat, Harry in his thirties only a few years ago, doing this exact same thing.
“You’re asking me if I spend time with other people,” Harry says. “Over the two decades I’ve been away from you.”
Draco yanks his hand away. It sounds very petulant when he puts it like that, and Draco feels very stupid for asking. He has no business caring about it anyway. It’s never been his business what or who Harry does with his time, just like it hasn’t been Harry’s business what Draco does with his.
“I’m asking you if there are others,” Draco says. “That you’re finding throughout time. Like me.”
All of the jest drops from Harry’s face. His eyes lock onto Draco’s, and he turns his head slightly to the left, like he’s half shaking his head. Sort-of-no.
“Not really,” he says.
“Not really?” Draco says. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Harry smiles, like there’s something very funny here that Draco is missing. “It means not really.”
The rain picks up around them, so hard that it splatters water off of the ground and onto their ankles. Draco turns back toward the library. “Fine,” he says. “Was lovely catching up.”
“Draco, wait,” Harry says. He catches Draco by the wrist, and Draco yanks his hand away. “It’s complicated, dealing with all of this. None of it is straightforward.”
“Nothing ever is with you,” Draco snaps.
Harry sighs. He looks beleaguered, exhausted by things Draco knows he’ll never understand. “You have to believe that I’m telling you as much as I can.”
“Fine,” Draco says. “I don’t see why I should care. It’s not as if we’re fucking together, anyway.”
He sounds so young. Young and spoiled.
Harry looks like he wants to kiss him again. Draco wants to let him. But he also wants to turn twenty-seven without being in love with someone who is two decades older than him, and also his age, and also not any age at all.
“You’re right,” Harry says. “We’re not.” He smiles as he says it, a soft, gentle smile that would be easier to stomach if Draco could see it as patronizing or superior instead of what it is, which is madly and unabashedly in love.
Draco wonders when that happened.
And he hopes he never has to see it again in his life.
*
The greys win out eventually, but in the end, they’re more of whites. Even Draco’s mother is still mostly blonde. Harry beats her to everything: the greys, and, if Draco had to guess, his sixties.
The observatory is plentiful with tourists and hikers on clear nights, taking in the night sky with the naked eye. Draco sees him from a distance, and at first thinks it is one of the many times he has imagined him. For someone who spent his entire life standing out, Harry is surprisingly good at fading into a crowd.
Draco had begun to doubt that he’d ever see Harry again, but in the firm, forceful way of self preservation. The same self preservation that pushed him to accept a professorship in the remote north of France, the type of place you only go if you’re going with intention.
When he spots Harry on the mountain’s peak, Draco understands that he was right to doubt he’d see him again. This man is as much Harry as he isn’t. He’s as much the Harry Draco knew as an echo of him, as someone who has the same face and the same smile, but whose skin and soul were worn with years that Draco would never share.
It feels obvious that this is where Harry would find him — here, at a place that felt like the very tip of the world, the Earth jutting into the sky, reaching out, and out, and out.
Draco stands next to him — at the edge of the mountain, where a handful of missteps could send tumbling down. Harry doesn’t look away from the sky, and Draco takes him in — the soft pull of age on his skin, the smile lines that are visible even when he isn’t smiling, the hardly there strands of jet black hair amid the greys, clinging to a youth that has abandoned him.
“There you are,” Harry says without turning away from the sky.
“Hello, sir,” Draco says. “Do you need a chair? You know, we’re always happy to provide for our elderly visitors.”
Harry turns and gives him an indulgent smile. He knows Draco needs time to take him in, and he takes it. But there isn’t enough time to remedy the impossibility of the man before him with the man who should be Draco’s age, brushing against thirty. It would take thirty years for Draco to fully understand it — the thirty years that Harry has lived without him.
“I wasn’t sure if I should come,” Harry says, turning away.
“You shouldn’t have,” Draco says.
“I can go if you like.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Draco says. “Come on. Watching you do all of this standing is tiring me out.”
He leads them to the steps of the observatory, a massive, domed eye peering out to the stars. Draco drops onto the stairs, and Harry sits at the distance you might sit from a stranger.
Draco wants Harry to kiss him. Draco wants Harry to want to kiss him so badly that he can’t get a sentence out, the way he behaved all of those years ago. But three years haven’t changed what Draco wants as much as twenty years have changed what Harry wants. Twenty unforgiving years, etched across his face, faded into his hair, and in the lines of the skin on his hands as they spread on the cool concrete of the stairs.
“Still looking at stars, then,” Harry says.
“Sorry,” says Draco, bristling. “Are you waiting for me to outgrow it?”
Harry chuckles. He is always laughing like he knows a secret Draco doesn’t. Draco wants to hate him for it, but he can’t shake the feeling that this might be the last time he hears that laugh at all.
“I want you to do precisely what you want to do,” Harry says. He leans back onto the staircase, turning in and propping up his head on an elbow on a higher step. There’s still so much space between them. “Tell me about it,” he says. “Why have you stuck with it all this time?”
“It hasn’t been that long for me,” Draco says, if only to be contrarian. “I’m not sixty.”
“You flatter me,” Harry says. “Sixty-three.”
There is a mourning creeping up Draco’s throat, a grief over what he’ll never know he’s lost. “Keeping track now, are we?” he says. It’s a fight to keep his voice steady.
“Rough estimates. Tell me about your work.”
Draco eyes him, and then looks to the horizon, the dark silhouettes of fir trees and the meandering stargazers before them. “I’m sure it’s not as exciting as the life and times of an Unspeakable.”
“Exciting gets boring,” Harry says. “I want to hear about the stars. Why did it stick with you?”
Draco breathes out a sigh. “If you must know,” he says. “I think it’s because I hate them.”
Harry is quiet for a second, and then he laughs. “You hate them?”
“I’ve always hated them,” Draco says. “I hate the thought that something so far away can have so much control over our magic,” he says. “The way certain forms of magic are stronger when different constellations are overhead — learning about it in school always made me so angry.”
“A lot of things made you angry when you were younger.”
“One thing in particular made me very angry,” Draco says. “And he still does.”
Harry smiles. “It made you angry, so you dedicated your life to it.”
Draco isn’t sure whether they’re talking about the stars or Harry anymore. “It’s the only thing I could think to do.”
Harry turns to the sky. Draco wonders what it might look like, all of those in between places that Harry finds himself in. In the rare times he’s let himself envision it, it’s looked something like this: a gaping nothing, speckled with stars.
“It’s honestly all ridiculous,” Draco murmurs. “The light from the nearest stars takes years to get to Earth. And from the furthest, even longer. So we’re not really looking at them now. We’re looking at them millions of years ago.”
Harry is quiet. He smiles at the sky like greeting an old friend.
“Some of them aren’t even there anymore,” Draco says. “We’re just seeing what the sky remembers of them.”
“And they still have the nerve to influence magic,” Harry says. “I can see why that would make you angry.”
“Why are you here, Harry?”
Harry turns to him. If he’s surprised by the question, he keeps it expertly from his face. “I wanted to see you.”
Draco wants Harry to want to kiss him, but he’s grown impatient with waiting. He closes the distance between them, pulls Harry upright by the collar, and steals his small grunt of surprise with his lips. Draco has thought of this endlessly, spent years batting away fantasies and memories that bubbled up every time he kissed someone else. He thinks he’s kissing Harry at sixty-three, and Harry at forty-five, and Harry at thirty. But all he can taste is that Harry he kissed for the very first time, when they were both young and stupid, so young and stupid they had no idea how young and stupid they were.
Harry takes Draco by the waist. There is a reluctance in his lips that Draco tries to make tender by force. There are a dozen people on the observatory grounds, a handful of them Draco’s students. Draco straddles him anyway, right there on the steps.
“My office is just inside,” Draco says, hands gripping Harry’s collar so hard they hurt, lips whispering against the indecisive stubble on Harry’s neck. “Or my flat — we can Apparate —”
“Draco,” Harry murmurs.
“I’m sure there’s a thing or two you can show me,” Draco whispers, kissing Harry’s jaw.
Harry takes him by the wrists. “Draco,” he says. “No.”
Draco pulls away. Harry still has him by the wrists. It’s for the best, because Draco wants to punch him. “Then why the fuck are you here?”
“I told you,” Harry says. “I wanted to see you.”
Draco wrenches his wrists away and stands up, two steps down from Harry. “Well, you’ve seen me,” he says. “Lovely as always. Can’t wait until next time.” He turns over his shoulder and walks toward the trees.
Harry doesn’t come after him. Something about that feels very wrong.
Draco turns around. Harry is still sitting on the staircase, his hands cradling each other in his lap, his eyes cast down upon them. His body makes the shape of exhaustion — arched back, downturned face, curled in on itself.
“There isn’t a next time,” Draco says. His voice is swallowed by the dark night between them. “Is there?”
Harry looks up at him. His smile is so sad it looks painful to wear. Draco crosses back to the steps. He stops a pace away from Harry, but Harry takes his hand, and Draco steps closer. They’ve never held hands like this, not that Draco can remember. But Harry does it with so much ease, like he’s done it a thousand times before.
“I don’t know if there is,” Harry says. “I’ve never known if there would be.”
Draco sits next to him. Harry doesn’t let go of his hand. “I’m getting old, Draco,” he says. “I don’t want you to have to watch me die.”
“Even though you know that’s been my life’s goal since I was eleven,” Draco says in mock annoyance.
Harry laughs. Draco feels sick to his stomach, but he needed to hear that laughter again. “You’re only sixty,” he says. “You’re hardly on death’s door. No more than you are at a baseline, anyway.”
“Sixty-three,” Harry says. “But it’s happening faster. It’s taking longer and longer to come back.”
Draco swallows hard. “Don’t they let Unspeakables retire?”
“This isn’t really something you can retire from,” Harry says gently. “Once you do it as much as I have, it sort of becomes out of your hands. It becomes out of anyone’s hands.”
There are so many Harrys sitting in front of him right now, so many men he’s met once and then lost, threading their way in and out of his life at the sharp point of a needle. The composite sum of so many strangers, and a single man whom Draco has been fighting, from the very beginning, not to fall in love with.
All that time was wasted. Draco never stood a chance.
“So this is goodbye,” Draco says.
Harry is quiet for a moment. Then he does that half shake of his head. Sort-of-no.
“Maybe half of one,” he says.
“Fucking Christ,” Draco snaps. “If you don’t stop with the —”
Harry kisses him. And this is exactly what Draco wanted. The kind of kiss that couldn’t endure the finishing of a sentence. The kind of love that can’t wait. But Draco wants more than a kiss. He wants more than one moment. He wants more than Harry can give.
Harry pulls away and stands up, leaving Draco kiss-drunk on the steps. “Promise me something,” Harry says.
“No,” says Draco.
That laugh again. Now, truly the last time.
Harry takes Draco’s hand, pushing his fingers open. He kisses him lightly in the circle of skin at the centre of his palm with a near reverence, his lips soft and worshipping.
“If you see me again, don’t forget the me that I am now,” he says. “I always get a little jealous.”
“I thought I wasn’t going to see you again.”
“You won’t,” Harry says, and drops Draco’s hand.
Draco stands. He might be crying if he wasn’t so angry. If Harry wasn’t so ridiculous. If he ever for once in his life spoke in lines instead of circles.
“I love you,” Harry says. “Just so you know.”
Draco’s breath catches. He thinks maybe he’s misheard. But he thinks that maybe Harry has been saying it in every way except for with words for the past four decades of his life.
“Don’t worry,” Harry says. “I just needed to say it while I could.”
Harry kisses him again — on the lips, and then the jaw, and then the lips again. Draco doesn’t want it to end, but he’s learned that Harry doesn’t linger in his goodbyes. “Don’t forget me,” he says again.
Draco can’t pull his mind from the tangled haze it’s locked in. The stars seem to be rotating overhead, the ground spinning beneath his feet. Harry drops his hand, turns over his shoulder, and walks into the night.
Draco knows he wouldn’t be able to hold Harry, even if he caught him. He clamors after him anyway. The earth is dewy and slick, and Draco stumbles to the ground, looking up at the very moment Harry steps into complete nonexistence.
A sharp pain introduces itself to Draco’s hand, and he lifts it away from the edge of a sharp rock embedded in the earth. Down on his knees in the darkness of night, he can just make out the crimson shade of blood that pools in a line of opened flesh that cuts across his palm. Beneath the pain, he understands with crisp, immediate clarity that it is deep enough to scar.
*
Aging takes a long time to do, when you’re doing it properly. Draco does it slowly and fastidiously every day of his life. He does it while he sleeps, while he reads, while he eats, while he studies. He does it while he’s thinking about Harry, and while he’s trying his best not to. He does it while he’s trying to find him in someone else’s arms.
Aging also takes no time at all. One day, Draco wakes up, and he’s forty.
It has always been easiest for Draco to hate him, so Draco hates him. He hates that five years later, that night still plays in his mind like he’s still living it. He hates that of all the things Harry possibly could have said, he chose the words that would ruin Draco most: I love you. He hates that he ever had the misfortune of meeting Harry Potter in his life.
He has found his way back to London, and is sitting on the Thames when he realizes he’s been thinking of this the wrong way.
“Excuse me, sir,” a voice says behind him.
The time between them has always been forged in crow’s feet and smile lines and hair abandoning color. Draco never contemplated the way it could change the timbre of a voice, low with use and age, and nearly unrecognizable in youth.
“Was just wondering if I could bother you for some directions.”
Draco turns, though he doesn’t need to to understand it. He’s been thinking too much in lines, he knows now, when he should have been thinking in circles.
Not even Draco’s clearest of memories could capture Harry as young as he is now, standing before him. His memories couldn’t do justice to the rich darkness of his hair, the fullness of his face, that dopey, sideways smile on a face that can’t have yet reached thirty.
That twenty-seven-year-old face seemed so old all of those years ago, when Draco was studying it next to his own in the mirror. Now, Draco knows how young twenty-seven really is.
“I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere,” Harry says with a playful, boyish smile. This young, playful Harry, who has no idea what’s ahead of him. “Last time I saw you, you weren’t nearly this old.”
And Draco bursts into laughter. Not because Harry is nearly as funny as he thinks he is. But because now, he’s finally in on the joke.