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Gazing into the blood orange sky, Harry aims for neutrality.
He pushes away his irritation with the absence of all colour that isn't breached by red and dust, pushes away his preemptive nostalgia. He'll want to remember this place as it is. Just miles of sand and thirsty rock, all red and dust, always red and dust, the stars pale holes in an ashen sky.
The air in his lungs is cleaner than anything he could have breathed back on Earth, every breath laced with glossy magic and stinking faintly of lavender. Harry inhales deeply, committing it all to memory.
He'll be back home in a matter of months; he's leaving tomorrow.
Draco fucks him hard that night, pushing Harry facefirst into his cot with a tight grip around his neck. Harry's nose bleeds; it's the too-dry air. Sweat drips down his forehead and blood down his lips, and Draco is so close, buried so deep, Harry burns and bursts at the seams.
He pants, kissing mindlessly at Draco's colour-drained hair which spills over Harry’s aching shoulders. Whenever Draco fucks him from behind, Harry imagines his eyes are as blue as the Earth.
Draco cradles him in his arms after, a step away from soft. His fingernails carve dull moons into Harry's damp skin.
They need to talk tonight. It has to be tonight; Harry might never see him again.
"Fuck," says Draco, as though privy to his sombre thoughts, and Harry's arms scream where Draco's nails dig in.
A hero. That's how the media had branded Harry once more when, a decade after the war, he'd decided to join the team headed to Mars. Their own planet would crumble under their feet soon enough. A new one needed preparing so it could one day welcome humankind, muggle and magic alike.
But Harry wasn't a hero. He'd just needed to leave, to leave home behind for a chance to breathe, tucked faraway under a foreign sky, even for a little while.
Home had followed him here.
He'd realised it the moment he'd set eyes on Draco stepping from one of the ships. Home was in Draco's hard stares and low taunts, in the way he mocked Harry, yet still expected greatness from him. "You can't be here," Harry had said, aghast, and they've collided every day since. Some days, when Harry feels heartsick for trees or birdsong or the murky sludge of the Thames, Draco unspools magic from his fingers until his face shines with sweat, until Harry floats in a pond with blue skies overhead and Draco's cool hands in his.
Turning in the bind of Draco's arms, Harry stares. Draco's hair is long and tangled, the chalky yellow of the sky at noon. His eyes aren't blue. They're the bright grey of the compound , of the morning light over Grimmauld. Draco smiles often these days – he's charmed the Muggle scientists, every witch and wizard in their settlement adores him, and he excels at what he does. Two thin lines are beside his soft mouth now, present even when he isn't smiling.
Come home with me, Harry might say, but Draco would never agree. Still, there's things that need to be said. Things he'd needed to say for a year now, words that clamour to be heard when Draco kisses his cheeks and holds him through the foreign nights.
It's his last chance now to say them.
Draco simply looks at him, his eyes like steel, wiped clean with ease.
"God," says Harry, choking on it all. He brings Draco close, kisses at his skin, licks and moans and gasps until Draco makes him sit in his lap. He fucks Harry like that, hard and slow, then again on the warm tile flooring, again on his side. Under the shower he drags his tongue over Harry's spent cock and Harry fights to remain upright under a stream of hot water that sings with Draco's spells.
He's half asleep by the time Draco helps him back to his bed. There's a tremor in his limbs and his mind is blurred with sweet fog, and he's never known how to speak to Draco.
Harry falls asleep on the scars on Draco's chest, failing to talk to him one last time.
The ship comes the next morning, in the brief blue of the sunrise. Reddish dust swaddles the air as it lands in the same spot it dropped them off a year ago, the same spot where it would land again, a year from now and a year from then. Harry stares into the dust clouds from Draco's cot, through a circular window of thick, polished glass.
Draco's side of the bed is empty. He left without a goodbye. He's in the greenhouses out back now, coaxing his magic into the earth and trees from the cracks in the regolith.
"Fuck," says Harry, the way Draco always does, with so much fervour, and buries his face in the pillow. He breathes in, cotton and lime and the vervain of Draco's shampoo.
He breathes out calmly, hours later, cotton and lime and vervain, as the ship turns pinprick small in a thirsty orange sky.
