tastes like the real thing

by the_invisibility_bloke

Summary:

Turning tricks in Knockturn Alley is probably definitely not what Harry meant when he told Teddy to “try everything.”

Notes:

Got excited and went a little rogue with this one, forgive me. (Original prompt in end notes.)

Thank you, Alex, for cheerleading and letting me lure you into my ships, even when they’re not real incest. ;)

Title, of course, is Radiohead’s.

Chapter 1: canis major in june

It has nothing to do with Harry.

That’s not why Teddy’s here (of course it’s why). It’s just another day (the 30th of July). This isn’t about tomorrow and isn’t about Harry and it certainly isn’t about Harry avoiding him ever since Teddy came home. Like they hadn’t been exchanging owls every week between London and Jakarta, London and Auckland, London and Mumbai for the whole damn year. Like whatever unspoken boundary they’d sworn to uphold hasn’t been eroded, smudged by every miss you and love you and not the same without you. By the flowers Teddy would press into his letters with a stasis charm under the guise of we discovered a new species of dittany today. By the maddening things Harry would write back, they’re brilliant and they smell spectacular and they look beautiful on my desk, and how “they” always sounded like “you.”

And not once could Harry be arsed to mention the fact he was getting divorced.

It’s not why Teddy’s here at the pub, hiding in a skin that’s not his own, sipping on lies he nearly believes, and scouting his next client.

It has nothing to do with Harry—until Harry walks through the door.

_

 

“Take it,” Harry says.

If only they were talking about something else.

Teddy stretches out on the dock. The runway of sun-dried planks is toasty beneath his back, even though the sun has politely excused herself. Maybe Teddy is just warm around Harry. Maybe Harry makes him warm.

No. No “maybe” about it.

“Ted.”

Harry’s magic reaches out in tendrils, wisps of cirrus that curl around Teddy’s. Spider-web delicate. Spider-web strong. Teddy hardly needs a reminder of all the ways they connect, casting into stark relief the one unspeakable way they can’t. But this—their uncanny radar for each other’s power, sensitive to the smallest wavelength, the most well-hidden glitch in emotion—this is something ubiquitous. Stretching backward through time, beyond Teddy’s earliest memories. Never talked about. Never needed to. It’s as natural as breathing, as love. Vic would bandy about rubbish like soulmates and destiny, but it’s closer to home than written in the stars.

It’s Harry. Just Harry.

Teddy fights the urge to jump off the dock and swim to the other side. Swim until his lungs burn and scream. Better his lungs than his heart. 

Harry passes the bottle and their fingers ignite. There’s no reason to avoid it. There’s no reason they should go out of their way not to touch each other because Christ, what would that mean?

“You have a chance to see the world, doing what you love. Take it.”

You’re what I love. Fuck, already. Teddy misses him already. His voice, the gravity that keeps Teddy orbiting around him. That cedar-spice scent of a Hogwarts hearth that clings enviably to his skin, even when he’s out of professor robes. How Harry’s the only one who calls him Ted. Like there’s a special, secret version of Teddy that belongs only to Harry. Of course there is.

Teddy takes a massive swig and pays for it, but he chokes down the cough like the adult he is. Firewhisky’s not all that, turns out, but it makes up for that tiny deficit of courage that kept him out of Gryffindor.

“A whole year,” Teddy says. Away from you, he omits.

“A year is nothing.”

A year is everything to an eighteen-year-old about to be separated from his—Harry. Godfather. Harry has a title. A role to which he is fully committed, knows the script by heart.

But Teddy won’t argue, because it will make him sound as young as he is.

“Look.” Harry swipes the bottle back and finishes it off, probably so Teddy won’t. Prat. “You shouldn’t settle too soon. Take it from someone who did.”

Teddy turns to look at him, but Harry’s still browsing the sky. He won’t find Canis Major in June, but it sure as hell won’t stop him looking. That’s where Harry goes when he’s lost. That, and Grimmauld. Teddy never asks, but he knows.

What he doesn’t know is why Harry, frugal to a fault in matters of vulnerability, chose this moment to voice regret of a major life decision. Can’t possibly be the DMLE years. That led him to teaching.

Does he mean—

“I just mean, you don’t have to choose a path yet. Take the apprenticeship. Study your weird plants. Travel. Meet people. Get to know yourself. Try... anything. Everything."

“Everything?” Teddy smirks. “Muggle street racing? Heroin? Orgies?”

Harry’s smile is too bright for dusk, moonlight echoed in lake water. “Nothing unsafe.”

“Rich, coming from you.”

Harry bumps his shoulder. “Piss off.”

“Do as I say, not as I do?”

“I will throw you in.”

Teddy laughs. It startles the crickets out of their serenade, and now it’s too quiet. Fuck.

“Seriously, though.” Harry’s too quiet, too. “Especially with—” He swallows. Hard. “You know the protection spells, yeah?”

A leaden lump swells in Teddy’s chest. “How many blokes d’you reckon I’ll meet in the wizarding jungles of Indonesia?”

“Hell if I know, but if anyone hurts you, I will destroy him.”

Knowing he’s only half-joking at best is so, so fucking hot. Teddy can’t help his favourite hobby is luring out Harry’s protective streak. He’s pushing his luck already, mind, but it’s the only way to stop himself doing something worse. God, the worse things he’d do.

“No bad boys, then?” As if any man, good or bad, could wrench his wasted heart away from this one.

Harry frowns. “No.”

“Not even one? Even you got one.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Or was that some rubbish you made up to make me feel better about coming out?”

Harry tries, unsuccessfully, not to smile. “Malfoy was an unrequited schoolboy crush. Hardly counts.”

“How do you know it was unrequited?”

“Honestly, if you’re that desperate for thrills, you can have the motorbike.”

“Become the bad boy I want to see in the world?”

“Just wear the damn helmet, Ted, I swear to god—”

“Wait.” Teddy pushes up on his elbows. “You’re serious?”

Harry side-eyes him and grins. “It was meant to be your graduation present, but I wanted to wait until your Nan left so she couldn’t hex me into next century—”

Good enough excuse as any. You hug people who give you presents. Teddy launches himself across the dock, collecting splinters, collecting Harry. He lands sideways across Harry’s chest with a painful thud of elbow on wood, and doesn’t even feel it. Just sinks his face into the black jersey cotton of Harry’s worn-out tee, the one he’s had since before Teddy started school. Best not dwell on that.

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” and he’ll say it as long as he can. As long as Harry’s laughing and saying it back and stroking the shaggy mood-ring mop on Teddy’s head as it flashes from lavender to the green of Harry’s eyes. “Reckoned you were saving it for Jamie.”

Harry snorts. “Gin would have my head on a stake.”

Teddy lifts his chin and grins. “I’m so glad you’re not my dad.”

Harry throws his head back and laughs, open and wild in the nascent summer night. Teddy already misses that, too.

“Is that the only reason?” Harry asks.

Teddy stares. It’s a joke but it lands off-centre. Enough to tug down their smiles and stop the Earth spinning and shine a spotlight on the centre of the universe where their chests align, liquor-sped heartbeats straining to unite, to race towards a finish line that doesn’t exist. Can’t exist. Absolutely cannot exist.

Harry’s hand stills in his hair, and then, a single increment, the breadth of a spider’s thread—his fingers tighten and curl.

Fuck.

It’s fine, it’s just been awhile. Teddy’s prepared. He even has a script. He calls it the Misinterpretation Mantra and it goes like this: He’s your godfather and he’s married, he’s your married godfather, and you’re a lovesick pervert.

It’s the bucket of ice water he needs. Teddy hauls the smile back to his lips and says, “There are a few other reasons.”

Harry raises an eyebrow. “Such as?”

“The fact I can swear all I want and there’s fuck-all you can do about it.”

Harry laughs and tosses him into the lake.

It’s half magic, of course, he’s not that much stronger. Harry’s visceral power is something fierce, tamed only to the point of necessity. There are elements he still leaves raw and untethered to roam free in the right conditions.

The conditions where he feels most safe.

“Shit—” Teddy surfaces, spluttering and shivering, to catch the tail end of a laugh.

“You were saying?”

"Bastard!" Teddy scoops two palmfuls of water to shove at Harry’s bare, bony feet. “It’s fucking freezing!”

“Swearing and disrespecting your elders? I should give the bike to Hagrid.”

Two can play, and they always do. Teddy fights past the cocktail of chill and intoxicant, targets his magic and summons his eleven-year-old body. Tops it off with the puppy dog eyes and trembling lower lip. His charm peaked in First Year, no question.

Harry sniggers, unfazed. “You’re such a prick.”

“Please, Harry?” Still got the voice down. Good to know he hasn’t lost his touch. Teddy pouts and extends an unnaturally small hand.

“Incorrigible.” Harry sighs and offers his own, bigger and stronger. For now.

Teddy zips back into his adult body, quick as can be for maximum contrast—I’ve grown up, in case you forgot—and tugs Harry into the water.

“Going soft, old man. Should’ve seen it coming.”

Harry smiles and rakes a hand through his shaggy, dripping hair. “What makes you think I didn’t?”

He waves a warming charm over the surface, effortless, elegant. The water heats at his touch, a simmering radius around their bodies coaxed into subservience. Relatable. Enviable.

Been awhile since they’ve gone swimming together, and Teddy hadn’t thought it through: Harry soaked and slick-skinned, drenched fabric groping his chest and sinewy biceps, droplets rolling off lips and lashes. He jerks his head to shake off the excess, lets the rest cling sinfully to his stubble, lets it gather in the corners of his eyes where sunburst lines are starting to carve out a home for themselves when he smiles. Like now. Teddy wants to lick each one. Lick past the smile, too.

Teddy retracts his magic, lest it give him away. The downside of this thing between them—makes it harder for him to hide. He wades back a step, two, but distance does jack shit to quell the arousal.

Doesn’t bode well for the coming year, does it?

“Thanks,” he manages. “For the bike.”

Harry nods. “Swear you’ll be safe.”

“I’m not allowed to swear.”

Harry splashes him. “I mean it. Spells aren’t enough. You don’t ride without a helmet.”

“Yes, Dad.”

Harry grins. “Fuck off.”

But Harry doesn’t swear around anyone else, and Teddy can’t help but swerve into oncoming traffic: “Sorry, would you prefer ‘Daddy’?”

He shocks himself with it—feels his jaw slacken, eyes stretched taut, throat closing up. Probably for self-preservation. God, what sort of unhinged fuckery would he say after two bottles?

It’s fine. It’s fine. Jokes hide the truth, and even if they didn’t, Harry, cool as a cucumber Harry, doesn’t miss a beat:

“It’s indecent to flirt with your godfather.”

He says it with a smirk and a quirk of his eyebrow and it’s not fine. It’s not. Teddy is going to die.

They’ve never acknowledged it, even in jest: that how they act when they’re alone together is different from how they act around others. There’s no clever, clandestine way to say it. But to name it, as Harry did—to detach it from innocence, peel off the platonic cover—

And for all Teddy’s inner turmoil, Harry looks wholly unbothered. He just looks like Harry, calm and collected behind old-soul eyes. But those eyes are his tell—that impish twinkle, a challenge and warning.

Teddy chooses the challenge.

“Yeah? I’ll show you indecent.”

He launches himself at Harry with no finesse, no strategy, just an end goal of ruthless dunking. It can be written off as juvenile, chaste. There’s a time and place for nostalgia—here and now’s as good as any. Teddy’s earned this, and even if he hasn’t, he’s going away for a year. Plenty of time for Harry to forget, if needed, his godson touching him a little too much for a little too long in ways just a little too close.

But Harry gives as good as he gets. Better. They distil to a single body of limbs and lake water, laughter and vice-grips scrabbling for friction, compensating for slippery skin. They wrestle and climb, they disturb the peace, they splash the serenity out of the water and steal a bit for themselves, drape it over their collective magic like a blanket until they can’t tell whose is whose beneath. Doesn’t matter that Ginny and the kids are up in the house thirty metres away, cleaning up from his graduation party, because that’s not a thought that should bubble up just now in a surge of guilt, mountain-spring clear, given they’re not doing anything wrong. But it does and maybe they are, because to all the world Teddy’s like a son, but Harry doesn’t flirt with his kids. Teddy’s the only one he looks at like that, like he’s hungry and sated, nourished but the craving persists. Like he’s seeing the future in Teddy’s eyes. A different future, kissing distance away from this one. Invisible but not enough to stop him looking. Canis Major in June.

Or it’s all a perverse, overblown, adolescent fantasy.

They make it to the mudbank, side by side like fallen stars, panting and sprawled out on sediment. The ripples they’d stirred up lap at their ankles, a reminder: You did this. Together.

Harry’s hand brushes his, wet and sandy. Probably accidental. Maybe Teddy’s pinkie finger climbing over Harry’s is an accident, too. Maybe.

But then Harry’s finger curls around it and there’s no way to write that off.

“Ted.”

It isn’t a warning. It’s a plea that begs, Don’t let it come to a warning.

“I’ll miss you,” Teddy says. Maybe if he oversimplifies, reduces it to an understatement, the professor in Harry will be compelled to correct him. To lift the veil, a transparent thing, a formality that lets them pretend they can’t see what’s behind.

Harry withdraws his hand and says, “I’ll miss you, too.” It’s easier to leave after that.

_

The pub door rattles shut behind him, and no one looks up. No one cares who you are here. That’s the whole fucking point.

But Teddy looks up. Teddy cares. He can count on one hand the times they’ve seen each other since the welcome-home party, which hardly counts. The Puddlemere match with Hermione’s parents. Coffee at the Ministry after Teddy’s interview, all three kids in tow. They used to carve out ways to be alone all the time, but now...

Stress, Harry says. Work, Harry says, but he’s a teacher and it’s bloody July. The divorce, Harry says—oh yes, that minor detail slipped into Vic’s last letter. (Followed by “now’s your chance” underlined three times.)

But what if it’s none of that?

What if it’s by design?

Even with the sunken shadows below his eyes, Harry’s more striking than ever. A fine wine, that man. Fitting, given the burgundy button-down he’s filling out far too well over washed-soft Muggle jeans. And the hair, the fucking hair—Teddy’s still getting used to that. Dark waves lapping at Harry’s shoulders, framing his eyes and his jaw in a way that ought to be banned from his own classroom. He looks like a midlife crisis gone very right. To hell with “out of sight, out of mind.” Absence made the heart go madder. Teddy is, as they say, fucked.

Teddy reels in his magic as a precaution. No need—Harry’s is running on fumes. Barely a flicker registers on Teddy’s radar, and if Harry senses any Teddyness beneath the glitter-dusted, powder-blue bodycon facade, there’s no indication. He spares no glance for the buxom bombshell in Teddy’s place, and that’s—something. Even Creevey gave her a once-over on the street, and that man is gay as a double rainbow over Soho. Teddy would know. Twice, if you count that quickie in the Hog’s Head loo last year.

So Teddy’s got a thing for older men. Try everything, right?

Fine. Turning tricks in Knockturn Alley is probably definitely not what Harry had meant. But it’s a thrill and a lark while Teddy’s weighing careers, it’s good practice flexing his morphing skills, and it takes his mind off—

“Double Red Dragon. Please.” Harry slumps into the empty stool beside him.

It would be so easy to slip out, and Teddy should. Go to another pub; better yet, go home. Rest up for tomorrow. But Harry only ever drinks wine, whisky on special occasions, and Teddy has no self-control.

“Rough night?”

Harry looks at him. Her. A cursory smile breaches the surface, then sinks back into the wire-taut line of his mouth—but he doesn’t look away. Some budding curiosity holds his attention, a phantom across the eyes, hurtling him toward something dangerous.

Recognition.

Teddy wills his nervous system into suspension as Harry’s magic cranks to life, a dragon emerging from slumber. Teddy feels it extend toward him like a question mark-shaped antenna, tapping at his door, lost. Unanswered, it retreats.

First time Teddy’s ever shut him out.

Harry shakes his head like he’s clearing out Wrackspurts. “Rough year, more like.”

Not a week or a month. A year. The length of time they were apart.

“How so?” Teddy asks in the foreign voice.

Harry stiffens. He clearly hadn’t come here for conversation, but Teddy’s good at what he does and he’s good at Harry.

“I—” Harry turns away. “Nothing. My birthday’s tomorrow. Not feeling particularly celebratory.”

“I’m sorry.” No point in shallow well-wishes; might as well go for truth. “For what it’s worth, however old you are, you’re positively gorgeous.”

Harry smiles, a little looser, a little more Harry. “Thanks. You too. All, what, twenty years of you?”

They laugh, together. Low. Matching.

“Twenty-four,” Teddy guesses, based on the last time he’d touched up his lip gloss. “Full disclosure, I do know who you are.”

“Ah.” Harry nods at the barman and seizes his appropriately blood-tinted spirit like a life-saving transfusion. “Thank you for being honest.”

“Don’t worry. We work under confidentiality charms.”

First comes the stare, then the awareness. Teddy’s gotten used to the reaction, the blowout of eyes, the stammer, the blush, the retreat, before the inevitable surrender. Harry does none of those things.

“Right,” Harry says, smooth as the lake they tore into last summer. The lake that tore into them. “Sorry, I’m not looking for—”

“That’s all right.” Teddy-not-Teddy smiles. “I’m happy for conversation.”

“Not sure I’m up for that, either.”

“Silent drinking partners, then?”

“Cheers.”

They clink, they sip. Effortless. They’ve always been effortless. God, Teddy’s missed him. Misses him, two feet away. Might as well be back in the Southern Hemisphere.

Tonight is not the night.

Teddy drops a few Sickles onto the bar and gets to his feet. The heels are still an adjustment. “I’d best call it a night.”

Harry looks up, shaken from his trance, but the smile is kind. He’s always kind. Treats everyone the same, no matter if they’re family or some whore in a pub. It’s one of his best traits. Teddy slips a little further in love. A bottomless slope, apparently.

“Thanks for the company,” Harry says. It’s obvious he means it. Obvious to Teddy, at least.

“The pleasure was mine.” Teddy leans down, hand on his shoulder, lips at his ear. “Shame it couldn’t have been yours.”

It’s a throwaway line. A little flirtation goes a long way for someone wallowing in self-pity. Life hacks gleaned from your gap year.

Teddy’s out the door, down the alley when the footsteps catch up with him.

“What about Polyjuice?”

Teddy spins around. Harry’s eyes are wild, jungle green under the mist-filtered streetlamp; breaths too even, too quick. Shit. He’d psyched himself up for this.

“What about it?” Not-Teddy asks.

“Is it... something you’d consider?”

Oh.

God.

Oh god.

That’s not even the worst part. The worst part is if Harry takes another step, if he rounds the corner where Teddy’s stood, he’ll see it.

The motorbike.

Teddy can’t think, which is bad, because he’s got to, fast. Vic’s older friend, the one who got him started—Philippe. Philippe mentioned doing it for a client once, and—shit, there was some Transfiguration lesson about the effects of Poly on a Metamorph. Fuck lot of good that does him now because he can’t. bloody. think.

There shouldn’t be thinking, anyway. The only answer is no. Politely decline and walk away. Nothing ever happened. No one the wiser.

“No one underage,” Teddy says without thinking (given he can’t). Not that Harry would, but it seems the most logical caveat. “No celebrities,” he adds for good measure. Like it’s habit. Well-worn pages from a dog-eared script. What the fuck is he doing?

Harry nods, once. “Brilliant.”

It’s so Harry, and it shouldn’t be. This isn’t what Harry does. Is it?

“What else?” Harry asks. “What are your... rules? Limits? Sorry, I’ve never—”

A drop of relief fissures open the brick of tension in Teddy’s shoulders. At least he was right on one account. This isn’t what Harry does.

Thank god for the dark. Teddy’s hand is trembling when he pulls the enchanted card from his pocket, a sparkling little square with gilded text. Reminds him of a Snitch. Quidditch. Harry. His first flying lesson with Harry.

Harry reads over the conditions, expressionless. Most men don’t get through it without a puzzled eyebrow, a disappointed huff, or least a flush of embarrassment.

He looks up, hands the card back, and says, “How much for the weekend?”

Teddy almost laughs. Teddy, as himself. God help him, he’s never booked more than a two-hour stint, never kept up the ruse more than three. How long can this body last? Will he be able to slip back into it as the Poly wears off? Will he even need the Poly, or can he just—why is he asking questions as if he’s actually going to do it?!

“I have plans tomorrow night,” Teddy says. The truth will set you free.

“No problem. So do I.”

Of course he fucking does. What’s he gonna do, drag Not-Teddy to his birthday dinner as some sort of arm-candy proof that he’s moving on? The dinner Teddy’s meant to attend?

This is where he should stop. No, he should’ve stopped five stupidities ago, but this truly is last call. He’s going to tell him. Now.

“Three thousand.” Teddy’s used to foreign voices spilling from his lips, but it’s the first time he’s felt possessed.

“I’ll give you five.”

Teddy does laugh, then, hysterical. “I don’t think you understand the principle of negotiation.”

“Polyjuice is rough on the body. And I’d want your full commitment.”

So he knows. He knows Not-Teddy’s never tried it before. Intuition is Harry’s middle name, at least in matters of magic. Or does some part of him still recognise some part of Teddy in this fragile front of a woman?

“Trying to get someone out of your system?” Teddy asks, playful, stalling.

“Something like that.”

“Relatable.”

“Is that a yes?”

The mind is not so easily transformed as the body, it would seem.

Teddy draws a breath. It disappears in his chest without a trace, then reappears by stealth, alchemised into one traitorous, earth-shattering syllable.

“Yes.”

 

_

 

Teddy can think now. A little. Too bad there’s no time to do it. His thoughts are forced to condense, to process in seconds what should take years. In therapy.

The Apparition point is seconds away, then suddenly, there’s Number Twelve. Awash in lamplight, gloomy as ever, but it never really was, not to Teddy. Not after that one summer.

Now he’s got twenty-three steps to the front door to work out who the fuck Harry’s so keen on shagging. Who in their right mind would turn him down, unless they were married or dead? Not once has Harry confided even a passing fancy of either gender. Not to Teddy, at least. Except—

Shit. Two for two. One married, one dead.

The way Harry’s always talked about him—the way he doesn’t talk about him—but Sirius has been gone far too long to be haunting his godson’s wank fantasies, and unless Harry’s kept a creepy little lock of his hair somewhere—no judgement, whatever, but no.

No. If it’s a bloke, it’s Malfoy.

They’re colleagues now, Harry can barely pen a letter without slipping in a mention. How Malfoy's office is one metre wider. How impractical his emerald cufflinks are. How unfair it is he can whip up a deflating draught faster and better than Harry (privately, Teddy thinks it’s quite fair, given Malfoy’s the new potions master).

But Teddy will never know for sure, because he’s putting a stop to this. Now.

“Sorry.” Harry waves a hand in the dark. Seeded lanterns blink awake across the foyer wall, capsuling them in an aureate halo that feels like the inside of a Snitch. “I know it’s a bit...”

Teddy inhales the familiarity. Dusty antiques that could tell more stories than Beedle, overshadowed by the fresh hickory and lingering adhesive of twenty-first century renovation. The checkerboard Carrara, barely five years old, bites echoes beneath his stilettos.

“It’s beautiful.”

And it is, if it weren’t so—lonely. But it wasn’t always. It wasn’t then. For all Harry’s spectral memories of Grimmauld, Teddy’s are nothing but stellar. He’s secretly glad Harry never could bring himself to sell after they’d fixed it up. It’s no house on the lake, but it’s comfortable now, cushioned with new memories. Just him and Harry, day after day for four weeks after Third Year. Jamie had been too young to be of use, and much as Teddy loved the kid, he’d been glad. And guilty. A whole month of Harry all to himself, shirtless and sweating with a tool belt slung around his hips, the pair of them ripping down walls and putting up fences and mucking about with the motorbike long after they should’ve been asleep.

As sexual awakenings go, Teddy’s was top tier.

And the garden—once they’d planted the roses and cleared out the barbed-wire mess of venomous briar fit for a prison yard fence—it was lovely. Just lovely. That was the summer Teddy fell in love with Herbology.

And with Harry.

Maybe, one day, he can make good memories for Harry here, too.

But it sure as hell won’t be tonight. That ship has sailed and sunk.

“Do you want to tell me your name?” Harry asks.

Teddy shakes his head. “Tell me theirs.”

Harry stares, locked and guarded.

“I assume you’ll want to use their name?” That’s not what Teddy’s supposed to say. He’s supposed to say Harry, wait.

Harry swallows. “Confidentiality charms?”

“Same ones the Unspeakables use. Go on.”

It’s rote by now, but it’s the first time his heart has threatened to rattle out of this D-cup chest. Metamorph mods are undetectable, but what if what if what if—

What if he can’t keep this one up?

What if a turquoise streak bleeds through?

Maybe the blond has addled his brain, because what in fresh hell is he doing?

Harry runs the tests, thorough to a fault. Teddy would expect nothing less. It’s the most awkward part of the job—waiting, fidgeting while a wand is drawn on him, inspecting his enchantments. He fidgets his way to the clawfoot console table on his right. One sympathetic fingertip brushes over a wilted ficus drooping out of an urn.

“Can’t keep anything alive.” Harry pockets his wand. “Plants... my marriage...”

Teddy’s heart clenches. Leave it to Harry to make shitty dad jokes at a time like this.

Teddy smiles and nods at the victim. “May I?”

“Have a go,” Harry shrugs. “Can’t get any deader.”

The revival spell is nothing fancy, but Harry’s always been rubbish at this. Leaves brighten under the incantation, rise and shine at Teddy’s touch. No wand required, just love.

“Little trick I learned in Mumb—” Teddy bites his tongue. “From my mum.”

“Incredible,” Harry marvels. “Reminds me of my—”

Teddy freezes. Harry waves the rest of the sentiment away like a bothersome insect.

“Do you take payment upfront?”

It’s sandpaper-coarse, crude on the tongue that once read him to sleep, but that’s why Teddy’s here, isn’t it? A business transaction, not an intimate evening with the man he’s loved since Fourth Year.

Time to come clean. His dad was a Gryffindor. Teddy can do this. He can.

“No need,” Teddy says. “I trust you.”

He can’t. He can’t. He can’t.

It’s only until he finds out who. That’s as far as he’ll go. It’s a horrible thing, what he’s doing—dragging a serrated blade through two decades of trust, but he needs this as much as he fears it: confirmation that Harry doesn’t want him. Only then will he be able to move on—or at least pretend he ever could.

Harry’s eyes link with Teddy’s as he summons the potion, wandless and wordless and spine-meltingly hot. The only sounds are the storeroom door thumping open, the plink of dusty glass through a gridlock of cobwebbed shelves, overflow stocked from his Auror days.

The potent sludge in a teardrop vial soars into Harry’s palm. Strong fingers mould to its shape, possessive; grip until his forearms flex. If Teddy were in his own body, he’d be hard.

“So.” Teddy clears his throat (her throat, high-pitched and floral, focus). “Who am I changing into?”

Harry’s eyes flicker. “Does it matter?”

“I’d like to be prepared.” Teddy shrugs like he does this every day. “A general description is fine. Age, height, build...” He tries not to swallow his tongue. “Gender.”

Harry blinks. Several times. “Right. Er, he’s...”

He.

Teddy’s blood goes cold but it’s Harry who reacts, eyes lightning around this stormcloud space thick with memories. It’s Harry who turns away, chewing his nails in a way he hasn’t since Teddy was small. He was a different Harry back then, the Harry that Teddy first met. Nearly a child himself. Skittish and numb and shaken by war and still he loved Teddy like no one else, with body and soul and a magic so ripe, so bold, Teddy’s own grew around it. A nascent vine climbing up a cracked but resilient trellis.

It’s time Harry had something of his own to lean on.

“Harry—can I call you that?” Teddy’s hand alights on his arm. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Harry’s eyes are challenge-dark. Think so? Try me. Teddy will. He could stare Harry down in any body, with any limits, any handicaps, any time or place.

“He’s gorgeous,” Harry says, swallowing hard, but doesn’t dare look away. “Fit as hell. Played Quidditch for years.”

Malfoy. So that’s that.

“He’s a bit—actually, no. We’re nearly the same height now.” Harry drifts away, eyes hazing off into space.

Nearly the same, bless. Malfoy’s still got a few centimetres on him.

“How old is he?” Teddy asks, with an evenness that shocks the senses. This must be the denial stage. Loss hasn’t quite hit, yet.

Harry’s eyes whip back to his. This one’s giving him trouble. No reason it should, just say it. Thirty-eight, same as Harry. Teddy can end this fucking charade here and now. Back out, slip away, claim a headache, for fuck’s sake. No one ever has to know.

“Nineteen.”

Guilt leaks from Harry’s eyes. There are years of pain paving the lines of his stupidly handsome face, fossilised in the clench of his jaw, the tortured set of his shoulders. His whole body radiates shame, a self-replenishing source.

The first instinct, of course, is to kiss it away, love it away. Teddy aches for him so deeply, nucleus-deep, seabed-deep, he almost forgets the admission. Almost forgets he played Quidditch, too. Hufflepuff Seeker, four years, and if that didn’t earn him a flurry of homophobic jokes about catching—

It’s time. Time for Teddy to react. To scream if he must, for joy or madness. When you’re nineteen (and he is, god, he is), what’s the bloody difference?

The fact he’s managed to keep up the mask gives him the boost of courage. The mask itself protects him, lets the real Teddy watch from safely within. Watch the chaos unfold like parchment covered in dangerous words with ritual power. All that’s left is to speak them aloud.

“What’s his name?” Teddy asks.

His voice is shaking, but so is Harry’s when he mutters the magic words.

“His name is Teddy.”

And then Harry’s gone. Rounded the corner to the kitchen, presumably to add whatever bit of Teddy he’s got, probably a hair from one of the jumpers Teddy leaves lying around like he’s marking his territory and maybe he was, all along.

The overwhelm shoots right off the charts, and somehow that makes it easier, almost anticlimactic. It’s too much to face, so Teddy doesn’t. Pauses the crisis long enough to address a single question.

Why?

Why didn’t Harry tell him? They’re both single now and Teddy’s of age, a man of the world, he’s gone out and lived, at Harry’s urging, there’s no reason they shouldn’t, except the bloody godfather thing, and what does that even matter? There’s not a snowball’s chance on a dragon’s tongue that it might be fear of rejection because he must know how Teddy feels, fuck, anyone in a twenty-metre radius with a fireseed’s worth of gaydar must know how Teddy feels—

Unless Harry doesn’t actually want him.

Unless Harry just wants to fuck him. Get it out of his system, like they said. Loves Teddy enough that he’d never do it, just not a whit more than that. Not enough to wake up with him day after day, sleep-puffy eyes and morning breath; not enough to make pancakes with him on Sunday morning; to share stretches of silence while they work or read.

Except they’ve already done those things. Weekends, holidays, summers. They did those things all the time.

Harry returns and presses something into his hand. It takes a moment to remember—cool, rounded glass; rough cork stopper. Christ almighty, the Earth’s poles have flipped and somehow they’re still playing.

“There’s a loo down the hall.” Harry backs away, evidently eager to clear his home of this stranger’s face. “Should be some clothes on the shelf. If you’d like to change. They’re clean. He—they should fit him.”

Somehow, Teddy’s fingers clamp around the vial without it shattering. Somehow, his legs wobble into submission, uneven, colt-like. He’s halfway down the hall when he turns and bares his soul.

“Can I ask a personal question?”

Harry stiffens. “Can’t promise I’ll answer.”

“Why can’t you be with him?”

Harry shakes his head, no hesitation, nothing to consider. “Just can’t.”

The delivery invites no follow-up. Teddy locks himself in the loo. The one he helped remodel. As promised, a small stack of badly folded laundry sits eye-level on the linen rack. Harry’s about as good at housekeeping as he is at Herbology.

He plucks the one on top, a vintage Queen tee he’s stolen from Harry at least a dozen times.

Teddy brings the tap to a white-noise roar and buries his face beneath it. If he’s going to cry, better to do it as someone else.

 

_

 

Walking back down the corridor as himself, mask shed, barefoot in Harry’s clothing with too-loose jeans hung low on his hips, tears and Polyjuice dumped down the drain—it feels like something impossible. A vulnerability that cannot exist, for no one could survive it. No one could avoid shattering beneath the weight of a march down the wedding aisle and death row in one.

Harry’s where Teddy left him, but in rapid decline. Curled in on himself, one hand spread-fingered over his face, a spider gripping its prey. He looks like a man condemned.

Teddy opens his mouth to say it before he falls under the spell of those eyes. Harry, I need to tell you—

Harry, I—

“Harry—”

Then Harry looks up, and the whole world is sucked away. Polyjuice down a drain.

Harry’s looking at him the way Teddy dreamed he would for five soul-crushing years.

How long has it been for Harry? How long has he been hiding this away behind his godfather mask, the title he wears like armour?

The thought alone sends a volt of arousal straight from brain to cock.

Harry steps toward him carefully, like Teddy is a mirage. A trick of the eye, not to be trusted. A conjured entity from an experimental spell Harry never expected to work. Not the awkward, slouching, dirty-haired kid who can lose a whole day to Muggle video games and still breaks out when he binges on chocolate. Not the lovesick twit who ran into Harry at Charlie’s last week, hands stuffed in his ripped denim pockets to stop himself giving Harry a second hug.

The scrutiny is short lived, elevating into something that feels like reverence. Teddy reasons it’s safe to let his magic loose now, unclip the leash so it can twine around Harry’s as it’s been aching to do since he walked in the pub. His godfather’s magic is right there waiting, meeting it with a force so violent it punches tears into Harry’s eyes. Teddy wants to lick them away. Could he? Oh god, he could, he can. Like his magic, he’s been released. He could touch him, kiss him, drop to his knees in filthy worship. That’s what he’s here for, isn’t it?

“Harry—”

“Please,” Harry shakes his head. “Don’t say anything yet. Just. Let me look. I never get to just... look.”

Teddy muzzles the lamentation clawing its way up his throat. You could’ve. Should’ve. I’ve been waiting.

“Perfect.” Harry’s hand suspends at Teddy’s cheek, close enough to feel the energy transfer, flesh to flesh. Bodies humming a plea to connect, to christen in the name of—or perhaps despite—their sacred titles, to consummate just as their magic did before they ever knew. If Harry touches him, when Harry touches him, Teddy will burst like a bubble. He will float and luminesce like a bubble, and then, at first touch, he will pop. “Perfect,” Harry chants again. “Absolutely perfect.”

He means the copy, of course. There is nothing perfect about Teddy, orphaned and queer and broken in ways he tries to heal with plants.

“Christ,” Harry chokes, leaning in to inhale from the pulse-heavy basin of Teddy’s neck. “You even smell like him.”

Teddy’s eyes drop shut. “Must’ve been a good batch.”

Harry huffs. “It’s for emergencies,” he confesses, lips gauze-light on Teddy’s throat. “Not this... definitely not for this.”

The reluctant integrity is so fucking Harry, it launches a new pang of guilt. Even to a stranger, he tells the truth.

But not to his own godson.

A lie for a lie, then? Is that what they’ve come to? Is that how Teddy’s justifying how deep he’s dug his own grave?

Harry eases back to meet his eyes. “Do you have a safe word?”

Teddy does. It’s lightning.

“Dittany,” he says.

Harry nods. Lowers his hand. The panic is surging back. “I think I need another drink.”

Instead Teddy races the panic, seizes two ravenous fistfuls of shirt, and pulls Harry’s mouth into his.

It’s not the kiss he’d envisioned—a gentle, post-confessional rosebud of a thing—but it’s the kiss Harry clearly needs. The kiss that flips the switch from tamable hunger to sudden awareness of famine, of all Harry’s denied himself for however long it’s been. It unleashes after the burst of shock, right into Teddy’s mouth, wet and relentless, on the crest of a magma tongue that leaves no corner untasted. It’s a mountaintop kiss, a horizon kiss, exhilarating, unsuited for words. Harry tastes like gin and grenadine, unexpected, but still Harry underneath—even if the Harry who kisses like this, dirty and purifying as lake water, is impossible to reconcile with the Harry who patched up Teddy’s scrapes, kissed away his tears. Where he once healed bruises, now he creates them, fingers viced around Teddy’s hips, whiplashing him into the nearest wall. Like Teddy is his feral link to gravity and not the other way around.

Harry holds him there, now that he’s got him. Holds him all over, up against the wall, hands kneading a path up his sides, arms, shoulders, neck, oh god, his fucking throat. When Teddy whimpers at the pressure, Harry tests a bit more. That’s what he does, Harry. Finds your weakness and instead of exploiting it, nurtures it into a flourishing strength. Teddy’s love of flying, of music, of plants—Harry was there from inception. It was Harry who gave him his first Nimbus, his first Fender, his first Herbology kit at the slightest seed of interest. And now it’s Harry’s hands on his throat, blooming to life a need Teddy’s never voiced to anyone.

Harry pulls away at Teddy’s ruptured gasp, checking for signs of distress. All Teddy can say is—

“Yes,” dropping the affirmation into Harry’s mouth, tracing it onto his tongue. “Please, anything, yes.”

Harry squeezes again, just a little, a promise, more, later, then he’s cradling Teddy’s face. Mapping him out with gem-cut eyes and firm fingertips. Both climb up his jaw, make their way to his hair, and that’s where they come into power. Now Harry can tug Teddy where he wants him, tip his head to the side, snap teeth around the hummingbird pulse. A deep groan rumbles through Teddy’s skin when their magic suddenly spikes.

“Fuck.” Harry sinks further against him and nuzzles into his neck, fingers curling in Teddy’s hair. “Do you feel that?”

Teddy does. The effect on their magic as it hurricanes around them, cocoons them in the eye of its storm. This is what it’s been waiting for. This is what it’s been pushing them towards, flirting them towards—

“Shouldn’t be possible,” Harry pants into his skin, a doubt evidently drowned by wonder. “You shouldn’t be able to—”

To forge his magical signature. No. No epiphanies, not yet, please let them have this a little longer.

Teddy yanks him back into a kiss, fights Harry’s tongue with his own, memorises each taste, each texture before the fallout. And even as he craves to touch Harry everywhere, to explore with his hands the cartography his eyes have been charting for years, he clings only to Harry’s shirtfront. A lifeline, a storm shelter. Afraid if he tries to touch anything else, it will disintegrate in his hands, decay to graveyard ash.

It is Harry who untethers him, takes Teddy’s hands and holds them against his chest. Gives them a squeeze, confirmation of solidity, then raises them over his head. Presses them to the wallpaper they’d hung by magic, roll by painstaking roll. Teddy would be lying if he said he hadn’t imagined this, wrists digging into the damask as Harry pins him in place and devours his mouth. But this is better than the fantasy, even as a ruse, and Teddy can’t help the fractured moan that resounds from his throat to Harry’s. Can’t stop his hips canting forward, a life-or-death quest for friction. Harry meets him halfway, hip bones slamming into his with intent to mark, to leave something that will outlive this night.

“Hold onto me,” Harry breathes, and lowers Teddy’s arms.

Teddy locks both arms around Harry's shoulders as Harry’s solid hands dip lower, seize handfuls of his thighs, and lift.

Lanterns rattle and flicker when they crash to the sofa, two doorways and a corridor later. Whether flare in magic or shoddy construction, it hardly matters. The whole house could come crumbling down for all Teddy cares, as long as his legs stay wrapped around Harry’s waist, Harry’s cock notched against his through straining fabric, hard as fucking granite.

“All right?” Harry asks. “Had to stop before I fucked you against the wall.”

Teddy smiles, heaving and hazy and certain he’s dreaming. “I wouldn’t have complained.”

Harry smiles back, but he looks so... how can misery and peace coexist? Like he’s holding a photograph of his favourite memory, knowing he’ll never get it back. Doesn’t he know he can have everything? That Teddy will give him everything?

“Harry...”

Harry’s hand comes home to his cheek. Teddy turns into it, mouths at the pulse, the palm, up his middle finger. He tongues the length, sucks it past tenderised lips, circles around the tip. Harry watches from swelling pupils, twin drops of black ink on glass, but his patience is short-lived. He steals his hand away, replacing it with his tongue, and Teddy dissolves. Forgets the confession he’s supposed to be giving; offers himself instead.

Harry’s moving with purpose now, igniting a path downward, laving at dewdrop sweat prickling the dip of Teddy’s throat while Teddy ruts against him, claws at his back, hard to the point of agony. So is Harry, but Harry is Harry. Calm in chaos, the eye of every storm. Where Teddy is a single point of contact away from explosion, Harry controls the detonation switch.

He rucks up Teddy’s shirt (Harry’s shirt), licks up his quivering stomach, and growls. “You actually taste like him.”

“How—” Teddy veers into horrible thoughts of guilt-fueled Obliviation, but Harry shakes his head.

“I just knew,” Harry says, nipping at the ramp of his hip bone. “I knew he would taste like this.”

“What does he—” Teddy’s hand nests in Harry’s hair, parting the midnight curtains. “What do I taste like, Harry?”

Harry casts him a pained, yearning look as he catches on to the roleplay. “You taste like you.”

“Is it good?”

“Good...” Harry drops his forehead to the hollow below Teddy’s ribcage. “Ted... it will ruin me.”

Teddy melts, boneless and in love. “Serves you right. You ruined me years ago.”

Harry looks at him, hard, then climbs back up, kissing away the admission. “Tell me,” one hand working between them, thumbing open Teddy’s top button. “Tell me when.”

“Since that summer. The night you let me try Firewhisky, right on this couch, made me swear not to tell Nan. I was gone for you.”

It takes him a moment. It takes Harry longer. Two lone dominoes, frozen in fall.

It’s over.

Harry blinks. “How did you—”

Not a single cell moves in Teddy’s body. Not a beat, not a breath. Just his eyes on Harry’s, wide and blinkless and blurring with tears.

A decade of Auror instinct kicks in. Harry scrambles off the sofa, wand drawn at lightspeed.

“Who are you?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer. Finite first, then a slew of others. Not painful, just fruitless. There is no charm to break, no spell to detect, no dark magic to reverse. There is nothing for Harry to find.

“Harry—” A silent Stupefy pins Teddy in place, precise as a surgeon’s incision. “Harry. Please.”

That does something. Harry releases him, but his wand remains on high alert as Teddy gets to his feet. Takes the deepest breath of his life, and morphs back into the blond.

A few dozen things cross Harry’s face, but ultimately logic wins. “That’s not possible. You can’t transfigure yourself out of Polyjuice, that’s not how—”

“Harry.”

Teddy sinks back into his own body. That, horrifically, drops the last piece into place.

“Oh, god.” Harry backs up, stumbles his way to the edge of the sofa, gripping the arm for support. “Fucking god, what the bloody hell.”

“I’m sorry,” Teddy says, because what else? “I wanted to tell you—”

It sounds even worse out loud, and Harry’s not buying it anyway.

“Tell me where he is,” Harry snaps, one more bid at denial. “Tell me what you’ve done with him. Tell me how you’re doing this.”

“Harry.”

“Tell me!”

Teddy takes a step forward. Harry takes one back.

“When I came out to you... you said nothing on Earth could make you love me any less.” Teddy swipes at his eyes. “Is that still true?” 

Harry looks punched through the heart. Teddy takes another step forward. This time, Harry doesn’t move.

“Is it?” Teddy asks again. He sounds weak. He is weak. Mad to think he could pull this off, to think he ever had a chance—at deception, at Harry, at anything.

After a very long time, Harry nods.

“Why—” Harry’s voice is gravel-rough, like he hasn’t used it for years. “Why were you there... at the pub... doing that?”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were getting divorced?"

Harry stares and stares.

“Yeah,” Teddy says, deflated. “Goes both ways, see.”

Harry’s mouth opens a dozen times, on the brink of so many fork-in-the-road words, but none of them make it out. None until—

“Why did you let me do this to you?”

Harry’s guilt tears a hole through Teddy’s centre. “Because I wanted you to.”

The air shifts, rearranging atoms. It’s the first time Harry’s magic has completely shut him out.

“I think you should go.”

“Harry. We need to talk.”

“We will. Just. Not now. Please.” He turns away when Teddy doesn’t. “Ted. Please.”

Teddy swallows around the taste of gin and grenadine and Harry. Still fresh on his tongue, Harry.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and sweeps through the door. Down the hall over marble tiles he helped Harry lay five years ago. He Floos barefoot into Vic’s living room, falls in her arms, and cries himself dry.

 

_

 

Vic owls him halfway through festivities. Of course all the Weasleys had to end up living two bloody blocks apart.

Harry looks like he hasn’t slept since the war

Aunt H has her Sherlock Deduction Face on

It’ll be worse if you don’t show

Teddy tosses the parchment on the floor by the bed, then sets it on fire for good measure. It’s a feeble little flame, but it does the job. Burn what he can, ignore what he can’t, jerk off for the fourth sticky time since breakfast.

Then he puts on pants.

 

_

 

Just a small group. Honestly, Aunt H (who does have Sherlock Deduction Face). The Weasleys who aren’t keeping Ginny company, several Finnigans, Longbottoms, a gaggle of Lovegoods and all three Potter spawn cheer Teddy’s late arrival, grill him about his food poisoning and offer a host of restorative draughts. When Lily suggests Polyjuice might help “because you’d have someone else’s tummy,” Teddy chokes on his first sip of Butterbeer.

Then, across two open rooms and twenty-odd unfairly happy faces, he locks bloodshot eyes with Harry.

He’s going to need something stronger.

Vic wasn’t lying. Harry looks twice dead in the face, but he’s made a valiant effort. The grey blazer and navy tee are stunning over fitted trousers. Of course they fucking are. Teddy wants to crawl into a cave.

Harry doesn’t look away first, and that’s the best thing that’s happened all day. Teddy’s made an effort at temptation, too, unfair as it may be. Showered and coiffed in his tightest jeans with the rip in the thigh and his 12 Uses of Dragon’s Blood v-neck. If today is the day his heart gets broken, he’ll damn well look good crying in a ball on the bathroom floor.

Dinner could be worse. Harry could announce his engagement to Malfoy.

Jamie and Al fight over Teddy’s left side. Lily claims right, as always. Teddy reckons being planted across from Harry is as bad as it gets. Until they bring out the gifts.

“Er, left mine at the flat,” Teddy confesses to his napkin. The truth. He doesn’t feel any freer. “Sorry.”

“You didn’t have to get me anything,” Harry says. He’s paused with his fork mid-journey from plate to mouth, just to look Teddy in the eye.

Teddy shrugs, withering under the pinprick scrutiny of god knows how many skeptical glances. “Well, I did.”

And that’s that. Or so he thinks.

“You could drop it by later,” Harry says without looking up, then plugs up his mouth with pudding.

Teddy spends the next hour trying to decide if it was a genuine invitation. Finally decides he’s not going to care, and escapes himself to the balcony. He leans over the balustrade beside a potted evergreen, resolutely does not look at the stars, and contemplates the rest of his life.

“Ted.”

Contemplation complete.

Teddy turns, and here they are. Alone for the first time since. He’ll die if it’s the last.

“I’ll be home by midnight,” Harry says. “If you... want to talk?”

Genuine, then. Teddy nods. He doesn’t trust words quite yet.

“Just—” Harry adds, “to talk.”

Teddy nods, but he’s already gone numb.

A slow-motion rejection. Brilliant.

Chapter 2: felix memorias

The first flash of turquoise coincided with the first time Harry held him.

It’s better to say coincided.

He must know who you are, Andy had said, but the title was only a formality. Harry was nobody. Certainly no father figure, god or otherwise. Just a war-torn kid with a graveyard’s worth of survivor’s guilt, still mourning his own dead godfather—who, privately (very privately), for a few reckless supernova moments, had been a right sight more than a title.

But there it was, that fledgling burst of visceral magic, reaching out for Harry’s in technicolour. And Harry, an unmoored wreck of sheet-drenching nightmares and bad coping mechanisms, had welcomed it into his mangled heart, split himself open on it, let it pour into his blood and bones till he could hardly tell it from his own.

Teddy had done the same. Orphan to orphan.

That’s where their shared history would end, Harry vowed. For every night Harry had spent cramped in his cupboard, Teddy would be warm and safe. For every neglected Christmas and birthday Harry had endured, Teddy would be honoured as a prince. From that first rogue turquoise blossom, Harry set out, with full transparency and best intentions, to love him, spoil him the way he deserved.

Spoil him. Not ruin him.

The road to hell, and so on.

Had he doomed them from the start? Loved him all wrong? Missed a rung on this wobbly ladder of familial bonding he was never taught how to climb? What does intent matter with an outcome like this—two lost souls who never knew how to be fathers or sons, so they became something else together. Something without definition or boundary. Something wrong. Which it is.

Isn’t it?

There must be a line between wrong and unwise, wrong and perilous, wrong and taboo—but clearly, clearly, Harry knows fuck all about lines. You ruined me years ago and still Harry wants to ruin him more. Ruin him for anyone else. Ruin him so there is no one else.

That’s not what makes him a bad person, though. What makes him a bad person is that even with all the time turners in the world, he wouldn’t change a thing.

Not when this glorious boy is standing on the other side of Number Twelve’s magical threshold, only visible to those who belong here. God, look at him—midnight on the dot, eyes lustrous with youthful optimism, a three-generations-old motorbike parked behind him and his helmet clutched dutifully under one arm.

If anyone belongs here, it’s him. It’s Harry who deserves to be exiled.

“Hi,” Harry says, and steps aside.

The foyer is as far as they get. To the left is the wall Harry nearly fucked him against twenty-four hours ago, and to the right is the drawing room with the sofa Harry nearly fucked him into twenty-three hours and fifty-four minutes ago—five years after apparently igniting Teddy’s fourteen-year-old libido. That’s a fuck lot of problematic numbers.

“Library?” Teddy suggests. “We could sit at separate tables, hide behind ancient tomes and banker’s lamps.”

Harry bites his tongue. Given how thoroughly devourable Teddy looks in his vacuum-sealed jeans and leather jacket (a coming-of-age present from Harry—distinctly tainted in hindsight), separate tables won’t be enough.

“Drink?”

Teddy shoves his hands in his pockets and hunches up his shoulders. “Yeah.”

They end up on the sofa because that’s where people sit and it’s ridiculous to be scared of a piece of furniture after you’ve battled dragons and won wars. Literally and figuratively.

“So.” Teddy clears his throat after several long gulps and digs around in his pocket. “Since it’s not technically your birthday anymore... consider it a ‘sorry for ruining your birthday’ gift.”

“Ted, you didn’t…”

He did, a little, but it’s Harry’s fault, and he’d rather not think about it while Teddy’s pulling a thimble from his pocket and restoring it into a gift box with a flick of his wand. Dark blue wrapping, Harry’s favourite, with a shimmering turquoise bow.

Given his natural abilities, Teddy had never much applied himself to Transfiguration. When did that change? And why?

What else has changed?

Harry unwraps it and cradles a small wooden stag in his hand. Tucked into its antlers is a single wooden flower.

A lily.

“Ted...” It’s more than you shouldn’t have; it’s I don’t deserve you.

“Lucas, this wizard in Rio, he carves them with protective powers. Like a wandmaker. They’re meant to—” Teddy hesitates, grabs his wand, and arranges the figurine on Harry’s palm. The most gossamer brush of fingertips, still nothing short of wildfire. “Felix memorias.”

The wood comes to life like pliant clay. It takes a step across his palm, sets two large oaken eyes upon Harry’s, then slowly bows its head.

The effect is immediate. Harry’s Patronus repository springs to the front of his mind—every happy memory he’s stored away, and several more he’d forgotten. No sense counting how many are of Teddy; he’s well aware the percentage is disproportionately high.

“Finite,” Teddy says. The stag freezes in place.

Harry stares at Teddy and says nothing, because all he wants to say is I’m so in love with you.

This isn’t a boy’s gift, it’s a man’s. A reveal of how intimately Teddy knows him, knows exactly what Harry must be needing at this chaotic crossroads in his life.

“It’s incredible,” Harry finally gets out. “Truly. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Harry sets down the gift and ponders how long he can stop the elephant in the room from stampeding them flat.

“Lucas?” Harry takes a swig. “Didn’t mention him in your letters.”

“Didn’t I?”

“No. There was Gabriel, the, er...”

“Coroner.”

“Right, bit creepy, and then... Amir? The…”

Teddy smiles. “Runway model.”

“Right.” Another swig, two for good measure. Maybe he can outdrink his jealousy. “Dated him for awhile, yeah?”

“Few months.”

“Mm.”

“Don’t worry. I only shagged Lucas to get a discount.”

Harry chokes on his beer.

“Joking. Shagged him for six weeks.”

“Brilliant.” Harry’s beer is gone. This was a bad idea. “You’ll break Lily’s heart, you know. She fancies you now.”

“Oh, bugger.”

“Planned the wedding and everything.”

“Let her down easy for me?”

“And have her shoot the messenger?” Harry scoffs. “Fight your own battles, Casanova.”

This time, they smile together. Not broken beyond repair, then. A hairline fracture, mendable. Forgettable. Does he want to forget?

Does Teddy?

“Ted—”

“I’m sorry,” Teddy says, a laser through solid-rock tension. “Everything—I’m sorry—”

“Stop. You have nothing to be sorry for. I’m the one who—”

“Fuck’s sake, don't be a martyr.”

“I’m not.” Harry looks at him, unflinching. It is imperative Harry takes responsibility for this, given he’s failed at every other. “I hired someone to impersonate you for sex. It’s unforgivable.”

“You’re forgiven.”

“Ted. What if it had been someone else? How would you feel when you found out?”

“Same way you did when you found out. Don’t patronise me by hogging the blame. We both fucked up, and—” His voice drops. “You felt it. In the pub. On some level, you knew. You wouldn’t have done it with anyone else.”

Harry starts to protest, but can he? Even now, his magic tugs violently at its reins. If it reaches Teddy’s, he’s done for. Perfect, precious Teddy, who’s watching him from behind this look, a gut-wrenching marriage of hope and fear locked in struggle. Even in distress, he’s the most gorgeous thing Harry’s ever seen, and the need to tell him, show him, is mounting by the second. It’s never been so raw, this need, so savage—a caged beast who caught a glimpse of freedom and is ready to gnaw through the bars, even if the risk proves fatal.

“Forgive me,” Harry says thinly, “for everything I haven’t told you.”

The elephant’s footsteps rumble closer. Harry deserves to be trampled. In the meantime he’ll press the heels of his palms into his eyes until stars burst behind them.

"Tell me.”

Harry envies him, unfairly. Teddy’s had five years to work out his feelings, while Harry has subsisted on denial.

“Fine,” Teddy decides. “I’ll go first. Ask me anything.”

“What—”

“Go on. Anything.”

Harry runs his palms along his thighs, blotting away sweat to no avail. “Why are you working as a... a...”

“It’s not a dirty word.”

“I know, but it’s risky. It’s...”

“Safer than being an Auror. And it was just till I figured out what I want.”

“Sweetheart, I can get you an interview anywhere. I can give you as much money as you need. I would do anything—”

“I know. And... nepotism aside, I’m grateful. But I want to do this on my own.”

“I understand, but why—that?”

“Because I wanted to try it.” The answer ripples with a confidence Harry’s never seen. “I like sex, Harry.”

Of course he looks him in the eye when says it. Harry drops off the face of the Earth.

"Harry." Teddy sighs. “When I work, I’ve got more protective wards on me than Hogwarts. I’m in control, I choose my clients, I had the best defence teacher in the world, and I’m not a damn kid anymore, so why didn’t you tell me you were getting divorced?”

Harry buries his face in his palms. “You should’ve been in Slytherin.”

“The Hat did offer. I think my exact words were, ‘No, thank you, sir.’”

“A true Hufflepuff’s answer.” Harry tries to smile. “I didn’t tell you because I wanted you to focus on your work. I didn’t want you to worry. And I didn’t want you to think...”

He can’t say it. This time, mercy is swift.

“...That it was about me,” Teddy finishes.

Denial springs into action. Harry fights it tooth and nail. “The divorce had nothing to do with... what I feel for you. Or, fuck, maybe it did, a little, and that’s worse, because I didn’t want you to think I had any expectations. That’s why I didn’t invite you to live here. Why I’ve been… distant.”

Harry knows what’s coming, but still the question pins him like a full-body bind. Teddy’s confidence has been gutted by fear by the time he finally asks:

“What do you feel for me?”

Harry can’t dodge it like a slew of curses anymore. He is fully, miserably aware of how he feels, and Teddy deserves the truth.

“When you came out, I was sort of… in shock.”

“Seriously?” Teddy snorts. “Sorry, but. You were shocked I was gay? Me?”

Harry smirks. “Okay. No. That... was not exactly a surprise.”

“What gave it away, the time you caught me trying on Ginny’s wedding dress?”

“Either that or lip-synching to Wham in the kitchen with a spatula.”

"If only there had been some clue…”

Teddy’s smiling, but it’s a front. The fidgeting fingers, the shallow breaths. Does he even realise his hair has gone into strobe light mode? Harry wants to pull him close, stroke his manic mane, tell him everything will be fine, but he can’t, because things like that mean something else now.

A ringlet of Teddy’s magic loops around Harry’s. Solidarity.

“What I mean is…” Harry tries again, “when you came out, I looked at you, and I realised you were no longer a kid. That’s when I knew I was in danger.”

“Of what? I was of age when I came out, and I did a shit job hiding how desperate I was for you to bend me over a table. You’ve got nothing to feel guilty about."

Harry rubs at his eyes, scrubs away the image. No such luck. “Told myself over and over I was imagining it...”

“Sorry. You'd think someone who can change faces at will could manage a bit more subtlety...”

“You were a kid.” Harry smiles feebly. “Remember the summer you practised morphing into Bowie for a month?”

Teddy ducks his head, wrinkles his nose. It’s cute as hell. “Thanks for that, by the way.”

“For what?”

“My Muggle music education.”

Twenty-three years and still the triggers are whip-sharp. Harry stares at the embers spitting low in the hearth and pretends he can still see it: the cut of his jaw, the silver-dawn eyes, rune-covered hands over every hungry inch of Harry’s youth-supple, iron-hot skin.

“That was all Sirius,” he says.

Teddy takes his hand. First touch since. “Tell me.”

Harry knows he doesn’t mean the music.

“I was in love with him.” He’s never said it out loud. Still easier than I’m in love with you. Stepping stones, perhaps. “Whatever that means at fifteen.”

“Did he...”

Harry nods. “Shouldn’t have. Obviously. He was a bit broken, Sirius. So was I. But together we felt… whole.”

“…And?”

“And then he died.” And so did I. “I went for the safest person I could find and swore I’d never take a risk on anyone again.”

Teddy blinks as awareness takes root. His hand starts to retract. Harry holds it tighter.

He could tell him everything. How many bottles of Firewhisky it took to alleviate the pressure bearing down on him after the war. To choose a career and excel at it. To marry, to father, to lead. Put his fame to better use. Be what everyone expected: victor or press-worthy failure. To be James—rebel, bully, lover. Even Sirius too often saw a ghost in his eyes, in bed and in battle, till death do us part.

Harry will tell him. One day. Tonight, he cups his godson’s hand in both of his, looks him in the eye and does everything in his power not to kiss him.

“Listen to me,” Harry says. “You’re one of the few people who see me as I am and never asked for anything else. What’s better, you let me see you. And it’s beautiful. Ted, you’re beautiful. Being in your life is the greatest privilege of mine, and the risk of compromising what we have...” Harry bows his head. “I’ve taken a lot of risks, most of which I didn’t think twice about. Not all of them were worth it.”

“You took the safe route too, and what happened?” He waits until Harry looks up. “Nothing is safe. I’m sorry.”

“But it’s different with you. It matters more.”

“Why?”

“Because I am well and truly in love with you.”

In the end, it’s the easiest thing to say. Teddy’s eyes saucer out, fill with tears, dim from hazel to bronze. Perfect lips twitch with hope.

“And—” Barrel onward, stave off the panic. “I don’t know when it started, probably sooner than it should’ve, and—”

“Harry. You’re not Sirius.”

Harry stares at him, adrift.

“I don’t know if that’s what you needed to hear, but you’re not, and I'm not you."

How can he do that? Just—make the biggest things feel simple. Obvious. Is that what the world is like to a nineteen-year-old unravaged by grief and trauma? Of course it’s what Harry needed to hear, because who knows him better than this boy? Man. Not fifteen-year-old Harry. A man.

Harry shakes his head, because old habits. “You said I ruined you.”

“In the best way, you daft git. You set the bar so high, made me so happy, who else could possibly measure up?”

“Plenty of people. People who didn’t half raise you, who could love you the way you deserve—”

“I don’t want their love!” Teddy laughs, actually laughs, scattering a few tears loose. “I want yours.”

Simple. Obvious. Nothing to do but cup his cheek and admit defeat. “Ted... you have it.”

It’s written all over Teddy’s face. Kiss me or I’ll kiss you first. Harry tugs him forward before he can and angles their foreheads together. An almost kiss, a yes but not yet. More intimate than anything they did last night. Harry staggers his hands, one on Teddy’s cheek, one on his nape, thumb stroking soft, limitless circles he’d never dared stroke, while Teddy’s hands anchor on Harry’s biceps—a boundary nudge of his own while awaiting the invitation.

“You’ve had a long time to think about this,” Harry whispers. “I’ve done everything I can not to think about it.”

“I know.”

“I need time.”

“How much?”

They’re so close, half his inhale comes from Teddy’s exhale, warm and sweet with a spark of fire, and he can’t think beyond that. “I don’t know.”

Teddy nods, stilted. No surprise when he finally pulls away and pushes mechanically to his feet. “I should...”

Harry follows. “Are we...”

“Yeah, good,” Teddy says to the fire. “Take the time you need.”

“Ted.”

“Just—” Teddy leans in, skittish and quick, lips at Harry’s ear— “I’m in love with you too, okay?”

He stumbles backward, hands in his pockets, head tucked to his chin, and he’s gone. Boots on marble, door open, door closed, and Harry is alone.

To think.

For whatever stretch of time he deems sufficient for rumination. To rearrange guilt, analyse fear, assess every outcome and think twice, thrice, about every risk, and not a damn thing will change the fact that he and Teddy are in love.

Fuck.

Harry all but Apparates out the door, all but blows off the hinges. Teddy turns, helmet halfway to his head, then lowers it to his side.

“Enough,” Harry says. “Enough time.”

Teddy’s on him before the last word. Before the fibreglass shell smacks to the stoop and rolls across the concrete. Before Harry can recall a single entry on the list of reasons they shouldn’t.

_

 

Nothing should be smooth, what happens next, but by luck or miracle, it is. In a three-act play, Harry tugs them over the threshold, kicks the door shut, and shoves Teddy up against it.

Seeker reflexes never die. His palm shapes around Teddy’s skull the moment before impact, the backs of his knuckles colliding with the door. The sear of pain is divine, a perfect partner to pleasure. And pleasure is everywhere, everywhere—overwhelming now Harry knows it’s him and not a copy he’ll have to put back on the shelf at the end of the night. This pleasure is fathoms-deep and all-consuming: the paradise press of hips, the swell of denim-trapped cocks. The way Teddy’s hanging off him, pliant and clingy, arms looped around Harry’s neck—first loose from shock, then tight with purpose, digging the kiss deeper, deepest. Sconces dim and flicker around them as they sink into sync, magic soaring over skin—tingling, cloud-soft, daydream-light—as close to levitation as you can get without incantation or intoxicant.

First things first, the quest for skin. Teddy’s jacket takes the plunge. Harry shoves it over shoulders, hurls it to the floor, sneaks beneath the remaining cotton and there it is, the fevered flex of tensing abdominals beneath his famished hands. Teddy pushes into it, urges him on, higher, lower, more, while his own hands launch from Harry’s hair, roaming, insistent, bold, dynamic, everything they weren’t last night. They scope across Harry’s shoulders, over his back, up under his shirt, nails stuttering a path on the way back down, and Harry—

Harry is gone. Dips out of the kiss and down to the neck, biting, sucking, marking—claims staked by ravenous teeth in willing, quivering flesh. One hand to hold this writhing adolescent body in place, the other still cradling the back of his head, a dichotomy of tender and ruthless. Teddy’s going mad from it, Harry hopes he goes mad, hopes that when his hand slips from Teddy’s hip to his arse, Teddy’s legs will give out.

It does and they nearly do. Getting to catch him is just a bonus. Harry smiles, wolfish, in his face.

“Are you trying to kill me?” Teddy gasps and grinds.

“No.” Harry grinds back, harder. “Trying to ruin you. Heard you’re into that.”

Teddy smirks like he’s not not being kneaded to putty. “Told you. Mission accomplished.”

Harry’s teeth clamp down over his pulse. “You have no idea.”

That lifts the snark into a moan. Teddy’s desperate now, fingers flying down the centre of Harry’s chest, button by horrible button. Harry grabs both needy, fumbling hands, presses them to the door on either side of Teddy’s face, and looks him hard in the eye.

“You deserve to be savoured,” Harry explains, “and I’m going... to take... my time.”

Teddy keens in his arms. “Back to my original question.”

“You’ll survive.” Harry lines up their caged erections, earning a broken whimper. “You’re in good hands, sweetheart.”

Teddy smiles. “You didn’t call me that. Last night.”

“No. No one else.”

It’s true. Even the day James was born, when Harry was so overwhelmed he could hardly find words, he knew that wasn’t one of them. Darling, love, any other, but not that. Sweetheart belonged to Teddy.

"Here’s what’s going to happen unless you stop me.” Harry kisses him, soft. “I’m going to take you upstairs, lay you out on my bed, and you’re going to tell me everything you’ve ever wanted from me. And then,” he licks across the bow of Teddy’s lips, “I’m going to give it to you.”

Teddy’s breath spikes toward panting. “All in one night?”

“God no, I’m twice your age.”

“Yeah, you are.” His eyes flash between mirth and arousal. “It’s hot.”

“Ted...”

“Shut up.” Two thumbs hook in Harry’s belt. “Do you have any idea how sexy you are?”

Harry strokes his face. They’ll save daddy issues for another night. “Trust me. It’s you.”

He kisses away the protest, filthy and sopping wet, and leads his horribly shaggable godson up the first flight of stairs.

 

_

 

“Stay still for me.”

Gooseflesh steals over Teddy’s arms. Definition fades from his eyes, an ombre melt from sky to deep sea to navy. Fascinating. Just from a simple request. Command? Is that what he likes? Fuck.

Harry kisses him in the centre of the bedroom, breaking only to peel off Teddy’s v-neck. When fingers fly back to Harry’s shirtfront, this time, Harry doesn’t grab him.

“Still,” he repeats, quiet and calm. Teddy’s hands fall back to his sides. “Good.”

A sharp exhale in reply.

This is what Harry wants: Teddy’s full attention on the singular act of being unwrapped, of Harry opening him up for the first time.

Harry moves to the skintight jeans, button, zipper, down. Teddy wriggles out of them, boots abandoned on the stairs. Aside from the tenting jump of his cock, he doesn’t move another muscle. It would be depraved to say this is what Harry loves about teaching, but at the most basic level, it is. The challenge, the rush of trying techniques until the spark of cognition ignites.

Harry doesn’t look, not yet. Not even when the black boxer briefs come down, smooth as butter over lean thighs, toned to perfection and still holding a South American tan.

Teddy stops breathing when Harry rights himself, steps back and drinks him in, head to toe and every gorgeous inch in between.

Here, under scrutiny, the nerves come. The uptick of breath. The boy who’s never been shy a day in his life is blushing, naked, for his godfather. Watching Harry with brink-of-sanity hunger and something equally raw that penetrates deeper: unconditional trust.

“Exquisite,” Harry breathes, inching closer. “You are so...”

That’s when he sees it—the zig-zag on Teddy’s hip. A tattoo, magic, golden and sharp, flashing in time with his pulse.

A bolt of—

“That’s my safe word.” The flush spreads down Teddy’s torso. “My real one.”

Harry traces it with a fingertip. “Lightning?”

Teddy brushes a thumb over Harry’s scar. The guilt stings back to life.

Harry sighs, severing contact. “I’m a bad godfather, aren’t I?”

“The worst.” Teddy smiles. “Missed every birthday... never took me flying...”

“Twat.” But Harry doesn’t look him in the eye anymore, and he doesn’t come any closer.

“Harry.” Teddy takes Harry’s hand and guides it to his chest. “Touch me.”

Harry’s fingers spread over Teddy’s heart. “Still feels like I’m taking advantage.”

“Hope that’s not all you’re taking...”

“Christ, Ted.”

Teddy steps closer, undeterred, until their wild heartbeats connect. “Stop treating me like you’re worried I’ll break... and treat me like you want to break me.”

Harry starts to short-circuit. “I don’t—”

“Yes you do. Do I have to beg?”

Harry runs both hands up Teddy’s shivering sides. “Couldn’t hurt.” He’s good in a crisis, if nothing else.

“Please,” Teddy’s lips trace Harry’s ear. “Please, make me yours.”

It’s easier to throw him on the bed than it was to throw him in the lake. He’s willing, pliant, and he goes down easy. Sprawls and writhes and cants his hips while Harry whips off his own shirt, crawls on top of him, kisses the life from his lungs, unrolls him like parchment, a secret text he’s been aching to study.

“You’ve always been mine,” Harry growls into his neck. “Mine to protect. Mine to love. However you’ll let me.”

“Like this.” Teddy pulls him closer. “Please, love me like this.”

“I do. God, I do. Didn’t you feel it? Didn’t you know?”

Teddy nods. “Thought it would never happen.”

Rutting, grinding, open-mouth kisses, Teddy’s bare cock against Harry’s denim. “Tell me,” Harry says. Lower now, sweet-sucked bruises over collar bones, hips rolling into a boil. “Tell me what you thought would never happen. First thing you ever wanted.”

Teddy mewls like the memory alone pains him, tugging Harry down by the hair until they’re cheek to heartbeat—Harry listening, rapt, to the rabid force inside Teddy’s chest, poised to betray his secrets.

“First time I touched myself,” Teddy pants. “Imagined it was you. Your hand. Guiding. Teaching me. Like always.”

Harry could die from shame and arousal and the agony of not knowing the difference. “Never tell me how old you were.”

Teddy smiles. “Yes, sir.”

Harry bites down on whatever he finds. “What else?”

“I—” Teddy gasps when Harry’s hurricane touches reach the head of his cock. “Thought about you doing whatever you want to me. Losing control. Taking what you need. Thought about... being on my knees for you. Hands behind my back. Your fingers in my hair, dragging me where you want me. Holding me on your cock until you’d shoot so far down my throat I’d choke, and—oh god, I need—Harry, I need—”

Harry stops to process the filth coming out of his godson’s mouth, for him. Stops to watch him, to witness the descent, witness his own consent to surrender. Marvel at the guilt of how easy it was; at the shock of how inevitable.

“What do you need, sweetheart?”

“Need you inside me.” No shame. Beautiful. “On my back, on my stomach, don’t care how. Could ride you until you can’t bear it and flip me over, or... or...”

That’s when Harry sees it, feels it. The way Teddy pushes into the flutter of Harry’s fingers teasing over his Adam’s apple. How he squirms into it, chasing the touch, just as he had last night.

“Or,” Harry curls his hand, breeze-gentle, around the arching column. “I could pin you down by the throat like you clearly need and make sure you feel it for days.”

Teddy’s eyes sink to black, rise to gold and finally kaleidoscope into copper.

“Is that what you want?” Harry asks.

Teddy nods, quick and sharp. “Your turn.”

An answer so easy it overrides guilt: “I want to take you so slowly you’ll go mad from it. Unravel you from the inside out until you can’t remember anyone else who’s ever touched you.”

Teddy’s cock jumps against his stomach. “Possessive, are we?”

“Surprised?”

“Pleasantly.”

But the nerves are spinning him like a top, fingers trembling at Harry’s flies until Harry takes pity. “Evanesco.”

Trousers gone, skin to skin, and that’s easiest of all. Teddy moans with relief at the first glide of their cocks, heat-smooth and dripping, sweet as heaven and filthy as hell. Harry hasn’t been this hard or this close since he was nineteen himself, and even then, it was never this. Nothing has ever been this—cursing and whimpers of Yes and Please and Feel so good while eager hands race each other over Harry’s body.

But this isn’t about Harry, he won’t let it be. This is a gift to the godson he loves, a gift too long denied.

“Beautiful,” Harry breathes as he licks and suckles and bites his way down Teddy’s impatient body, every newly tended inch blossoming towards Harry’s touch. “Gorgeous, look at you. So fucking sexy—no, don’t—” A tiny scar beneath him is airbrushed away. He looks into Teddy’s guilty eyes and shakes his head. “Please don’t.”

Teddy blinks out a tear. The scar fades back into focus.

“I want you exactly as you are.” Harry presses a kiss to the blemish, another to a nearby mole. “You’re perfect.” Flicks his tongue over a peaked nipple, drags it between his teeth. “You are absolute perfection.”

Teddy squirms under the praise and it's—addicting. Transcendent. Harry wants to worship at his altar until Teddy believes it, sees himself through Harry’s eyes. In offering, Harry dips lower. Pins Teddy’s hips under two firm hands and swallows that vibrant cock in one glorious, velvet slide.

The cry of surprise is more beautiful than the belltower chime at Hogwarts, than the rush of a Snitch past his ear. The twist of Teddy’s fingers in his hair, the arch of his back, the stutter of his hips—in tandem they conduct his cries, an opus of whimpers and moans. Harry could die here in between this boy’s legs and consider his life fully lived.

“Do you have any idea...” (Harry releases him, lower—) “How many times...” (Lower, lavishing attention over his bollocks—) “I’ve imagined tasting you like this?” (Like this—lower, hands under thighs, pushing up, up, open—) “Feeling you come apart on my tongue?”

And Teddy’s so good. He knows. He gasps. He spreads himself even as he’s caught off guard, as his eyes drift to heaven, lips parting like the clouds, while Harry opens the gates.

“Good,” Harry says, dipping down. “Relax and let me have you.”

Teddy does, and there it is. That hot, clenching furl of muscle, heady with musk and twitching with abandon. There Harry aims his tongue, wet as tears from anticipation; from pent-up, mouth-watering need. There he paints over that hungry opening, softens it loose, slicks it to ready, drives the rigid tip of his tongue past the rim to lap at him like he’s a meal, and oh, isn’t he just?

“Oh fuck oh god I—Harry—” Teddy bites into his fist, cuts off the words.

“Don’t you dare.” Harry pulls off and tugs Teddy’s hand away. “Want to hear you. I love it. Love you.”

Harry mutters the spell, adds one slippery finger when he dives back in, just to test the command. Teddy obeys with a fucking shout, pushing into the breach. Harry adds a second, just to see, and Teddy’s hips buck off the bed.

“More," he begs, nails mauling at Harry’s shoulder. “You’re so—feel so—fuck, you’re so good.”

Harry tongues at him, languid, between his fingers, until spilled-ink eyes expand with tears, until magic is pinging off Teddy like shooting stars that burst on Harry’s skin. Teddy’s entire body is an active fault line, muscles quaking, cock throbbing, harder than any Harry’s seen. He can’t be but a breath from the brink. Harry pulls back to watch, entranced.

“Can you come like this?” he wonders aloud, adding a third. “Just this?”

“Yeah.” Teddy nods, frantic. “Fucking hell. For you? Yes.”

“Good.” Harry licks him again, fingers brushing over his prostate. “Don’t.”

Teddy slams his head into the pillow. “You overestimate me.”

“I’ve underestimated you, actually.” Harry climbs up his body and gathers him with his free hand, his other buried to the deepest knuckle. “You reached me, even as someone else. Your body is incredible. You are incredible.”

Teddy drags him closer, sharing sweat and pulse and the urgency of now, as he reaches for Harry’s cock. “Please.”

“I’ve got you.” Harry slips out his fingers, slicks himself up, and kisses away the whimper of loss. “So good. Always so good for me.”

Eyes and hair flash out of sync as Teddy urges him forward, shaking, impaled on a single word.

“Yeah?” Harry smiles, brushing away a sweat-soaked shock of violet rapidly melting to crimson. “You like that?”

Teddy nods.

“Good.” Harry lines up, pushes past the first and last resistance. The world begins and ends in this single point of contact: the head of his cock disappearing, swallowed by greedy, willing heat, propelled by the sting of nails shearing skin from his shoulder blades. “Look at you, opening up for me so well.”

That does it, liberates the moan trapped in Teddy’s throat, legs clamping around Harry’s waist. Harry reels him in, hand to cheek.

“Keep your eyes on me.”

Teddy does, and Harry sinks into him, a slow-motion crash, a total loss. He will never recover from how this feels—a tailor-made channel around his cock, pulling him in, inviting him home. Nothing has ever come close, not one of the uncountable men he’s tried to lose himself in for six months, since the day he moved into Grimmauld. Teddy’s body is a marvel, a white-hot furnace burning him to the hilt, charring Harry’s guilt to cinders.

“All right?” Harry breathes.

Teddy smiles. “I was born for this. For you.”

“Ted. Jesus.”

“Tell me I’m wrong.”

Harry kisses him, deep and dirty, full of affection. “Nothing about you is wrong.”

The first drags are slow to the brink of agony, all the way out and all the way in, every inch a discrete bliss of its own. Each thrust grazes over Teddy’s prostate, a tease, a promise. A cruelty, judging by the shortness of breath, the full-body tremors, the pearl glaze in Teddy’s eyes.

“You need it hard? Fast?” Harry pants. Teddy nods. “Then first you’ll take it slow.”

Teddy’s voice cracks on whatever noise, whatever word he’d intended. Harry kisses it better.

“You told me to break you,” Harry whispers. “Now let me.”

Teddy does, and in doing, dissolves. Harry fucks him this way as long as he can, honey-drip slow, trust-building slow, confessions in his ear until the tension drains, drop for drop, until Teddy’s body is butter-soft beneath him, until something sparks out behind his eyes, an overtaxed filament, the release of power.

He’s ready. Harry pulls back.

“Arms overhead. Crossed at the wrist.”

Teddy’s eyes sharpen as he complies, pinned by command alone.

“Good boy.” Harry urges Teddy’s legs over his shoulders, traps his waiting wrists with one hand, and wraps the other around his throat.

Teddy gasps. His hair paints over itself, landing on turquoise, and that’s when Harry figures it out—nineteen years later.

This is the colour of Teddy’s trust.

Harry kisses him once more, pulls out and slams back in. There is no mercy in the way he pounds into him now, this was years in the making, a belated release of something that was too great to call need, too terrifying to call love. Teddy’s eyes have blacked out to onyx, but they never leave Harry’s. Shade by shade they lighten with every incremental squeeze of Harry’s hand, every rapid-fire thrust toward the edge, when the piston of hips begins to falter, when Harry’s hand slinks between their bodies—

“Don’t—” Teddy shakes his head. “Don’t need it.”

Were Harry his age, he’d be twice gone by now. This boy has earned his reward. Harry sinks his fingers back into the tendons, that just-right pressure over the windpipe, riding the line of too much.

Then—a little more.

Teddy comes untouched with a strangled cry, quite literally. Magic without magic. White ropes shoot from the swollen head of his cock and overlap on his chest like bindings. Would he let Harry do that? Tie him up in elegant patterns?

The image is more than enough—the quickest trigger Harry’s ever pulled. Pleasure rockets up his spine like a zipper sealing shut, locking him in. There’s no buildup, only ignition—the drop of a match, a lit fuse, crackling, unstoppable, till it hits him in fiery torrents, liquid bullets shooting deep inside this boy, man, godson he loves beyond reason—a years-long starvation, quenched.

There are no aftershocks, but a continuous, low-rumbling quake. Teddy holds him as Harry collapses, hot palms over cooling sweat, moving up to cradle Harry’s head, but then, he falls still. So still that a seed of panic takes root. Did Harry push too hard? Assume too much too soon?

Was this as terrible an idea as he’d feared?

Warm, plumped lips find Harry’s shoulder. A smile opens on his skin. Three little words follow.

 

_

 

Dawn looks good on Teddy. Does something sparkly to his eyes. Harry tries not to think of all those Christmas mornings, but fuck it. That’s their history.

Youth is contagious—to a point. Harry hasn’t gone this many rounds since he was bloody fifteen, though it’s entirely possible this is an illusion and he died from the last orgasm. The one in the shower, where he learned his teenage godson is a cocksucking virtuoso.

Teddy smiles with his sparkly eyes, drags a finger down Harry’s sticky chest. They’re both in dire need of a second shower, yet Harry feels cleansed, reborn.

“I should probably... head out.”

Harry’s heart plummets. “What?”

Teddy smiles. “To grab my toothbrush... maybe a change of pants... you did book me for the whole weekend...”

Harry buries his face in his hands.

Teddy snorts. “Too soon?”

“Mhm.” He lets Teddy peel away his hands. “Want some company?”

“I do...” Teddy nibbles at his ear. “Shame I’ve only got the one helmet...”

Harry swats at him. “Brat.”

“Should pick up breakfast, too.” Teddy roots around for his shirt. “You have nothing in your fridge, Harry, nothing. It’s embarrassing. You are every divorced cliche.”

“Including the fit young lover?”

Teddy raises an eyebrow and throws him a sock. “Is that what I am?”

“No. Yes. More.” Harry tugs him into his lap until Teddy is straddling his thighs. “You’re… this is...”

Teddy traces a fingertip over Harry’s jaw. “Everything?”

Harry nods. “But...” But reality closes in. “Sweetheart, you’re so young. I don’t want to hold you back.”

“From what? All you’ve ever done is encourage me to go after what I want.” Teddy grins. “And I did.”

Harry smiles, every protest fittingly strangled by his hands slinking around Teddy’s bruise-blooming hips. Harry fits his fingers to their imprint equivalents, and it doesn’t go unnoticed. Butterfly eyelids, hinged-back head, a summer-breeze sigh. Fucking hell, he’s stunning.

“Look,” Teddy gasps, even as he’s grinding down, his tireless cock refilling again, “every relationship has challenges. If ours is some generational disconnect, we’ll face it together.”

Harry narrows his eyes and holds him still. “When did you get so wise?”

“Had a good teacher.” Teddy bites his lip and smirks and yes, Harry’s probably dead.

“That...” Harry swallows thickly, “should not be hot.”

“But it is, yeah?” Teddy’s smile is filthy, shameless. Harry could die from it, gladly.

“You know we’ll be crucified when this gets out. Even I can’t protect you from the Prophet.”

“Sod it. They’ll talk for awhile, get bored. No one’ll bat an eye when I’m forty and you’re—”

“For the love of Merlin, do not finish that sentence.”

“But I want that. The messy shit and the boring shit and the growing old together shit. Well, maybe not together, given...”

“Yeah, got it, thanks.”

Teddy smiles. “Life is short. You barely got out of school alive and I spent the first decade of my life wondering if you’d make it home every week.”

Something twists in Harry’s chest. “Never knew that affected you.” A thumb soothes over Teddy’s cheek. “I’m sorry.”

Teddy shrugs. “Just glad you’re not an Auror anymore.”

“So am I.”

“I used to pretend you went into teaching just to spend the school year with me.”

“That… was definitely a bonus,” Harry smiles, but new guilt drags it away. “Did... did I love you wrong? Did you ever feel…”

“No.” It’s firm, packed with understanding. “You loved me in exactly the ways I always needed. Including now.”

Teddy hammers his point with a searing kiss that goes straight to Harry’s head (both of them), pinpoints the guilt and lasers it out. It’ll grow back, of course. But that doesn’t stop Harry from flipping him over, licking along his beautiful throat mottled by red fingerprints. Doesn’t stop him from hardening again from the grip of eager fingers in his hair; from the ungodly noises alone. Teddy’s moans are life-giving and positively fatal.

“Your hands—” he gasps. “Fuck, Harry, never stop touching me.”

Harry never intends to. In fact—

“The thought of anyone else touching you makes me insane.” And he’s gone and said it aloud. Harry stops and looks up, guilt pouring back. “But—if you still—until you get another offer—I mean—it’s your body. I respect that.”

The words flog him to shreds, but that’s his penance. He deserves every lash of petty jealousy.

“They were poor substitutes.” Teddy smiles. “I don’t want anyone else. And I did get an offer.”

Harry bolts up. “The interview? They owled you?”

"This morning."

“Ted, that’s fantastic! I’m so proud of you.”

“...But?”

“Nothing. Just... are you sure you want something... permanent? Here?”

Teddy sighs and cups Harry’s face. “You were right about going away. It made me sure of what I want.”

His smile is kissable, and Harry does, guilt-free. Better than flying.

Teddy settles himself on Harry’s chest. Harry cards his fingers through tangled turquoise and turns to the open window. To the pinprick stars piercing their rays through a dusty London dawn. Harry spares them a glance, and ends his search.

The brightest are in Teddy’s eyes.

 

*

Notes:

Original prompt: Teddy thought making money turning tricks would be fun. Then his godfather pulls over and offers him a ridiculous amount of money to spend the weekend hanging off the man's cock. Of course, Teddy accepts - even if it means he has to figure out how to hold this tarted-up female form longer than ever before.

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