#aesodoro

AESODORO

Teodoro forces Aesop to remember to find joy in the world

Aesop is the safe harbor and grounding Teodoro needs when the world is too much

Hashtags:

#agegap

#studentteacher

#soulmates

#jailbaitwait

#amortentiafail

TEODORO:

An soft-spoken orphan from London with no past that sees little point in fighting for his future. A relocation to Scotland, a little magic, an uncomfortable amount of murder, and a whole lot of friends willing to root for him helps change that—helping him become outspoken and happy to stand up for his dreams.

AESOP:

"How exactly did the two of you…?"

"Meet?" Sharp replies coolly. The prying is an annoyance at best, but he's used to this—they're BOTH used to this.

Overlaid, Teodoro fires back with the same precision as a knife between the ribs: "Fornicate?"

Sharp winces. It's perhaps the least graceful route either of them could have taken, but the question has long gotten stale. Though, frankly, he's not sure if he'd prefer another invasive round of twenty-questions, or someone mistaking them for blood kin again. At last count they've been presumed as uncle-and-nephew, father-and-son, or cousins no less than a dozen times this same summer. The pair find all familial guesses utterly preposterous—they look nothing alike—but people do so love bending over backward to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths.

…Perhaps then, Teodoro was right in going straight for the throat. Regardless, the younger man's smug grin is more contagious than Dragon Pox, and swiftly, Sharp finds himself wearing one very similar. It doesn't hurt much to have a little fun with life's Sisyphean aggravations.

"Well, that is the thing about finding balance in a relationship," Sharp explains, "—it leaves me with no leash to reel him in with."

Teodoro scoffs. "Implying I need to be reeled in. You know very well you're the only one I'm biting."

Sharp and their guest both sputter, though the latter does so in recoil, while Sharp flushes lightly around his cheeks, hiding the embarrassment poorly behind a grimace. "Smartarse."

"You'd not prefer me any other way."

It's not a colleague of Sharp's they've found today in Hogsmeade, but someone known through a friend-of-a-friend. Once upon a time, Sharp popped into their life on rare occasions, often asking for guidance in forensics—seeking details unnoticed by his coworkers. As he recalls, it was mostly regarding magical explosives. When Sharp's not busy untangling another knotted web of misconceptions, he'll have to ask what they've been up to since he took up the mantle of Potions Master. In the meantime…

Leaving Teodoro's commentary to hang, Sharp steers the conversation back on track, "Honestly, it's not a terribly interesting story, but—"

Teodoro arrived at Hogwarts with his head stuffed full of nearly four years worth of material—all crammed in over the span of a summer spent under Eleazar Fig's tutelage. Riding along in second place after practical magical skills came historical knowledge, and in third: cultural know-how. It didn't leave much room for anything actually about the school itself.

Counter to Teodoro's experience, Sharp had been made aware of the other many weeks in advance.

"News came down that come the new semester, we'd have a statistical anomaly on our hands, and that the rest of the staff and I would needs help fill in the gaps that Fig was unable to cover. So when Teodoro arrived—almost late to his own sorting, I'd already long sorted his existence out. My biggest concern was over helping our Head of House acclimate our new first years, so when Teodoro was announced a Ravenclaw, I honestly couldn't have cared less. Teaching's unforgiving and oftentimes, rather thankless. You learn to turn off your worries unless you can actually do something about them—and as I'd already pre-planned the material for tutoring him, there was no point in doling him any more attention than I'd already given."

"So…" the explosives expert pauses, looking between the couple, "not even a single spark?"

Teodoro laughs, "God, I'd just survived a dragon attack, lost everything to my name but the clothes on my back, and the first thing they do is stick a talking cap on my head! It didn't leave much room to do more than fight off the vertigo. I probably saw him. I think I saw him. But I was just trying to stay upright at that point."

"Well…certainly, then, in class…"

Louder and brasher than Teodoro, Sharp laughs—

Classes were classes. Likewise, tutoring lessons were that and nothing more.

"It only took a second glance to recognize that he was handsome," Teodoro says. "I'm not blind. But I was busy."

Sharp smiles; the gentle upward twist of his lips looks out of place to all but a select few. "Then, before September ended, you showed up between classes on your lunch break."

"I was looking to avoid my classmates," Teodoro explains. "I…might have been resisting change. Just a little."

"Just a little," Sharp parrots flatly, teasing.

Teodoro elbows him discreetly. "The point is, when he realized I wasn't there to make trouble—that I just wanted to eat in peace—and he let me. It was incredibly nice."

"Initially, I thought him lost. Most students steer clear of me in attempt to avoid gaining more assignments or heightening my expectations of their work. But when he insisted that my classroom was the place he was least likely to be found, so long as he kept to himself, I had no issue. I keep office hours over meal breaks and eat on my own most days, so it wasn't as if he'd go unsupervised in a room full of potent chemicals and powerful potion reagents."

A few burners left running without cauldrons set atop them kept the otherwise chilly dungeon pleasantly warm.

"Out of the blue, you asked me a question one day," Sharp continues with a quiet, thoughtful hum. Neither remember it, but every time someone deigns to bother them with the whys and hows of their attraction, they drag out the spectacle just to keep the other person pinned by societal niceties. "Might have been about ingredient procurement?"

Teodoro shakes his head. "No, we ruled that one out. In fact, you'd been quite repetitive about the situation with the leech juice shortage,to the point you'd gone off several times, warning me that shops' stock of the stuff might go dry. I wound up nabbing every single leech I found while out exploring, that I wound up with such excess, I started dealing them to other students."

Sharp's eyebrows hike. "That was you?"

Teodoro nods curtly. "I'm telling you, it was about why you insist on students using daggers when a mortar and pestle will do."

"Show me someone who doesn't wind up using it as a cat dish by their second year post-grad, and I've a beautiful stretch of sunny, white-sand coastline to sell you."

"At this point," Teodoro volleys, "I could probably afford it."

Sharp's brows rise a sliver higher, and the two stare intently at one another, as if passing on some secret, unspoken message. Whatever the intent, Teodoro eventually backs down, sheepish, but not downtrodden.

"Perhaps I've not that much.* What matters is that it got us talking."

Three months—that's the time they spent learning one another's idiosyncrasies and quirks through small talk and winding tales. Teodoro allowed Sharp room to breathe and vent his classroom frustrations, and in turn, Sharp encouraged Teodoro speak up about his worries in adapting to magical life. Teodoro brought news of Muggle London. Sharp laid out stories from his time spent as an Auror. And, slowly, but surely, they began to look forward to each lunch spent together. 

As Teodoro slowly crawled from the confines of his reluctance, spending more time with his peers, five lunches a week became three—sometimes two. But by then, a link had been forged. The time apart didn’t feel like a loss; it made the moments together sweeter.

“And then?”

The carrot-and-stick method always works so damned efficiently. Even those who start sneering get caught in the undertow and pulled along. If they still don’t like the outcome, by the end, almost all sit on the edge of their figurative seat…much like the fuse burning on Sharp and Teodoro’s temporary hostage.

Teodoro blinks. “And then what? Isn’t it obvious? Intelligent, patient, handsome—I wanted to jump his bones.”

Sharp pivots in with clarification, “He was fifteen and I… Well, I discovered things about myself that I'd preferred to have not, but while I can’t stop being a bloody pervert, I could at least be a moral one.”

The friend-of-a-friend doesn’t need to know about how adamant both had been to keep their attraction secret from one another. Neither will they speak about the horrors of Amortentia, and the walls built in its wake, tall and unfaltering, between the pair for over a year. And the small flickers of tension brought on by guilt and second-guessing that both still fumble and struggle around… Well, that’s none of the bastard’s business either. But for all intents and purposes, Teodoro and Sharp are grateful, happy, and whole as they can be.

“We weren’t supposed to wait for one another,” Teodoro says. “ And we tried not to.”

Sharp side-eyes him, “You dropped Potions and planned your entire sixth-year schedule around the chance ask me—”

Swearing, Teodoro thumps the other man hard enough to make him sway, and as Sharp laughs back, Teodoro tries—tries valiantly to put the man in his place: “I didn’t want things to be awkward!” 

Sharp knows, gods know he does. But sometimes it’s worth it to rile up not only whoever’s tied to him in conversation, but Teodoro as well. 

Yes, there’s issues of ethics in play—a twenty-year gap in nothing to scoff at. But between the two of them, though their relationship is still technically new, and while the sexual desire is real and very much heated, in a friendship born from shared meals and relaxed conversation, their dynamic is a peaceful and comfortable one.

They don’t live together—not officially. Sharp’s presence in Teodoro’s home is that of a visiting guest, though few would likely believe it by sight. On the ground floor, Sharp’s straight razor sits neatly folded next to a small pocket mirror, on a high shelf below the kitchen window. Teodoro’s books largely fill space on the bookshelves, though a few weathered texts on large-batch brewing now sit within arm’s reach of the stove. Upstairs, two desk drawers hold Teodoro’s utter-writing supplies, while the other two have Sharp’s favorite quills, as well as a few dip-pens and nibs. The nightstand by the bed is Teodoro’s by claim; it’s where he stows his glasses come bedtime (if he remembers to remove them at all before passing out), so in return, Sharp leaves his notebooks on the corner hutch on the opposite side of the bed.

And though together with classes suspended for the summer, their responsibilities haven’t waned. Allowed in by Caretaker Moon, Teodoro visits his creatures on-campus almost daily, returning home smelling positively foul. (“I’m back! Would you like a hug?”, “I damn well would NOT. You stay over— No. DO NOT COME NEAR ME.”) Sharp, meanwhile, when not shackled to the task of potion-prep for Blainey, has so much shopping to do. He stockpiles ingredients for the semester to come, and later, bent over Teodoro’s desk, grumbles over numbers and dates. (“Given necessary brewing times, to have the total I need ready by September…”, “Tea? You look like you could use a break and I’ve got a pot on.”) 

It keeps them busy. Some days they still don’t get their lunches together. But when they do, trading fragments of their days over the kitchen table… Oh, it’s wonderful. Neither would trade it for the world.

* Post-dress-buying, Teodoro has absolutely blown all of his non-savings load on a goddamn gramophone. He is BROKE and knows it.

Thank you for the tag, @honeylavender100!