#tpeouh

chapter three: blue incandescent eyes that guarantee

“No.”

“Albus, please.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why?”

“I am not dressing up as Bob Ross as part of a couple’s costume with you.” Albus says.

Polly whines. She reaches across the breakfast table, placing her hands on top of Albus’ wrists as she stares at him. “Please, Al. Just imagine the vision,” she says. “You, dressed as Bob Ross. Me, dressed as a canvas with a half completed painting on it. We’d look amazing.”

They both look up as Scorpius walks through the door. He has his rucksack slung over one shoulder, a baker boy hat dangling between his fingers. Polly waves at him, smiling as he drops a bag of sweets in front of her. Fizzy cola bottles, her favourite, of course. Albus smiles at him, too. A wholly genuine and soft smile, one that he saves exclusively for Scorpius.

Because, six months later, time whisked past in a flurry of a late September chill and waves of autumn leaves trickling through the air, Albus still has a soft spot for this boy. Albus won’t lie and say that he’s over Scorpius, per se (even though he technically doesn’t have anything to be ‘over’, since they never actually dated), but he’s definitely better at handling himself and his feelings these days. Sure, Albus still thinks that Scorpius is the most radiant boy in any room and whenever Albus goes on a date he always ends up comparing the suitor to the starry-eyed blonde boy probably craning over his archaeology homework at his flat. But he also adores the bones off of him in a platonic way, too.

chapter seven: i, patroclus, and you, dionysus

The first thing Polly does when she walks into Latte! is press a kiss to Yann’s lips. She sets her bag down on the table, lays her jacket over the back of the seat, and kisses him.

Albus isn’t sure whether he’s used to them being together yet or not. He knew it was inevitable – there’s only so many years two people can spend tiptoeing around each other before one slips and they collide, finally – but it still came as a small surprise when they told him.

Or, well, when Polly told him.

She didn’t tell him a lot about what happened in her hometown. He had to piece things together, mostly, using the fragments of her texts and the minor utterances she made about the situation when they returned to work out the ins and outs of what happened. Which isn’t normal for Polly, even less so for Polly and Albus. Normally they share everything, they open their hearts to each other. Albus normally knows everything there is to know about her, but this? This seemed to surpass a level of heartbreak that not even Polly could process.

Albus gets it, though. He isn’t sure how he would put himself back together again after losing a sibling. Because, well, that’s what happened to Polly. She still won’t say the words, and she doesn’t address her sister in past tense yet, but when Yann showed him the order of service leaflet for the funeral and when he walked in on Polly crying quietly over her phone in Latte!, it all fell into place in his mind.

Albus shrugs. How does one move a mountain? How does one put back together an antique vase dropped to the floor and smashed into a thousand pieces? You can paste glue along the seams and reconstruct it like a little jigsaw puzzle, but it will never go back to how it was.

It’ll still be beautiful, somewhat, but it will be different.

chapter five: you spur in me that childish giddiness

“Who the fuck gets married on Valentine’s Day?”

Albus laughs into his book. He looks across the aisle of the train to stare at Polly; Polly, who leans over her ‘disgustingly overpriced’ (her words, not Albus’) cup of tea and rattles on endlessly about how weird it is that someone would choose this day, of all days, to get married.

“Surely it’s bad luck, right?” She continues, despite nobody having answered her first question. “Like the whole never-knit-your-boyfriend-a-cardigan thing.”

“I think it’s romantic,” Yann says, smiling at Polly. “I mean, proclaiming your love on the day of love. What could be more romantic?”

Albus laughs into his book, again. He laughs because it’s funny, of course, but also because the last thing Polly would want to do in life is pick a fight with Yann over romance. This is what they do, though. While Scorpius and Albus waver this fragile line between friends and something, Polly and Yann tease each other. They keep each other on the edge of their seats. Albus supposes it make sense; of all the people in the world who would push each other’s buttons as a way of showing affection, it would be Yann and Polly.

“What’re you reading?”

Albus looks at Scorpius. Scorpius, opposite him, his puzzle book of crosswords open in his lap. He has a beret on, a subdued mustard one he picked up from a charity shop and sewed his initials onto after Polly tried to steal it.

chapter eight: I’m drunk on your presence; I am knocked down

Albus has his sleeves pushed up to the bend in his elbows, little beads of sweat making his fingers tacky as he drags them over the markings on the map spread out on the front of their rental car. “So,” he says, pencil between his teeth, free hand ruffling up his hair. “I’ll handle the drive until Lancaster, we’ll take a break at the services, then you’ll take us up to Troon?”

Yann nods beside him. He draws a little star over the service station they’re talking about, drumming his fingers over the flimsy paper. “Yeah, sounds good,” he says. “But we’ll stop three times, just to give us enough breaks. I think if we pencil in a stop just outside Birmingham, and then another past Carlisle… that should keep us awake, I think.”

“Perfect,” Albus says. The sun is hot on his skin despite it only just having passed ten in the morning, and the idea of driving for four hours in a stuffy car is a moderately unsettling proposition to him right now. He pushes himself off the car and peeks around to the back. “You guys all packed?”

Polly pops her head around the side of the car and gives him a thumbs up. “Just about,” she says. “Scorp is going to have to carry the board games on his lap, and the bag of shoes doesn’t quite fit, but Karl has offered to have them by his feet. You two sorted out the route?”

She presses a kiss to Yann’s lips as she joins the two of them at the front of the car. Yann lazily wraps his arm around her waist, and Albus looks back to the map, just for a moment.

“We have,” Yann says. “Albus is starting us off, then I’m taking over for the second half.”

“Can I ride in the front with you when it’s your turn?” Polly asks.

Albus scoffs. “Yeah, right.”

Polly frowns. “Why not?”

“If you think I’m driving four hours and then spending the rest of the journey cramped in the back with man-spreading-galore Karl Jenkins and fidgets-more-than-anyone-I’ve-ever-met Scorpius Greengrass-Malfoy, you have another thing coming.” Albus says. He pulls his sunglasses out of his hair and pushes them up over the bridge of his nose.

chapter four: you will suffocate me until my death

Albus has ink all over his fingers.

He also has ink over his bottom lip, too, he is sure. His tongue occasionally picks up a metallic flavour when it swipes over his skin through nervousness, and Albus has accidentally chewed on the bottom of a pen too many times to be unfamiliar with the taste of ink, not that he ever notices himself doing it, of course. But he’s too lost in his work to care right now.

The busy picture of London disappears in blurred fragments of green and grey and black out the train window, slowly transforming into emptiness and vastness and the type of tranquil landscape Albus thinks Coleridge must’ve been looking at when he wrote and sometimes starting up at once in green and sunny glade.

Scorpius sits opposite him, of course, his head glued to an archaeology text book, a pencil in his left hand occasionally circling words or jotting little notes down in the margin. They share a bottle of water and a coffee, the early December chill seeping into their skin with even more ferocity given that the on-board heating system has failed and the window above their heads won’t shut.

Albus chances a glance at Scorpius; Scorpius with his furrowed brow and scrunched up nose as he dissects some challenging paragraph about the Bronze Age. Scorpius and his upturned coat collar, his lavender jumper tucked into grey denim jeans.

Albus’ phone vibrates on the table.

chapter six: as if we’re playing on a playground

“I thought the whole April showers thing was a joke,” Yann says one morning, nose pressed to their rain-streaked window, his face twisted in the deepest frown Albus has ever seen. “But clearly not.”

Albus laughs. He carefully flips pancakes in his frying pan, feeling so terribly domestic as they sizzle and brown perfectly under his watchful gaze. Normally Albus wouldn’t go to such effort for breakfast – in fact, on a normal day, they’d be eating almost expired jam slathered over bread toasted from frozen – but Yann is a little stressed this month, so it’s the least Albus can do to qualm his rising heart rate.

“It’s just rain,” Albus says, wincing as he burns himself slightly on the pan. “Just take an umbrella.”

“God, I’m so nervous, Al,” Yann says. He whines as he positively throws himself onto the sofa (Albus can tell he does this, despite being in the kitchen, as he hears the springs of their slowly dying cushions groan unhappily beneath Yann’s weight). “What if they think I’m ugly?”

Albus scoffs. “Yeah, sure,” he says. Or, well, shouts, in order to be heard over the pancakes sizzling. “That’s totally going to happen.”

“It could.”

“Yann, as your resident-friend-who-spends-every-day-thinking-about-pretty-boys, trust me,” Albus says. “They will not think you’re ugly.”

Yann huffs. “Stop flirting with me.”

chapter ten: I know, if I let you, you’d ruin me

“I’m so bad at buying gifts.”

Albus rolls his eyes. “You’re just completely overthinking it.”

Yann huffs, crosses his arms over his chest and stares into the glass cabinets as if straining his eyes will suddenly provide him with all the answers he clearly wants. His hair is curled, a little frizzy at the ends, and he’s just finished a shoot somewhere in central London and called Albus the second he left the building to drag him to this antique jewellery shop tucked down a tiny alley by Leicester Square.

“What if she hates the piece I pick?”

“She won’t. It’s Pol, Yann. You could buy her bin bags and I’m sure she’d love them,” Albus says, swatting Yann when he looks at him with a thoughtful expression. “No, Yann. You’re not buying her bin bags, for fucks sake.”

Yann groans. “Would art supplies be better, maybe?” He says. “Like, I don’t know. Paintbrushes?”

“God, no.”

“Why not? She’s an artist. What more would she want than art supplies?”

“Yeah, exactly. She is an artist,” Albus says. His phone vibrates in his pocket, his fingers carefully pulling it out as he keeps talking. “She has every single art supply she could need and then some. Her workshop provide the paints she needs, and she’s been using the same set of paintbrushes for the last, what, three years? It’s because she’s an artist – a professional one, by the way – that she doesn’t need art supplies for her birthday.”

Yann glares at him. “Stop making sense. If I wanted logic I would’ve gone to Rosie. We all go to you so you can make us feel better.”

Albus laughs. “Thanks, Yann. I’m taking that as a compliment.”