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Things have changed since Dean went away. It’s been four years, so it isn’t unexpected—but some of the changes have been hard to take nonetheless. And then some have been downright unforeseeable.
This is Dean’s realisation when he finds himself standing outside a particular small shop on Diagon Alley with a hand painted wooden sign swinging above its door. The sign reads: Harry’s Pots. This is, apparently, the premises from which Harry Potter sells his—wait for it—pottery. Honestly. He goes to art school in the states for four years and when he comes back Harry bloody Potter has become a maker and merchant of ceramics.
And then, as Dean comes to understand once he steps inside, there’s the difficult fact that nobody has gathered up their bollocks and told the bloke that he’s really rubbish at it.
“How are—Dean Thomas?”
Dean turns to face Harry, who looks exactly how Dean would expect potter-Harry to look. He’s got a filthy smock on, his hands are covered in drying clay that must be wreaking havoc with his skin, and there are smears in his hair marking the route of an absentminded hand through it. Dean can’t help but grin at him. There’s just something impossibly endearing about the saviour of the goddamn world puttering around in a messy studio all day with clay in places it shouldn’t be. He looks extremely fit, to Dean’s minor dismay.
“Harry,” he acknowledges. “I see you’ve had a bit of a career change.”
Harry nods a bit sheepishly. “Yeah. The Aurors weren’t for me. Turns out I’ve had enough of fighting.”
“Shocking, that.”
Harry laughs. It’s the kind of knowing laugh that Dean nearly can’t stand, not that he can blame Harry for it. “How was America? Seamus and Gin both seemed to have the impression you were enjoying it.”
“It was brilliant,” Dean says honestly. His mum had wanted him to stay closer—go to London’s own highly reputable college of magical fine arts, or study in France or Italy if he really had his heart set on going abroad. But the thing about the States was this: even the people who gave a shit about current affairs had no way of knowing how involved he’d been in the distant conflict at that school in Scotland. If they asked him, he could just say that yeah, it’d been a tough time, and they wouldn’t really know what else to ask him about it. They didn’t press. They didn’t think of him as a veteran.
He still is one, obviously. When he’s alone with himself it’s fucking impossible to forget. But he found it easier when everybody around him wasn’t reminding him every minute of the day how much he’d been through.
“It really is great there. Have you been? You should visit.”
Harry looks away from him, fiddling with some malformed vases on the nearest shelf. He moves them an inch to one side, then moves them back.
“You’re relocating permanently, then?” he asks.
Dean shrugs. “Don’t know yet. Four years is a long time to be away from everyone and everything. Seemed only fair that I come back home before I make the choice. Make sure I’ve got a picture of what I’d be leaving. Say a proper goodbye, if it comes to that.”
“Smart,” is all Harry has to say.
Dean’s not sure what’s up with him, exactly. He catches the man darting odd glances at him now and then, sees the restlessness of his hands, the slight hunch in his shoulders that he swears wasn’t there when he walked in. That said, Dean is no stranger to mood swings and strange triggers. He tries not to judge.
“How come you’re making pots now?” he asks, not sure what else there is to say about his possible longer-term emigration. “There must be something behind it; it’d be an awful lot of time and effort to invest just for the pun.”
Harry gives an eye roll from which Dean infers that too many before him have made similar comments.
“It’s relaxing. The name thing’s just a coincidence.”
This, Dean can understand. Art has always been a part of his life, but art as therapy increasingly so.
“Do you, uh…” Dean begins, not entirely sure how to phrase the question he needs to ask. Because he never got any better at anything surrounded by students and teachers who refused to point out his shortcomings. If nothing else, at the end of his degree he understands the value of an appropriately critical eye. “Do you sell much of this?” He gestures at a nearby collection of… cups? He thinks they’re cups.
Everything in the shop is wonky in the extreme. It’s rough, textured with scrapes and thumb indents. The cups are too shallow, the vases too wide and short, and the bowls curved all the way underneath like coconut halves crafted for kava drinking. The price tags tied to everything are… higher than Dean would have made them, personally.
“You’d be surprised how much.”
Dean admits that he might be.
“Have you had any pottery lessons?” he asks, wincing as the words come out. One of his least favourite types of art school student is the sort who think that because they’ve had An Education, the wank stains on their bedsheets necessarily exist on a higher plane than the work of people who haven’t formally studied art.
Harry, to his credit, just chuckles. His weird shiftiness seems to dissolve, as he says: “A few, ages ago. Just enough to understand how to make something, anything, out of clay. Did you do much with ceramics in school?”
“A fair bit,” Dean admits. It’d been one of his favourite subjects outside of drawing, partly because the teacher had been so good.
“Any pearls of wisdom for me, then?” Harry grins.
And this is how Dean finds himself standing behind Harry while he throws a vase, leaning over his shoulder and feeling the warmth of him, touching his hands to correct them (perhaps a bit more than is strictly necessary).
They talk, in the meantime. It’s easier when the awkward distance between them has been shut down by the task.
“I was surprised not to see you at Seamus’ wedding,” Harry says.
Dean grits his teeth. “I had exams.”
“Okay, and what else? Because I don’t see you missing your best mate’s big day just for some exams.”
“I- it’s complicated.”
Harry just waits patiently, hands sure and steady around the spinning clay in front of him, body solid as Dean leans forward against him more than necessary.
“I was in love with him,” says Dean, astounded to hear the words actually coming out. He’s talked about it to his mates from the States, who didn’t know Seamus at all, but never to anyone from home. “I only realised it in my second year away. Hadn’t considered that I could be gay until about then. Once I did it was bloody obvious, though.”
“I always thought you were together at Hogwarts,” says Harry, commendably unconcerned for a man in such close proximity to another who’s just come out to him.
“Apparently everyone did. I actually got some confused owls after Seamus and Aoife announced the engagement.”
“Sorry,” says Harry. One of his fingers cuts too deeply into the pot in front of him and it starts to cave in around the middle.
Dean’s hands shake as he takes hold of Harry’s and moves them, as carefully as he can.
“It’s fine. It’s in the past now; it just wasn’t back then.”
Harry nods in understanding. “I get what you mean about hindsight,” he says, for some reason. “Looking back at how I felt about Oliver Wood, or about Cedric… how dense must we have been to miss it all along?”
This time it’s Dean’s hands cutting into the clay.
“Fuck, sorry,” he says, looking at the mangled lump on the wheel.
Dean feels Harry’s shoulders move in a shrug. “Don’t be.”
Dean goes to withdraw his hands, to step back and away, but Harry’s hand catches his wrist. There’s clay all over them, pale and streaky against each of their complexions.
“Stop me if I’m wrong,” Harry says, then turns and kisses him. He even tastes like clay.
Dean does not stop him.
“You know,” Harry says, when they’ve snogged as much as two people whose hands are too dirty to touch most parts of each other can, “I don’t do this to be good at it. Or… I do, but what I’m good at isn’t making pretty things. I really don’t care about that.”
Dean waits for him to continue.
“One night after I dropped out of Auror training, Hermione brought over tapes of this guy called Bob Ross for me to watch. According to her he’d been in the military, but he was so calm and happy. He said, once, that he spent half his life doing somebody else’s thing. I definitely got that. Anyway, I don’t think you can watch him very long without wanting to try something for yourself. I got a canvas, brushes, paint… after that Hermione brought over something different almost every week. Clay was my favourite. I didn’t expect anyone to want to buy what I made, but apparently a lump of clay with my name scratched onto it is worth something to some people. It stops things accumulating too fast, and I can donate the money to the children’s home, so I count it all as a win.”
Once again, Dean is acutely conscious of how much he hasn’t been around to see. Harry making pots is one thing, but this Harry, who’s picked up a whole different philosophy on life, is quite another. He aches, all of a sudden, at the thought of leaving again in a few weeks’ time and missing even more of it.
“Why’d you even let me come in and patronise you then?” Dean asks. “If you didn’t need or want any lessons?”
Harry tilts his head thoughtfully. Dean can see him searching for the right words. “Because you offered,” he says. “That was nice of you. To want to help. And I thought… what harm could there be in spending a bit of time together? Getting some hands-on experience with you, if you will.”
Harry holds his face straight for about five second before the expression bursts like a hollow piece of pottery exploding in the kiln. He tries to throw in a wink, but his eyes are so scrunched from laughing that it ends up more of a deranged twitch.
“I guess I could offer your hands a few more private sessions,” Dean grins. “See where that gets us.”
Things haven't just changed, Dean reflects in the weeks that follow; they are changing, and so is he. For the first time in years he starts to think that he might not have to leave all of Europe behind again just to find a new way of being happy.