Work Text:
Theodore Nott is running.
He’s tall and gangly, not particularly athletic, his long, long, long legs notably pale against the silky forest green of his gym shorts. He has headphones jammed in his ears, a scraped-up silver iPhone strapped to his left bicep, and sweat is beading on his forehead, darkening the sandy blond hair at the nape of his neck. His breath is coming in short and fast, his mouth hanging partially open, his lips soft and full and wet from his most recent sip of blue Gatorade.
“This,” Pansy suddenly says, gesturing to the track below with her shiny red lollipop, her charm bracelet tinkling, “is really fucking creepy, for the record.”
Blaise grits his teeth, shifting around on the scorching hot metal bench at the very top of the bleachers. He knows it’s really fucking creepy. That’s why he made her come with him.
“You drink blood now,” he says, kicking at the clear plastic lollipop wrapper crinkling by their feet; it reads AB+ in stylized block letters. “You are the literal embodiment of the word creepy.”
Pansy heaves a hugely dramatic sigh and tilts her head all the way back, squinting up at the sky. “You should just ask him.”
Blaise casually drops his hands to his knees, squeezing tight to prevent them from—moving. Jiggling. Whatever. “I’m not going to do that.”
“Why not? It’s prom, not some weird, wolfy, naked-in-the-woods bonding ceremony. He isn’t going to say no. Not to you.”
“How do you know that?” Blaise demands, aggressively petulant. It’s embarrassing. He’s embarrassing. “Are you friends?”
Pansy rolls her eyes. “No, we aren’t friends, dipshit, he’s a giant antisocial nerd who never actually talks to anyone.”
“I’ve talked to him,” Blaise says, scowling down at the track. Nott’s on the far side now, the scent of him carrying on the breeze, pencil lead and Old Spice and the hulking, summer-brown pine trees at Blaise’s fourth stepdad’s lake house. Burnt coffee beans. Stupid-sweet chocolate syrup. The greasy prepackaged blueberry muffins from the library vending machines. “He used to hang out with Malfoy.”
Pansy snorts. “When we were eleven. How do you even remember that?”
Blaise shifts in his seat again, swallowing uncomfortably. He’s been very conscientious about not examining any of this too closely—the werewolf bullshit is its own separate disaster, of course, the grimy, jagged, moss-covered pebble lurking like a trigger-happy landmine in the depths of his gene pool; but Theodore Nott—Blaise’s true mate fixation with Theodore Nott—hadn’t felt like nearly as much of a shock. More of a peripheral inevitability, maybe.
“I’m just going to have to ease into it,” Blaise says, cracking his knuckles. Curling his toes inside his boots. He wishes that he was still capable of sitting still, of not fidgeting, but there’s just too much pent-up energy, too much pent-up frustration, that he doesn’t have a single fucking clue what to do with yet. “I’ll try to—I don’t know. It’ll be fine. I’ll be—fine. Baby steps.”
“If you say so,” Pansy mumbles doubtfully.
Down on the track, Nott lifts up the bottom of his t-shirt to wipe the sweat off his face, exposing the sharp cut of his hipbones and the skinny trail of wiry brown hair that disappears into the drawstring of his shorts, his abdominal muscles bunching, quivering, gleaming taut in the half-baked glare of the late afternoon sun, his lightly freckled skin splashed pink with exertion—and Blaise makes a sound in the back of his throat, a low-pitched growling kind of whimper that sets his scalp prickling and his pulse racing and his gums itching, aching, because he wants to chase—he wants to hunt—he wants to take—
Pansy snaps her fingers.
Blaise blinks, startling just enough for his foot to slip off the bench in front of them with a loud, rattling thud.
And Nott lowers his t-shirt, covering himself back up, threadbare gray cotton fluttering a little, sticking a lot, before slowly starting to run again.
One night when Blaise was in middle school, he accidentally took too much Adderall and found this subreddit that was inexplicably devoted to reporting, investigating, and discussing liminal spaces. Magical thresholds. Gateways to different dimensions or universes or—whatever. He spent several hours trawling through the archived posts, raising his eyebrows at various descriptions of abandoned Waffle Houses in Texas or Georgia and burnt-down insane asylums in rural Washington and ice-cold patches of sprawling North African desert, his initial, instinctive skepticism waxing and waning and then waxing some more; not unlike a lunar cycle.
He hasn’t thought about that shit in years.
He’s thinking about it again now, though, unbidden, because it turns out that “midnight at the 24-hour CVS that used to be a RadioShack and still has a disposable Fujifilm drop-off kiosk behind the family planning aisle” is definitely a liminal space.
“Oh,” Nott says, peering down at Blaise like he, too, senses the clear-and-present Bermuda Triangle fuckery going down all around them. In the atmosphere. Filtering out from the air conditioning vents. “Hey.”
Blaise clutches the bottle of fancy water-based organic lube he just picked up and fights the urge to sniff. To inhale. To inhale deeply. He can control himself; he’s always been able to control himself. Control—emotional discipline—it’s the cornerstones of his entire personality, for fuck’s sake.
“Hey,” Blaise says, about a solid minute too late. He’s breathing through his mouth. Carefully. Deliberately. Obviously. “This is—uh. It’s late.”
Nott averts his gaze. “Yeah.”
“I’m just . . .” Blaise trails off, realizing he probably doesn’t need to explain to Nott why he’s buying lube. Except—he wants to. He wants to explain to Nott why he’s buying lube. In detail. Graphic detail. Exceptional detail. He wants to demonstrate, wants to show off, wants to outline all the ways he’s uniquely qualified to take care of Nott, all the reasons he’s uniquely capable of taking care of Nott. How he can do it better. Do it best. “Yeah.”
Nott smiles, sort of, a little secretive, a little sly; he has a four-pack of Red Bull, a family-sized bag of pretzels, and a frankly concerning number of potpourri sachets in his basket. Lavender. Sage. Flower petals and peppercorns and—witch stuff?
At that, Blaise does a double-take, and Nott . . . Nott blushes, hard, when he notices exactly what it is that Blaise is noticing, and then the exhausted security-banshee cashier at the pharmacy counter calls out, “Next,” and the moment ends.
The tension snaps.
The words Blaise still isn’t sure he’s comfortable saying out loud—werewolf, true mate, sorry, it’s you, it’s you, of course it’s you—die a swift, ignominious death on the tip of his tongue.
Nott clenches and unclenches his jaw, looking surprised, looking confused, looking weirdly, intensely pissed, actually, before he clears his throat and jingles his car keys and gingerly steps around Blaise, one of his broad, bony shoulders bumping against a revolving stand of leopard-print reading glasses.
“Have fun,” Nott says dryly, nodding at the bottle of lube in Blaise’s hand.
Blaise watches him walk off, all narrow hips and thoroughbred legs and tight, paint-flecked, well-worn jeans.
Yeah.
Liminal fucking space.
Nott has this sticker on his laptop—it’s green and gray and red, a cartoon rooster perched on a spatula, and it takes Blaise a few days of surreptitious internet sleuthing to figure out that it’s the original design of the logo for a lesser-known Jamaican food truck.
Their schedule is online.
They do not deliver.
Blaise skips fourth period French and sneaks off campus to drive downtown, ordering one of everything off the menu. Fried plantains and jerk chicken sandwiches and heavy Styrofoam containers full of curried goat and stewed oxtail and scotch-bonnet butter beans. Pansy laughs at him when he gets back to the school cafeteria, wordlessly pointing one of her grossly ubiquitous blood-red lollipops in the vague direction of the library. Blaise doesn’t deign to acknowledge her, just twists his suddenly sweaty palms around the thick paper handles of the take-out bags and stomps down the hall.
The library doors are papered in bright, sparkly, rainbow-striped prom posters. Cheerfully mocking. Mockingly cheerful.
Dance the Night Away!
Shoot Your Shot!
I Heard You’ve Got a Fever and the Only Prescription is More Cowbell!
Nott is seated at the table farthest away from the check-out desk, hunched over a calculus workbook and a ratty pile of loose-leaf notepaper; a weak beam of sunlight is streaming in through the high-up, slightly slanted picture window, catching on the crown of his head, making his hair look blonder than it really is. He’s gnawing on his bottom lip, worrying it between his teeth, a crumpled can of Dr. Pepper at his elbow.
Blaise’s whole body—muscles, nerve-ends, instincts—it tenses. Bristles. Readies itself for a good chase, a good hunt, which is a completely normal, not-at-all mortifying thought to have about—
“Lunch?” Blaise drawls with exaggerated nonchalance, holding up the take-out bags.
Theo doesn’t even flinch. The glance he tosses back over his shoulder is impassive, disbelieving, fringed with the faintest flicker of impatience. “I’m busy.”
“But you need to eat,” Blaise says, sidling closer to the table.
“It’s against the rules to do that here.”
“So?”
Theo sighs and hooks his ankle around the leg of the chair next to him, kicking it out. “Did you at least get plantain chips?”
Minutes pass.
The silence between them—that looms, ever-lasting, strung-up like a tightrope between the ugly utilitarian shelves in the library—is prickly.
Blaise doesn’t know what they’re supposed to talk about, exactly. Malfoy used to talk enough for all three of them, but Malfoy isn’t here, and Blaise isn’t used to this. This strange, selfless compulsion to smooth over his own rough edges, to put effort into setting another person at ease in his presence. Is this another bullshit wolf thing? Like the stereotype that they’re all big, dumb, drooling house husbands who hate wearing shirts and manfully chop firewood for fun?
Blaise coughs into his fist and reaches into his backpack, blindly retrieving his physics notebook and a marbled black fountain pen with an ergonomic grip.
Theo looks at him askance, chewing a bite of his sandwich—inwardly, Blaise preens; he’s successfully managed to feed his mate—and humming as he watches Blaise flip through the notebook until he gets to last night’s half-finished problem set. Most of it’s probably wrong. Blaise has been a little fucking preoccupied lately. A little fucking distracted.
Blaise clicks his pen.
Theo swallows noisily.
Blaise purses his lips.
Theo frowns at Blaise’s problem set.
Blaise unpurses his lips.
“Jesus Christ,” Theo mutters, sighing again, grabbing his discarded pencil and snatching up Blaise’s notebook. He sneers at the answer column, shaking his head, his nostrils flared, and violently starts erasing the last two—no, the last three—equations, re-writing them, re-working them, his exasperation almost tangible, sticky and sour against the roof of Blaise’s mouth. Theo then shoves the notebook back over and primly says, “You’re welcome.”
Blaise hesitates.
Narrows his eyes.
Smooths his tongue over the points of his incisors and wonders what his hand might look like splayed across the inside of Theo’s thigh. It’s right fucking there. His hand. Theo’s thigh. He could just—
“Yeah,” Blaise croaks, absently brushing the eraser crumbs off the table. “Okay. Thanks.”
Full moons are hard to describe.
They suck, yeah, totally, one-hundred percent, they’re lawless impulse-driven nightmares that bring all of Blaise’s worst werewolf traits directly to the metaphorical surface, an oil-on-water sheen of raw adrenaline and wild aggression, of overgrown sideburns and inhuman claws and a bottomless, unruly hankering for bloody red meat.
But—full moons—they also don’t suck.
A tiny bit.
Occasionally.
Sometimes.
Full moons are bone-deep. Soul-rippling. They connect all the separate, fractious, constantly warring parts of him, sew them together, patch them up, make him feel whole and centered and calm. Like he’s been meditating. Aligning his chakras. Guzzling essential oils in the back room of a yoga studio.
It’s not terrible.
It’s not—bad.
What is bad, though, is pulling into the parking lot at the trailhead and seeing a vintage yellow bicycle with a fucking 1950’s newspaper delivery basket attached to the front propped up against the big wooden noticeboard covered in caps-locked Comic Sans rattlesnake warnings. Theo is standing next to it, his arms crossed, his expression both bored and eminently unreadable, wearing gray sweatpants and a baggy white v-neck. High-tops. A Fitbit.
Blaise turns off his car.
The engine cools down while gravel spits and skitters against hot metal, and he opens his door, stepping out into the dusky, rose gold, early evening light.
“Happy wolf day,” Theo says, with almost no inflection at all.
Blaise rubs his lips together and tucks his hands into his pockets. “How’d you know I was going to be here?”
Theo sniffs. “I’m a witch.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah.”
“So. Then. You also know that you’re my—”
“Yeah.”
“Because you’re a witch.”
“Well,” Theo says, looking amused. Properly amused. Something like a smile is finally curling around the edges of his mouth, changing the shape of it—changing the power of it, the effect it has on Blaise, specifically, because the thin, mulish, conspicuously wary pout he’s gotten so used to being on the receiving end of is gone. “You’re also, uh, not subtle. At all.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
“Do you disagree?” Theo asks, effortlessly bland. “You think you’ve been subtle? Really?”
Blaise huffs. “How long have you known?”
“That you were going to decide—at the very last minute, by the way—to come to this park for your full moon run?”
“No, how long have you known—the other part.” Blaise digs his heels into the ground, rocking backwards, widening his stance. “The mate part.”
Theo just raises an eyebrow and holds his gaze, refreshingly clear, coolly expectant—a nudge, a push, an invitation—like he’s waiting for Blaise to move, waiting for Blaise’s teeth to scrape and graze the soft, fragrant curve of his neck, where his pulse is thundering, telling on him, waiting for Blaise to roar and pounce and bite.
Blaise thinks about that; about how Theo might let him; about how Theo might bite back.
And it’s that—
That, the most familiar, most himself thought Blaise has had since he woke up two inches taller and twenty pounds more muscular, with the weight of an undesirable genetic accident pinning him to his bed, to a totally new identity, to this boy he’d been pretending not to notice for years and years and—
“Tonight,” Blaise starts, slinking forward. He still wants to chase. He still wants to hunt. But maybe that isn’t new. Maybe believing it was new was always more of a hope, a wish, a cleverly buried, intentionally suppressed daydream. “If you stay . . . I’m going to probably do some crazy embarrassing shit. Weird wolf shit. Steal your clothes, bring you a dead rabbit, construct a creepy cave nest for you out in the woods.”
Theo’s smile seamlessly shifts into a smirk. “Yeah. You are.”
“But before I do any of that,” Blaise goes on, measured, controlled, like his heart isn’t pounding against his ribs, clamoring to get the fuck out, “I just want to do—one thing. One normal thing. One normal, regular thing I’ve wanted to do for a lot longer than I’ve wanted to, like, lick day-old sweat off your abs. Okay?”
Theo’s smirk twitches. Stretches. “Okay.”
“Theo,” Blaise says, almost too solemnly. Almost too seriously. “Will you go to prom with me?”
It happens slowly.
Gradually.
Theo’s cheeks slowly turn pink. His lips gradually part. A laugh—a laugh—builds in his chest, slowly, gradually rumbling stronger and louder and deeper, erupting like the world’s sleepiest, most reluctant volcano as he stares at Blaise.
“That’s a yes,” Blaise says smugly. “That’s an emphatic yes.”
Theo snorts. “You’re an idiot.”
“No, I’m an—”
“Asshole,” Theo finishes for him, nodding sagely. “You’re right.”
Blaise grins, even while above them, behind Theo, the outline of the moon is beginning to form, beginning to sing to him, full and round and magnetic. Mesmerizing. Across the sky, just on the heat-blurred line of the horizon, the sun is still hanging around.
Two-toned.
Dual-purpose.