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When Tom was a child in the orphanage, he took a liking to snakes.

It was a kinship born from solitude and a mutual disdain for the other children at the orphanage, who liked to toss rocks into the bushes to chase the snakes out and then scoop them up with long, bent branches. The older boys would chase the younger girls around the yard, branch held at arm’s length as the girls squealed and shrieked and threatened to tell the matrons. It wasn’t the cruelty of the act that bothered Tom so—truthfully, Tom had never much been bothered by cruelty—but the disrespect of it. To reduce the creatures he found so fascinating to a schoolyard toy, a cheap scare to make the younger children shriek. Tom thought it demeaning.

He liked the way the snakes gleamed like small emeralds in the summer, the sun glinting off their backs. He liked how they’d dart into the underbrush when the other children came running but let Tom stroke one gentle finger over their heads.

It started slowly. He sat cross legged in front of the brush when the other children were busy and placed a strawberry some distance away. He waited, sometimes for hours, until an emerald head emerged from the brush, darted forward to seize the offering, and disappeared. The second strawberry he kept for himself. After the snake had eaten he rewarded himself with the burst of sweetness in his mouth.

Over and over he did this, whenever he could, moving the food closer and closer to himself until the day the snake snatched it right out of his fingers. Tom, perhaps foolishly, never worried over being bitten, and the snake never gave him any reason to regret it.

When the snake grew bold enough to curl around his wrist Tom named her Nagini. He believed that after so long he had earned the right.

When he grew old enough to leave the orphanage he went to the flight academy, as it was the easiest place for a young man with nothing to get his feet under him. Tom learned how to fly planes. He learned how to shoot guns. He flew across the world and believed he had seen many things. He believed he had seen enough to know everything.

Two years after graduating the academy his plane malfunctioned and Tom performed a crash landing in the midst of the Sahara Desert. He had no co-pilot, no passengers, and no mechanic, seven days worth of food, a fortnight’s worth of drinking water, and the most cursory knowledge of planes one required to graduate from the Academy. Fortunately, after his first brief inspection Tom determined that the situation was urgent but not dire. He had seen this sort of damage before. He would be on a tight schedule, but he had the head for it.

Still, he was stranded in the desert with a fortnight’s worth of water, few provisions and a badly damaged aircraft. 

These were the very unfortunate circumstances that led to Tom meeting the little prince.

✩ ☆ ✩

Tom’s first thought upon seeing the little prince was that he certainly hadn’t been stranded long enough for the hallucinations to set in. Later, perhaps, when he was far hotter and far thirstier, he might have passed it off entirely as a mirage and worried over the possibility of heat stroke. Now he couldn’t convince himself surely one way or the other.

Tom had set out a primitive shelter beneath the plane, the sand there cooler where the metal had taken the worst of the beating sun all day. He was just settling down to sleep for the night, thanking god for the blessed relief from the unforgiving sun, when he heard a small voice say, quite clearly, “Please, draw me a sheep.”

Tom startled upright, snapped his head to the left, and was met by the sight of a small, serious looking boy. No—not a boy, not much younger than Tom at all, but softer and smaller. He looked like the boys when they started at the Academy, soft-skinned and round-faced and freshly out of secondary school. Not yet hardened. Not yet mean. Stranger still was the way he dressed himself. Smart, shining black boots and an aristocratic outfit of white, topped by a thick green cloak that brushed the sand where he stood and a scarf of yellow wrapped several times around his neck. Surely he couldn’t have been wearing it all day, not in this heat. Tom could hardly conceive how he was wearing it now, even after the sun had set and the temperature had dropped.

So astounded was Tom by the sight—this brightly clothed, slight, rather bizarre looking man standing in the middle of the Saharan desert, neatly dressed, clean and polished, round cheeks flushed with health—that he did nothing but stare at the apparition for quite some time.

The young man, growing tired of Tom’s silence, repeated, “Draw me a sheep.”

His voice was higher than Tom’s and sounded like music. A nest of soft brown curls sat atop his head, free ringlets framing his boyish face, round spectacles perched on the tip of his nose, skin golden and glowing even in moonlight. He looked like a boy prince, Tom thought, which in no way explained how the man had gotten there.

Tom opened and closed his mouth a few times. “But… but what are you doing here?”

The little prince’s brow furrowed and his eyes found and held Tom’s. Then he said, very slowly and very seriously, “Please… Draw me a sheep.”

And so Tom did the only thing there is to do when one comes across a little prince standing calmly in the Sahara some thousand or so miles from the nearest civilization, dressed neatly and polished primly, who then asks you to draw him a sheep—he crawled out from under his aircraft, retrieved a pad of paper and a nearly dried out pen from the cockpit of his plane, and did as he was told.

The little prince took one look at the drawing, tilted his head to the side like a pup, then said decisively, “No, I don’t think so. This sheep is sick, see? You’ll have to draw me another.”

Tom, irritation softened by bewilderment, flipped to the next pad of his notebook and drew another.

“That’s a ram,” the little prince explained primly. “You can see for yourself, it has horns. Rams have horns, not sheep.”

With this second rejection the last of Tom’s curiosity fell away to make room for irritation, and he shut the notepad with a glower. “You draw yourself a sheep, then. I’m a pilot, not an artist, and if I don’t sleep I’ll have no energy left by tomorrow to fix my aircraft.”

Without another word Tom flipped the notepad cleanly shut, intending to crawl back beneath his plane to try to capture a few hours sleep. He made the mistake of looking at the stranger before doing so and froze under his scrutiny. The little prince’s chin was tilted ever so slightly upward in order to meet Tom’s eyes, the angle making clear show of two hardened stones of emerald and a pink scar etched across the prince’s pale face. Tom was very suddenly and very jarringly reminded of the snakes in the brush at the orphanage, of the way the light glinted off their scales in the summer when the clouds finally cleared out. 

He blinked slowly and evenly up at Tom, waiting. Gritting his teeth, he snatched up the notepad once more, flipped to a clean sheet, and drew a third. 

The little prince still wasn’t satisfied. “He’s too old. By the time I get home he’ll barely have time to keep me company.”

Tom, frustrated and exhausted from the heat and trauma of the day, scratched out a rough three dimensional rectangle. Then, upon a moment of contemplation, added three small circles along the side. “Your sheep’s inside,” he said, tossing the other man his notepad perhaps less kindly than he could have. “I hope you’re satisfied.”

With that Tom turned away, ready to remove himself before the prince could think up another protest. From behind him Tom heard a quiet oh, then, “He’s lovely.” 

He whirled, frowning tersely as he took in the delight on the younger man’s face; he had positively lit up. He looked up at Tom, eyes wide and bright and wonderful. Tom frowned back at him. “How much grass d’you suppose he’ll eat?” the little prince asked.

Tom blinked. “Why?”

“Everything where I live is quite small,” the little prince explained patiently. “There isn’t much room for grass.”

Tom stood looking once more at this impossibility, his thoughts too heat-scrambled to properly contemplate the existence of him until morning. He said, finding himself quite helpless, “Nothing at all to worry about. I’ve given you a very small sheep, see?”

At this the little prince peered down at his drawing, smiling fondly. “You’re right, he’s just the perfect size. Look! He’s gone to sleep…”

And thus, Tom Riddle made the acquaintance of the little prince.

✩ ☆ ✩

The following days found Tom splitting his time between working tirelessly on his aircraft and trying to coax information out of the younger man about where he’d come from. The task proved itself more difficult than Tom was accustomed to.

The first day he tried asking for the little prince’s name and found even this simple bit of information impossible to withdraw from the man. Tom surmised after not long at all that the little prince had never once in his life let go of a question once he had asked it. If denied answer he became impossible to hold a conversation with, and the result was a lot more of Tom speaking than the stranger he so desperately wanted to understand. On top of all this, the little prince seemed only to hear Tom’s questioning half the time. The other half, Tom supposed, registered to the little prince as nothing more than white noise.

He’d tried coaxing answers, tried demanding them, asked in every tone and temperament he could think of—with no result. To his own frustration, Tom was left with nothing to do but listen. Tom, not prone to such passive tactics of gathering information, found the entire situation to be both a great puzzlement and a great agitation. 

Despite this, he couldn’t help but fixate on the way the other man spoke.

There was something curious to the prince’s voice, something that curled the corners of his vowels and made all of his words high and sweet and lilted. The little prince spoke like he was reciting poetry, with a discernible rhythm that Tom could tap his toe along to. He thought, sometimes, that if the little prince’s voice were to rise just so, it would dissolve right into song. 

Tom listened to his words that way—like a melody. He did not mean to.

✩ ☆ ✩

The prince disappeared and reappeared. He told stories that Tom let wash over him like a breeze in the miserable climate, the prince’s voice cool and refreshing. A puzzle in his own right, Tom accepted the prince as a welcome break to the endless, monotonous red waves of the desert. 

All the while Tom worked on his repairs. He’d been flying the same plane since graduation and found himself quite attached to the aircraft, and it bordered on distressing to see his plane so damaged. 

Perhaps it was foolish to fret so much over a plane. There were a hundred of the same model sitting in the academy’s hangar as Tom worked and, provided he patched this one up enough to make it home, they would happily replace it. He could have a pristine replica of this same model within weeks if he requested it from the Academy. It wasn’t practical for Tom to feel gutted at the sight of his plane damaged this way—but Tom had earned this plane.

The Academy was not a kind place. It was a learning environment entirely built on competition, fueled by pitting each student against one another for the highest ranking. Their starting positions upon graduating from the Academy were entirely dependent on their ranking, as scouters recruited exclusively by performance or status. The highest ranking student was given honors upon graduation that would follow them throughout their career and serve as all but an official invitation to any plane model and starting position they saw fit.

One class at the academy consisted of several hundred students. The visible board was the top twenty-five, and landing there was enough to ensure a well-paying position with plenty of room for promotion. Most students aimed for top fifty, and most didn’t make it.

Top fifty wasn’t enough for Tom. Top twenty-five, even top ten wasn’t enough. 

Neither was second.

It came down to Lucius Malfoy and Tom. The two of them toyed with first and second spot on the leaderboard all three years at the academy. Tom appreciated the challenge Lucius provided, if nothing else. Malfoy was competitive, he wanted first, but he didn’t treat it seriously. His casual approach to the entire situation agitated Tom deeply, no less so because Malfoy didn’t need to take first. His father, Abraxas, was wealthy and well-connected. Malfoy could have landed in the bottom fifty and still had his pick of position.

Yet he fought Tom for first. Good-naturedly, but fiercely. Tom supposed that Malfoy considered the two of them friends. Tom didn’t have friends.

Tom had never left London. He had no family and not a single connection independent of those he’d made at the flight school; the Academy was his way out. Second would have gotten him out , sure, but there was no guarantee he would end up where he wanted and Tom avoided dependence on another’s judgement when he could help it. He didn’t enjoy feeling trapped.

During their last year at the academy Malfoy suffered a terrible accident.

Tom topped the leaderboard.

Tom worked tirelessly on his repairs. He had earned this plane.

✩ ☆ ✩

“What’s this thing, anyway?” the little prince asked on the second day, eyeing Tom’s airplane with interest.

Tom was rightfully offended. “Don’t call it a thing,” he sniped, shouldering past the little prince to stand beside it. “It’s an airplane, obviously. It’s my airplane. I flew it here.”

The little prince tilted his head, curls bouncing and spectacles glinting with sunlight. “And did you fly it very well?”

To his horror, Tom felt his cheeks flush with mild embarrassment. “Yes,” he sniffed. “The plane was damaged, so I had to land early. That’s why I’m here.”

“You fell out of the sky?”

“Yes.”

The little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter. The sound was high and sweet like church bells and annoyed Tom a great deal. He was not a man who appreciated his troubles being laughed at. He opened his mouth to scorn the younger man when the little prince continued, “That’s quite funny. You fell out of the sky, too.”

Tom clicked his mouth shut. Opened it again to ask, “You crashed here?”

“What planet are you from?”

Tom looked at the little prince sharply, trying to glean from his expression whether or not he was mocking him. Upon finding no signs of insincerity he responded, bemused, “Earth, of course. What planet are you from?”

The little prince stepped forward to prod one wheel of the plane with the toe of his shiny boot, and mused, “Of course, this couldn’t have brought you from very far…”

✩ ☆ ✩

After a brief consideration, Tom soundly decided that he wouldn’t be offering the stranger any of his rations or emergency supplies. If the man had gotten here he could get back, and he didn’t seem worried over death or sickness. If he died, well. Tom wouldn’t be pleased exactly, but it surely would be no weight on his shoulders.

He didn’t offer the little prince food or water and the little prince didn’t ask. He would disappear at odd hours right out from under Tom’s nose. The desert was wide and flat and unforgiving and provided nowhere for a man dressed so brightly to hide. Tom checked his plane the first handful of times, convinced the little prince must have found somewhere to hide, but his aircraft was hardly large enough for Tom, let alone a stowaway. 

Tom asked the little prince where he was from. Thoughtfully, the man replied, “What’s best about the crate is he’ll be able to use it as a house after dark, or to rest under in the day.”

Tom said, “If you tell me where you’re from I’ll be able to draw you a nice stake and a rope to tie him up with so that he doesn’t wander,” because the little prince seemed to think only Tom capable of wielding his pen and notepad and Tom intended to use this to his advantage.

The little prince tilted his head, looking puzzled. “What would I tie him up for?”

“Animals that aren’t tied up wander off.”

The little prince laughed again and Tom felt his mouth tighten. The prince spoke and acted like he always knew something Tom didn’t, like the world was whispering jokes in his ear that Tom wasn’t privy to. He said, still grinning, “Where do you think he’d wander, then?”

“Off a cliff, in front of a vehicle, into the jaws of a predator,” Tom counted them off callously. “Anywhere, really—straight ahead.”

The little prince quieted down but kept his small smile. His mouth curled up at the corners like worn paper, perhaps more sadly than anything else. “Everything where I live is quite small,” he said, repeating an earlier sentiment. “Straight ahead, you can’t get very far.”

This was how Tom learned where the little prince had come from. Debatably.

The little prince believed, wholeheartedly and without a hint of jest, that he came from another planet. From his descriptions, Tom gathered that the planet was hardly bigger than a house, had three volcanoes, a flower, and a vast amount of seeds waiting beneath the surface that seemed to sprout not when they were planted, but whenever they deemed fit. 

Tom would have dismissed the man entirely as unwell if not for the fact that by the time this information was gleaned from the prince he’d already been four days without a crumb of food or a drop of water, pulled several disappearing acts, and changed in no visible way. Tom could not explain the little prince, and for this reason he almost believed him.

Almost. Tom was a reasonable man.

Unwell as he was, the prince had plenty of stories and was happy to tell them as Tom slaved away at his airplane day by day. Working under the beating sun was miserable, but any attempt Tom made to sleep during the day so he might work at night proved futile. The heat was all-consuming.

The prince carried on with his black shining boots and heavy cape and scarf and never sweated a drop. Tom thought about touching him just to see if his hand would pass through.

“I have a flower,” the little prince told him one day, following a long description of how exactly the prince must go about digging up the baobab seedlings on his planet, “unlike any other flower in the world. The other flowers on my planet all look the same, but oh, she’s dazzling. She knows it, as well. Not very modest really…” The man laughed lightly, and when Tom looked at him his eyes had gone wide and wet and warm, thinking of this flower. Tom scowled and turned back to his engine. The prince sobered. “She was so vain, so pretentious. She had me put up a screen at night and grew mean if I didn’t water her on time. She’s the reason I left, you know.”

“Left your planet?” Tom asked dryly, still waiting for the day the prince fessed up where exactly he had come from. The other man either didn’t catch Tom’s tone or didn’t care.

“I shouldn’t have listened to her,” he confided. “Flowers, especially mine, they’re so prideful. They never say what they mean. She was beautiful! She perfumed my planet and I always knew that she loved me. It’s just that she said these things…” The little prince was quiet for a few somber moments filled only with the telltale sounds of Tom’s repairs. “I shouldn’t have listened to her,” he repeated, “she never said what she meant.”

Tom said, “Women are like that.”

✩ ☆ ✩

It was late morning, not yet mid-day, when the little prince asked Tom if they could watch a sunset.

Tom looked at him blankly. “You’ll have to wait.”

The prince stared back at Tom strangely, like he was considering for the first time that the man might be dull. “What for?”

Tom responded deliberately, “For the sun to set.”

After a few moments pause the prince burst into laughter. “Oh! Almost an entire year, and I still forget how big it is here. I think I’m still at home! On my planet, all I had to do was move my chair a few feet, and I could see the sunset whenever I wanted. One day I watched the sun set forty-four times!” Here the little prince paused thoughtfully and Tom just looked at him, perfectly bewildered. 

“You could do that here,” Tom said slowly—reluctantly, like he was giving something away. “With an airplane, provided you have enough fuel to last the trip, of course, you could follow the sunset as long as you liked.”

The prince tilted his head, chewing over Tom’s words for some time. “You know,” the prince responded finally, “when you’re feeling very sad, sunsets are wonderful.”

“And on the day of forty-four times, were you feeling very sad?”

But the little prince did not answer.

✩ ☆ ✩

“Where have you flown with this, then?” the little prince ventured one day, sitting cross-legged in the sand beside Tom’s toolbox and handing him tools on command. 

“All over the world—wrench. No, the larger one. Yes, there—across oceans, over every continent besides Antarctica, to many countries.” Tom puffed up a little as he spoke. He was proud of his ventures.

“Oh- so only Earth, then,” said the little prince, sounding disappointed. “You haven’t been to other planets?”

“It’s very difficult to get to other planets from Earth,” Tom said, miffed at the lack of acknowledgement. “The smaller one, now.”

When he glanced down to retrieve the offered tool the prince was frowning. “Not very hard,” he said unhappily. Tom couldn’t be bothered to ask what had done it, this time.

“What planets have you been to?” Tom asked instead. “Speed handle. No- the metal one there, with the square bent in the middle.”

The prince handed Tom the tool and watched quietly as he set to work loosening bolts. “I’m sorry about your plane,” the prince said, sounding as genuinely remorseful as if he had broken the aircraft himself.

Tom made a quiet noise of contempt, not pausing in his task. “It’s only an airplane.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“What you believe doesn’t concern me.”

A minute passed before Tom’s agitation at the man’s silence won over. Emerging from the engine, he accepted the rag that the little prince offered up, cleaning the engine grease from his hands and holding the little prince’s intent eyes. They held the staring contest for nearly a minute before the prince looked away, scooping up a handful of sand to let it run back through his fingers.

When the younger man finally spoke he only said, inexplicably, “It’s the time you spent on your airplane that makes your airplane so important.”

Tom turned back to the engine. “Pliers,” he said, and ignored the brush of the prince’s fingers on his own.

✩ ☆ ✩

Tom hadn’t broken Malfoy’s shoulder.

He could have prevented it, though.

Tom was a better pilot than Malfoy, his eyes keener and his mind sharper. Malfoy was prone to silly mistakes, small things that put entire flights at risk, his only saving grace being that he was very good at getting out of them. While Tom was calculated and meticulous Malfoy was a man of instinct and reflexes; he would be good for combat when he left the Academy, but a terrible strategist. 

Tom thought that their commanding officers must have known that, but Malfoy surely didn’t. If Malfoy graduated the Academy on top he would choose a position of authority, strategy, and command purely for the power of it. 

A position like that should and would be Tom’s— no one else could do it better.

The Academy often had upper-class students run regular inspections, maintenance, and repairs on the aircrafts before bringing in the engineers to double-check their work. It was a routine maintenance check, and Tom and Malfoy were working beside each other.

Tom saw where Malfoy hadn’t secured the engine compartment door long before the weight of it beared down enough to swing closed. He knew what would happen several moments before it actually did—Malfoy dropping his wrench, his arm lodged shoulder deep into the engine compartment and feeling blindly for his tool; the nudge of his elbow, just enough to jostle the hatch out of place; Malfoy unable to react quickly enough, even with his impeccable reflexes; the crunch of his shoulder as it was crushed, Malfoy’s blood-curdling scream.

Lucius Malfoy would never fly a plane again.

When he left the Academy he clapped Tom on the arm and wished him luck. He had always been the kinder man.

✩ ☆ ✩

The prince showed up whenever he pleased without warning or reason. After four days Tom had given up trying to ascertain where he was coming or going from and settled into the reality of this small, pretty man who he could not seem to shake and who spoke of flowers and sheep and distant planets, and the very real possibility that Tom was going soundly mad.

Tom was shoulder deep in the engine of a plane working on a particularly stubborn deadbolt when the little prince asked, “Do sheep eat flowers?”

Tom replied distractedly, attention trained steadily on the task at hand. “Of course they do. Sheep will eat anything.”

Upon receiving no response Tom lifted his head, knocking it on the plane’s overhang above him and cursing with fervor. The little prince himself was looking distressed, but Tom, thoroughly preoccupied with the growing bump on his head, didn’t pay any particular attention. 

“And what if the flower has thorns? Will the sheep eat the flower then?”

Tom wished desperately for something cold to press against the throbbing knot on the crown of his head. Briefly he slipped into a fantasy of ice cold beverages and cold packs on hand. He was tired and cross and his head was throbbing something fierce, and Tom was a person who became mean when things were not going his way, so he said cruelly and without really thinking first, “Then the sheep will eat the petals. Thorns are no good for anything but pricking human fingers.”

He was surprised to hear the little prince respond with feeling. “That’s not fair at all! My flower has never pricked me, never even thought of it. She boasted that her thorns were for fighting away tigers, not people. They only want to feel safe, you know. Flowers are hardly safe anywhere—”

Tom, who had resumed his attempts at dislodging the rusted deadbolt, now with a fierce headache as company, grew more and more frustrated with the little prince’s rambling as he went on and eventually interrupted, “Christ almighty, can’t you tell I’m in the midst of something serious?”

Silence.

“Serious?” the younger man repeated incredulously, and Tom said nothing. “Serious! What’s serious?”

“Plane crashes are serious!” Tom snapped, exasperated but still not turning toward his companion. His hand slipped from the wrench and the force sent his knuckles into some sharp extremity of the engine, blood welling where it touched. He cursed.

The little prince went on, either not noticing or not caring for Tom’s injury. “For thousands of years roses have been growing thorns to protect themselves and for thousands of years sheep have been eating them anyway, for no reason at all. To understand why the flowers have gone through so much trouble to guard themselves if it’s worth nothing in the end, that’s not serious?”

Tom emerged from the plane, intending to find something to wrap his hand with before the bleeding grew too severe—it was no good to lose unnecessary fluids when water was already so scarce—but he froze at the sight of the prince. His face had gone red and splotchy with anger, his eyes welled up with tears that made Tom want to sneer or look away. He did neither, but wondered what on earth he could possibly be crying for. 

Tears were an unnecessary waste of fluid as well. Not that the prince seemed to need any.

The little prince went on, “What if I were to tell you I know a flower who looks and smells and speaks like no other flower in the world. What if I were to tell you that because I loved her, looking up at the sky and knowing that she’s there on my star is enough to fill me with happiness. And if someday, somewhere within those millions and millions of stars, a sheep were to eat my flower, for me it would be as if every star had gone out. Is that not important? Is that not serious?”

Tom stood and stared, dumbfounded. It was the most he’d ever heard the little prince speak all in one go before, surely, and with the most fervor. And while all his talk of stars and speaking flowers and space travel threw Tom off, he couldn’t help the fascination that the prince’s words roused in him. Tom had never spoken of anything the way this boy spoke of his silly flower. He couldn’t imagine caring for something so fickle. 

The little prince had stopped speaking and stood there breathing heavily, seemingly unable to say another word. Tom watched, speechless and entirely helpless, as his lower lip trembled and his eyes welled up and Tom prayed to every saint he could recall from Sunday school that the man wouldn’t start crying. Tom had never tolerated tears well, never had patience for any of the younger children at the orphanage like some others did. Tom never knew how to reach people there.

Despite all of Tom’s fervent prayer, the little prince burst into sobs.

Tom wasn’t prepared for the sheer intensity of his reaction to the prince’s tears. It was a gut-wrenching thing, something that reached into Tom and twisted his stomach with a visceral feeling of wrongness. It wasn’t disgust with the brash display of emotion as he expected, but rather distaste for the fact that it came from the prince. The sight of wetness on the man’s cheeks had all thoughts of bandages and plane repairs and lost time, of deserts and thirst and dying, dropping out of his head in all the time it takes for a tear to fall.

There was on one star, on one planet, on Tom’s own planet, a little prince who had collapsed with sorrow.

He was helpless to do anything but cross the distance between them, fall to the hot, hot sand, and gather the slight man into his arms. Small hands clutched at the lapels of Tom’s uniform, wet lashes fluttered against his neck and soft, springy curls teased his nose, and all the while the little prince trembled. Tom made desperate platitudes. “Your flower is safe, I swear to you. I will draw you a fence. I’ll draw you a muzzle for your sheep. I…” Tom had never felt so clumsy, so foolish. He didn’t know what to say. 

“She’s lovely,” the prince sniffed, mumbling into Tom’s neck. Tom raised one hand to cup the nape of the prince’s neck, still holding him as closely as he dared, and rested his cheek upon the prince’s soft curls. “Beautiful like no other flower that’s ever sprouted there, and she believed she could fight tigers.”

“I’ll draw you a cage to lock away any tigers that come for her,” Tom swore.

“She filled the air with something sweet and warm like nothing else. She kept me company. She was so picky about the drafts…”

“I’ll draw you a glass case to place over her so that the wind can’t touch her,” Tom promised.

“Flowers are so contradictory,” the prince sighed. “I was too young to know how to love her.”

And Tom held the little prince more tightly still.

✩ ☆ ✩

The sun fell past the horizon while they were sitting there, so long Tom held him and the little prince allowed himself to be held. When he finally stirred Tom’s spine popped in several places as he straightened. He brushed a stray curl as it came to fall over the little prince’s eyes, not entirely understanding the action. With a frown the man caught Tom’s hand in his own, brushing his thumb across the dried blood on his knuckles.

“Silly man,” he sighed. “You should have said.”

Tom retrieved the first aid kit from the cockpit and sat obediently as the little prince took Tom’s hand in both of his own, cleaning away the blood as best he could with a damp rag so as not to waste their water. Tom’s hand dwarfed the other man’s, dark and calloused where the prince’s were soft as silk. 

He wrapped Tom’s hand slowly, gentle as anything. Afterward he flexed his hand, testing the very sturdy and very real bandage restricting the movement. It was as close to proof of the prince’s existence as Tom had yet gotten.

When Tom slid under the plane he pulled the little prince along with him. The younger man followed without hesitation, and when Tom pulled him snugly against his chest he only sighed deeply and pressed closer. It was too hot here to share body heat, but Tom couldn’t bring himself to mind.

It had been a long time since Tom slept with anyone, and never had he slept with anyone like this. There was the experimentation that came along with secondary school, then the stolen, secret fumbles he shared with other young men at the academy, a time or two that they’d catch a few hours of sleep in each other’s bunks before they had to be anywhere else. But the act of sleeping, to hold someone for no reason other than wanting to, was an intimacy Tom had never experienced.

The little prince melded against him too perfectly for Tom to believe he was meant for any space other than here. Tucked into the concave of Tom’s body, ankles tangled between and over and under Tom’s. There was a tight, shimmering feeling in his chest that he couldn’t will away, a hammering of his heart that panicked him.

The little prince sighed and nestled further against Tom’s shoulder.

How strange.

Their shared body temperature turned out inconsequential, as Tom quickly realized that the prince didn’t seem to give of any heat at all. The little prince wasn’t cold, exactly; he felt the way Tom imagined starlight might feel if he ever managed to brush it.

He woke in the morning to the little prince’s soft voice, rough with sleep in a way Tom hadn’t yet witnessed. The sound pleased him, as did the muss of the prince’s hair and his droopy morning eyes. The display was almost enough to make Tom forget that they were lying beneath a plane in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Truly, if anything could, it would have been that. 

He took in the pleasant sight for a few moments before shutting his eyes again, pulling the prince closer and burying his nose in the other man’s curls with a grumble.

The smaller man called Tom’s name a few more times, pushing and prodding against his chest lightly until he finally conceded, opening his eyes begrudgingly to squint against the too-bright sun. 

“Morning,” he murmured, finding himself enraptured by the green of the prince’s eyes catching sunlight. Emerald like Nagini, like a little head peeking out of the underbrush.

Having secured Tom’s attention, the little prince spoke softly and seriously, holding Tom’s gaze as if he was confiding in him a great secret. “You told me that you’ve flown all over the world, that you’ve seen every ocean and every continent, but I know you, now. You’ve seen nothing of the world, not really.” 

Tom, still slow moving with sleep and not having been given nearly enough time to catch up to the conversation, said, “You’ve seen the world, then?”

“Some of it,” the prince replied simply. “More than you.”

Tom, thinking of the sheep and the flower, wondered privately if he was right.

He said, “Can you tell me?”

“No.” And here the little prince smiled, eyes glinting with something. “But I can show you.”

The first day Tom thought the little prince an apparition. In the following days, after he’d begun telling stories of baobab trees on small planets and talking flowers and tiny volcanoes, he declared him a basket case. But the little prince seemed to live off of sunlight alone. He wasn’t warm and he disappeared inexplicably. Like walking starlight, Tom thought. Not quite a person, or perhaps something more than a person. Something more than anyone else he’d ever met.

Tom had never believed in magic. He was a reasonable man.

“How?” he asked helplessly.

The little prince peered at Tom with only inches between them, curls hanging over his eyes, round spectacles glinting in the sun. He must have slept in them. “Would you like to?”

The little prince tilted his head the slightest bit and the sun caught those cursed eyes again. Tom nodded because he didn’t trust himself to speak.

The little prince raised one small hand to cup the side of Tom’s face and the pilot froze, eyes wide and locked on the prince’s. Despite the fact that the man had spent the night tucked snugly away in Tom’s arm, he wasn’t prepared for it. Tom was not accustomed to being touched so intimately, nor so casually. He was startled by the brush of his small palm, arrested by the coolness of it and how wonderful it felt in contrast to the heat of the desert.

“Don’t be frightened,” the little prince said kindly.

The young man blurred, the desert dissolved into a whirl of tan and gold and blistering red, Tom’s plane pixelated at the edges of his vision, and he free fell. Somewhere, distantly, he recognized the little prince falling with him.

They landed on what Tom was shocked to describe as a very small, singularly inhabited planet. Before them sat a tall backed throne, and upon it a gaudily dressed man with a gleaming crown atop his head. The shock of it sent Tom stumbling backward a few feet. His heels caught on the edge of something and he toppled backward, landing firmly on his bottom. Looking down he saw the ground draped with a magnificent ermine cloak, and upon following it found that it was indeed the cloak worn by the king, meters away. It had wrapped all the way around the planet to where Tom fell over it.

Catching sight of them, the man straightened and looked positively jovial. “Ah! Here are subjects!”

Tom scrambled to his feet, looking wildly toward his companion to find him looking back, laughter dancing behind his eyes. From before them the king’s voice rang out again, as eerily as if it had been recorded and was now being played back. “Ah! Here are subjects!”

“What is this?” Tom demanded, ignoring the man in lieu of climbing to his feet and brushing the dust off his clothes. “Where are we?”

“A memory,” the little prince said, absently reaching up to straighten Tom’s collar. Tom’s stomach clenched so violently at the action that he didn’t even have the time to be thankful the prince was in an answering sort of mood. “Of sorts. It’s like a sort of… pocket dimension. It exists like I remember it, but it’s malleable.”

“Ah!” the king exclaimed. “Here are subjects!” Both Tom and the prince continued to ignore him. 

“When I came the first time he said, ‘Ah! Here’s a subject!’ Now you’re here, and he’s addressing both of us. I’m not entirely sure how it works, to be honest.”

“A pocket dimension,” Tom repeated the prince’s words from before. He felt a bit winded. “You took me to… a pocket dimension.”

The little prince shifted his weight to his toes, leaning toward Tom like he was divulging a grand secret. “Tom,” he whispered urgently, “I’m going to show you the world.”

“Ah!” the king cheered jovially. “Here are subjects!”

Tom hadn’t yet torn his eyes away from his prince when the younger man spoke. “Go on,” he encouraged, nodding toward where the king sat on the great throne before them. 

And so Tom did the only thing there is to do when one meets a little prince in the Sahara Desert some thousand or so miles from the nearest civilization, who then whisks you away to a pocket dimension to show you the world—he took a breath, pivoted toward the king, and did as he was told.

“Come forward, child,” the king said, which annoyed Tom greatly, as he was freshly in his twenties and at least adult enough to crash a plane in the Sahara, but he complied anyway. The little prince followed closely beside him, little black boots crunching in the strangely textured dirt. The prince turned to press his face against Tom’s shoulder, muffling a yawn.

The king looked affronted. “Yawning in the presence of a king is truly dreadful etiquette,” he scolded. “I forbid it.”

The little prince turned to face the king, blushing lightly. “Well,” he replied a little huffily, “it wasn’t on purpose. We’ve made a long journey, and we haven’t had any sleep.”

Upon a moment of thought the king declared, “Then I command you to yawn. Visitors are so rare here, yawning is a curiosity. Go on, yawn again—it’s an order.”

The little prince flushed more deeply still, looking faintly embarrassed but rightly defiant. “Well I can’t exactly do it at will, can I?”

This seemed to fluster the king, who began to splutter. The little prince turned to Tom, looking like he was shaking off a dream. “I suppose some things have to happen the same.”

“What just happened?” Tom demanded, faintly unnerved.

“I’ve never brought someone with me before,” the prince defended lightly. “I only have an idea of how it all works.”

The king, still sputtering, said, “Then I… I command you to yawn sometimes, and sometimes to-”

The little prince rolled his eyes at the king’s going on, pinning Tom with a look that seemed to say, watch this, then he turned back toward the king.

“Sire,” he ventured, “excuse me for asking, but-”

Hastily the king cut in, “I command you to ask!”

Tom watched the little prince’s eyes dance. “Sire- what is it exactly that you reign over?”

“Over everything,” the king replied simply, puffing up a little.

“Everything?” Tom asked skeptically.

The king gestured vaguely, in no specific direction. “Over all of that,” he confirmed.

“All of what?” Tom asked, increasingly perplexed by the silly man.

The little prince cut in before Tom received an answer. “The stars, then. Do you reign over the stars?”

“And the planets,” the king nodded, “and everything between them.”

“And do the stars obey you, sire?”

“They obey me immediately, as does everyone else. I tolerate no insubordination. I am a universal monarch.”

The little prince’s eyes glinted with mischief, which helped Tom be sure it was his present prince and not the echo of him pulling the strings. “Your Majesty,” he went on sweetly, “I should like you to do me a favour. Would you mind terribly, commanding the sun to set?”

The king threw his hands up grandly, clearly pleased to have something finally to command. “You shall have your sunset! I shall wait,” and here he pulled a large calendar from under his cape and squinted at it, “according to my data, until conditions are favorable.”

“And when will that be?” the prince questioned.

The king went back to squinting at his calendar, tracing one long, ringed finger along the pages and mumbling under his breath. In his preoccupation the little prince turned toward Tom. “He can’t handle disobedience, so he only gives orders that can be followed. The first time I was here he gave a truly engaging monologue about it that made it all seem very kind and reasonable, but really it’s about him, not what he reigns over. Watch.” He swivelled to face the king, still squinting down at his calendar. “Your Majesty, may I sit down?”

The king immediately quit his muttering and tucked the calendar back into his cape, wherever he’d pulled it from. “I command you to sit down,” he declared, and the little prince did. The king looked extraordinarily pleased.

“I think we’re done here,” Tom decided, offering a hand to where the little prince sat criss-crossed at his feet and warming with satisfaction at how easily the prince accepted.

“Don’t leave!” the king spluttered, leaning forward in his seat but never quite standing. “Do not leave—I shall make you my minister.”

“Your minister of… what, exactly?” Tom asked, amused now.

“Of justice!”

“There’s no one here to judge,” the little prince pointed out fairly.

“There’s no way to tell!” the king said, grasping at straws. “I’m very old, you see. I haven’t yet explored my realm fully, for it tires me to walk.”

Tom craned his head and leaned forward on his toes to peer at the other side of the planet. “No, I’ve checked. There doesn’t seem to be anyone over there, either.”

The little prince, grinning widely, grabbed Tom’s hand. “I do think we’ll be on our way.”

“No,” said the king.

“If Your Majesty wishes to be obeyed he should give a reasonable command,” Tom drawled. “If you were to command us, for example, to leave this instant, it seems to me that conditions may be favorable.”

Beside him, the little prince snickered. It was reward enough.

The space around them began to flicker and blur, and the prince raised the hand not occupying Tom’s to his cheek. “I make you my ambassador!” the king hastily shouted after them, but the planet had already gone.

The planet that materialized around them next was even smaller than the last. There was barely enough room for a street lamp, a lamplighter, Tom, and the little prince. He couldn’t imagine any use for a streetlamp on a planet with no streets, houses or inhabitants aside from the one in charge of lighting it. The man put out the streetlamp.

“Good morning,” greeted the little prince, and Tom found it hard to focus on anything but the fact that he hadn’t yet let go of his hand. “Why have you just put out your lamp?”

“Orders,” the lamplighter replied. “Good morning.”

“And what orders are those?” Tom asked.

“To put out my street lamp. Good evening.” And he lit his lamp again.

“Why have you just lit it again?” the little prince asked.

“Orders,” the man said simply.

“Elaborate,” Tom told him, annoyed.

“S’nothing to elaborate on,” said the lamplighter. “Orders are orders. Good morning.” And he put out his lamp.

“He’s worse than the king,” Tom decided. “He was at least more fun to toy with.”

“Orders are orders. Good morning.”

The little prince hummed in mild disagreement. “I like the lamplighter. At least he’s thinking of someone other than himself.”

“Who’s he thinking of?” Tom scoffed. “He’s the only one here.”

“Well. Whoever instructed him, I suppose.”

“Orders are orders. Good morning.” The little prince turned back to him and the script progressed. “It’s a terrible job I have. It used to be reasonable enough. I put the lamp out in the mornings and lit it after dark, then had the rest of the day for my own affairs, and the rest of the night for sleeping.”

The prince nudged Tom pointedly in the ribs and obediently he replied, almost bored. “Orders have changed, then?”

“Orders haven’t changed!” the lamplighter exclaimed. “That’s just the trouble! Year by year the planet is turning faster and faster, and orders haven’t changed. Now the planet revolves once a minute and I don’t have a moment of rest. I light my lamp and turn it out once every minute!”

Tom eyed the man contemplatively. The king, while foolish, Tom could understand. To give orders and have them obeyed was to maintain power, and clinging to power was reasonable, however pitiful the king’s attempt at it might have been. This man, though, did nothing but follow the orders of another, even when the orders had become nearly impossible. It wasn’t selfless—it was moronic.

Tom couldn’t muster up anything but contempt for the lamplighter, but when he looked the little prince was watching the man fondly. Tom did not understand. The little prince’s head turned to look at him expectantly. “Well?”

“Well?”

“Help him.” The little prince gestured toward the man.

“Good evening,” he said, and lit the streetlamp.

When it became clear that the prince wouldn’t be taking no for an answer Tom addressed the man resignedly. “Have you considered… stopping?”

“Orders are orders,” the man said, then put out the streetlamp. “Good morning.”

The little prince was still looking at Tom, eyes wide and expectant as if waiting for the other man to solve a riddle. There was a right answer, then. Tom stared back, wracking his mind for anything the prince might have said to suggest an answer, but he’d never mentioned the lamplighter or his strange planet before.

The little prince, turning away from Tom to address the lamplighter, said, “You seem sad.”

“Orders are orders,” he replied.

Tom blinked at the prince once, twice, before understanding dawned. Turning back to the lamplighter, he said, “You know, your planet is barely four strides long. If you want to take a break all you’d have to do is walk around it slowly, and you’d always be in the sun.”

The lamplighter lit his lamp. “Good evening. And what good does that do me when the only thing in the world I really want to do is sleep?”

Tom frowned. “Well, then I suppose you’re out of luck.”

“Yes,” the lamplighter said forlornly. “I suppose I am. Good morning.”

✩ ☆ ✩

“On his planet,” the little prince said later, “I could watch one thousand, four hundred forty sunsets every twenty-four hours.”

“When you’re feeling very sad,” Tom echoed, “sunsets are wonderful.”

The little prince looked at him for a very long time.

✩ ☆ ✩

The next planet they appeared on was of a much more decent size, by which Tom meant he could see it begin to curve some hundred or so meters away. Like the previous planets it seemed only to be inhabited by a single man with a single piece of furniture, but it was large enough that Tom supposed there could have been another man with another piece of furniture on the other side.

Before them sat an old gentleman at a great desk, accompanied by a large, dusty, seemingly blank book, a protractor, and a magnifying glass.

“Ah!” the man exclaimed, startling exaggeratedly in his seat at the sight of them. “Explorers! Where do you come from?”

The little prince approached and perched on one corner of the desk. Tom followed, if only because he didn’t like the prince within reaching distance of a stranger but not of Tom.

“Who are you?” the prince asked.

“I’m a geographer.”

“And what does a geographer do?”

The man puffed up proudly. “Geographers are scholars. I record where the oceans are, and the rivers, cities, mountains, and deserts.”

The little prince perked up at this. “That is very interesting.” He turned to gaze around at the man’s planet and Tom followed suit. What Tom could see of the planet looked similar to Earth, with rolling hills and a body of water in the distance and shrubbery here and there. The only difference was all the Earth was coloured a deep purple, the shrubbery neon yellow instead of green, and the water fluorescent pink. The sky itself was a pale green.

“Your planet is beautiful,” Tom admitted grudgingly. Thinking of the English coast, he asked, “Does it have oceans?”

“I couldn’t say,” said the geographer.

The little prince, who had perked up at Tom’s question, slouched a little in disappointment. “What about mountains?”

“I couldn’t say.”

The prince deflated further. “And the cities, rivers, and deserts?”

“I couldn’t tell you that, either.”

“Some geographer you are,” Tom said snidely, glancing down at the blank book. He didn’t appreciate the man boasting about his profession only to disappoint the prince.

“There isn’t a single explorer on my planet!” the man defended, turning a bit red and splotchy. “The geographer is far too important to leave his desks. He’s to stay in his study until explorers return to tell him what they’ve found and he’s able to copy them down.” The geographer perked up suddenly with excitement, offense apparently forgotten. “But you’ve come from far away! You must describe your planet for me!”

At this Tom’s interest piqued. For all his talking about his planet, the little prince had never described it in detail to Tom.

“Oh,” the prince said, seemingly caught off guard. “Well, where I live everything is quite small. I have three volcanoes that I rake out in the mornings to avoid eruptions—two active and one extinct, but you never know.”

“You never know,” agreed the geographer. “And what else?”

The little prince furrowed his brow thoughtfully before brightening. “I also have a flower.”

The geographer flapped his hand dismissively. “We don’t record flowers.”

The prince frowned. So did Tom. “Why not? She’s the prettiest thing.”

“Because flowers are ephemeral.”

“What does ephemeral mean?”

“Geographers work in the business of eternal things. It’s very rare for a mountain to disappear, and if it does it takes much longer than one’s life will last. It’s also rare for oceans to be drained of water, or for cities to be abandoned. We do not work in the business of fickle things such as flowers.”

Tom, remembering the little prince’s proneness to outbursts in defense of his flower, braced himself. But the prince, who never let go of a question once he’d asked it, only pointed out, “Extinct volcanoes can come back to life. What does ephemeral mean?”

“Whether a volcano is active or extinct isn’t a geographer’s concern—one way or another, it’s a mountain, and mountains are not ephemeral.”

Tom, sensing the prince’s mounting frustration, cut in. “You’d better go ahead and tell us what ephemeral means, with all your tossing it around.”

The geographer looked up in surprise, as if he’d forgotten Tom was there. The prince’s shoulders slackened a bit with relief.

“It means, ‘that which is threatened by imminent disappearance.’”

The prince, deeply unhappy now, turned to Tom. “My flower is ephemeral,” he told him, “and she has only four thorns to defend herself against the world, and I’ve left her on my planet all alone.”

Tom briefly warred between punishing the geographer for his reckless words and comforting his prince, but ultimately settled for brushing a light hand over the man’s head. “She’s a fierce little thing, isn’t she? She still has a long time yet.”

This settled the prince a little, which settled Tom in turn, although he still bristled a little as the other man turned back to the geographer. “Where do you suggest we go next?”

After some thought the geographer replied, “The planet Earth. It has a good reputation.”

✩ ☆ ✩

When they returned Tom studied the shadows and saw that they hadn’t moved a centimeter in their absence—a timeless pocket dimension. Tom almost asked the prince to take them back.

He looked at the man, still tucked snugly against Tom’s chest, and could think of nothing but the geographer’s words. 

Ephemeral means, ‘that which is threatened by imminent disappearance.’

He thought of the prince’s love for his flower and how he saw a sheep inside a box, took in the dusting of freckles across his cheekbones and the green of his eyes and the cut of lightning across his brow. His eyelashes were thicker and longer than Tom had realized before, and his lips curved into a perfect cupid’s bow, and Tom, for the first time, thought about kissing him.

Not because they were the only two people in the desert for a thousand miles around, or because he wanted a quick fumble, or because he was beautiful and soft and pressed against Tom’s chest and he could, but because he thought the little prince might taste like starlight, and he wanted desperately to find out.

Tom, for the first time, didn’t kiss him even though he wanted to.

Not because he was scared or because he thought the little prince would tell him no, but because of the geographer’s words. Because he feared, inexplicably, that the moment their lips touched the little prince would up and float away. He felt that way, sometimes. Like mist in the shape of a man. Like stardust playing at being human.

✩ ☆ ✩

“Tom,” the little prince hummed pleasantly, “have you ever tamed something?”

They were sitting cross legged in the sand, propped up against the plane while Tom took a break to eat his rations and drink a sparse amount of his water supply. He was already terribly thirsty nearly all of the time. The prince leaned into Tom’s side with his head propped on his shoulder.

“Tamed something?”

“It means ‘to create ties.’”

“I know what it means,” Tom replied mildly. He thought of the snake at Wool’s Orphanage, sitting cross legged in front of the brush until the little green thing saw fit to climb into Tom’s lap. He though of calling her Nagini. He turned his head to look at the little prince, strange and wild, as bright and untouchable as starlight, and the man sat up to look back. “No,” Tom said. “I haven’t.”

“Oh,” the little prince breathed, delighted. “You’ll have to meet my fox.”

There were no foxes in the desert, so Tom was not at all surprised when the little prince laid a delicate hand on his cheek and whisked them both away.

They materialized in a field of green, where the little prince was sprawled out on his stomach, weeping. Tom hurried to kneel beside him the moment he’d steadied himself and brushed a slightly frantic hand through his hair, concerned. “What happened?”

“Good morning,” rang a voice, and Tom’s head snapped up to see a small red fox below an apple tree.

Far past the point now of being startled by talking animals, Tom replied, “Good morning.”

“What’s wrong with him?” the fox asked, quite rudely.

At this the little prince lifted his head and Tom withdrew his hand. His eyes were wide and watery but brightened at the sight of the animal. “Oh! Who are you? You’re very pretty.”

“I’m a fox.”

The little prince pushed himself to sit on his heels, glancing up at Tom with a small, grateful smile before turning back. “Come and play with us. We’ve travelled so far, and I’m feeling quite sad.”

“I can’t play with you,” the fox said, slightly affronted. “I’m not tamed. How unkind of you to ask.”

The little prince twisted his hands in his lap, looking abashed. “Ah, I’m terribly sorry. What does tamed mean?”

Tom, eyeing the apple tree with far keener interest than he did the fox, stood and made his way to pull down a snack. It’d been too long since he’d had any food that wasn’t dehydrated and packaged. At his approach the fox let out a startled yip and bounded away.

Tom returned with the apples, nonplussed, and handed one to the little prince. The man beamed, polishing it on his tunic and taking a happy munch. “Thank you,” he said around the mouthful.

“It’s my pleasure,” Tom replied. Then added, at least half truthfully, “Although I’m sorry to have scared your fox away.”

The little prince flapped his hand as if swatting away the remorse. “He’ll be back, of course. He wants to be tamed.”

“What were you weeping over?”

“Oh,” the little prince perked up, swivelling his head around as if he’d only just remembered where they were. “Well-” he faltered. “Well, I passed a rose garden.”

Tom peered past the little prince and surely enough saw some few hundred feet away the entrance to a garden. He took a bite of his apple and nearly melted at the burst of fresh, ripe sweetness. How wonderful that pocket dimensions came equipped to accommodate all five senses. “You passed a rose garden, and that made you want to weep?”

“No, well.” The little prince set down his apple in order to toy with his fingers. “My flower, she’s a rose. And she told me that she was the only flower like her in all the universe, and I believed her, of course. Then I passed the garden with a hundred roses and…” Here the little prince looked almost ashamed of himself. “For a moment I believed that she’d lied to me, and that made me weep.”

“Well, didn’t she?” Tom asked, not entirely understanding. “Lie to you, I mean.”

The little prince took two sure bites of his apple, polishing the thing cleanly off, then tossed the core out into the grass. He pushed himself to his feet, brushing off his clothes and offering Tom a hand, which he took. Then, beaming brightly, he said, “Let’s go see the railway switchman.”

✩ ☆ ✩

They appeared at a railway platform. It was the first place they’d visited that was actually filled with people, and the sudden influx of faces that weren’t his prince’s was jarring. While the little prince seemed to radiate the faces here looked drab and grey, skin hanging off their cheekbones. Their attire too was leached of color, as if someone had taken the entire scene and turned the saturation down. They looked half dead, more like automated corpses than real people. There was a train huffing and puffing on the track, doors held open as the people filed on in a winding, orderly fashion.

In the time it took for Tom to glance around the little prince disappeared from his side. He whirled, scanning the sea of monochrome for color and catching the tail end of a cape disappearing between two tall men in business attire. He hurried after it, straining his eyes, before finally spotting the prince further up the platform. He seemed to be in avid conversation with a man dressed in uniform. He was young, Tom’s age, with bright blond hair and cheeks that dimpled as he grinned down at the prince.

The little prince smiled brightly at Tom’s arrival, not protesting when Tom grasped his elbow firmly to pull him a few steps away from the switchman and closer to his side. The prince allowed it, leaning into Tom’s side with an indulgent smile and not protesting at the protective arm Tom placed around his shoulders. “Tom,” he greeted. “I was just asking this man what it is he does here.”

The switchman, looking decidedly less enthusiastic but not at all unfriendly, told Tom. “I sort passengers into groups by the hundred and they file into the trains, then I send ‘em off on their way. Sometimes left, sometimes right.”

As if on queue, the train stopped on the track let out a deafening blast of its horn and the switchman grasped his handle with both hands, leaning heavily backward until it clunked into place. The train took off. Tom observed the prince watching it go with wide, fascinated eyes. “What a hurry they’re in,” he breathed, captivated. “Where are they headed?”

“Oh, all sorts of places. That one’s headed north, and they’ll step off one by one ‘til it's emptied out and they’ve all got where they’re needing to go.”

“What are they looking for?” the little prince asked, and the switchman grinned wryly.

“That’s a harder question, ain’t it? Not even the one driving the locomotive knows.”

Some distance off a second train rounded the bend from the same direction the other had departed. The prince’s eyes widened. “They’re coming back already?”

“It’s not the same train,” Tom explained to him, tired of hearing the switchman speak. “There needs to be plenty—no matter where you go there are people wanting to get from that place to another.”

The prince tilted his head then turned back to watch the train as it pulled into the station, doors opening and dozens of dull, dreary adults spilling out from its belly. “They weren’t happy where they were?”

Tom thought about the academy, thought about turning his eyes away from Malfoy just before his shoulder shattered—hearing the crunch. His first solo flight, the freedom of knowing he could fly and fly and fly and never come back…

“No one is ever happy where he is,” Tom replied. The little prince turned thoughtful at this, but notably did not disagree.

“Well,” the prince sighed, still eyeing the train, “at least there are windows. They move so fast—how much of the world you must see in just a fifteen minute train ride!”

The switchman laughed lightly. “They ain’t seeing nothing. They’ve got their noses buried in the paper, more like, or else they’re yawning or sleeping. S’only the little ones with their noses pressed up against the glass, see?” From the left a train barrelled past, and a dozen little faces were pressed against the windows, peering curiously out at the platform. This the little prince nodded at, seeming to understand perfectly.

“Only children know what they’re looking for,” he said knowingly, twisting slightly under Tom’s arm to peer up at him. “They spend all their time loving a ragdoll or a toy figurine, and when it’s taken away from them they cry.”

The switchman, all but forgotten, said, “They’re lucky.”

✩ ☆ ✩

They stood back in a field of grass, not far from an apple tree, in front of a small red fox. Tom eyed the apples once more and the prince tucked one hand into the crook of Tom’s elbow, shooting him a knowing look. Tom looked back unimpressed, but stayed put.

“What does tamed mean,” the little prince asked.

“You’re not from around here,” the fox concluded, eyeing both Tom and the prince assessingly. “What are you looking for, all the way out here?”

“We’re looking for people,” the prince explained, although Tom thought that was not strictly true. A pocket dimension echo, then. “What does tamed mean?”

The fox scoffed and bent his head to lick at his chest petulantly. “People,” he declared, “have guns, and they use those guns to hunt and make coats and gloves from my beautiful fur. They also raise chickens, but I can assure you that is just about the only interesting thing about them.”

“We’re people,” Tom pointed out, sinking down to sit in the grass once more. The little prince followed suit, curling into Tom’s side but keeping his attention on the fox.

The fox’s hair stood on end with alarm and he studied them for a few moments before seeming to settle. “Can’t be,” he concluded. “You haven’t got any of that funny fur on your face. People have furred faces, and guns, and chickens. Are you looking for chickens?”

Tom sighed forlornly, resting his head on the prince’s wild tuft of hair. “We’re looking for friends,” the prince corrected patiently. “What does tamed mean?”

“Ah,” the fox perked up as if he’d only just heard the prince ask. “I’m glad you asked! There’s no care given to taming, anymore. To tame means ‘to create ties.’”

“To create ties?”

“For me, you’re only two young men out of a hundred thousand other young men. I have no need of you. If you were to walk away now I would carry on hiding from hunters and eating chickens, just as I was. But for him,” with this the fox pointed his nose in Tom’s direction, “you’re the only young man in all the world, and he’s the only young man in all the world for you.”

Something longing seeped into the fox’s voice, and Tom was too shocked at his own involvement in the explanation to cut in before he continued.

“But if you tame me…” he went on wistfully, “I’ll be the only fox in all the world for you, and we’ll need each other because that’s what happens when you’re tamed. I’m bored, you know. All the chickens look the same, and all the hunters look the same, and my days all look the same. But if you tame me the world will burst into color. Footsteps now all send me flying into my burrow to hide from the men with guns who wear my fur, but your footsteps will sound like music, and when I hear them I’ll come out to dance. And see over there! The sun-darkened wheat! When the sun shines through your hair just so you resemble it perfectly, so when you tame me it will remind me of you, and the sound of the wind in the wheat will make my chest flutter and hum…”

Tom, still shocked silent, felt the prince’s hand curl lightly over his own. “I’m beginning to understand,” the little prince said. “I knew a flower, and I think she tamed me.”

The fox looked at the two of them imploringly, seeming to ignore the previous statement completely, and Tom shifted where he sat, uncomfortable for reasons he couldn’t explain. The prince squeezed Tom’s hand where he continued to hold it, as if in sympathy.

“Please,” the fox blurted after a stretch of silence, “tame me!”

“I think we will,” the prince said kindly, smiling at the fox. “Now though, I believe Tom would like an apple. They’re just behind you, see?”

And the fox, nodding gravely with understanding, trotted away.

✩ ☆ ✩

Tom and the prince found themselves before a sales clerk advertising small white pills, square shaped and small enough to balance on the prince’s pinky.

“Good morning,” the little prince greeted her. “What are you selling?”

“Thirst quenching pills!” the woman explained jovially, holding up a bottle as if for emphasis. 

The prince tilted his head, eyeing them with some interest. “Why are you selling those?”

“To quench thirst! One of these a week and you won’t even remember what being thirsty feels like.”

Tom eyed the woman’s chapped lips distastefully as she spoke and cut in. “Yes, but… you still need to drink water, you know. Even if you aren’t thirsty.”

At this the sales clerk stared blankly at Tom, seemingly struck dumb at the suggestion. Tom stared back, vaguely fascinated.

The prince interrupted, insistent.. “But why are you selling them? What’s wrong with drinking water when you’re thirsty?”

“Saves time,” the sales clerk chirped, brandishing the pill bottle once more like a weapon. “Experts have said you’ll save fifty-three minutes a week!”

They left not long after, wandering past other stalls and dodging other salesmen. After some time Tom spoke aloud. “If you had fifty-three spare minutes a week, what would you do with it?”

The prince grinned up at Tom and interlaced their fingers between them. “If I had fifty-three spare minutes a week to do whatever I liked,” he said, swinging their hands lightly, “I would spend them walking very slowly toward a water fountain…”

✩ ☆ ✩

“Please… tame me!” the fox blurted.

The little prince worried at his bottom lip. “I just don’t know if we have the time,” he said regretfully. “We’ve just gotten here, and we have a lot to learn…”

The fox perked up at this. “You only learn from the things you tame. Tame me, and I’ll tell you a secret. Something no one has ever told you before!”

Tom rolled his eyes a little at this, but the little prince brightened immediately. “Well, I suppose we can spend some time…”

“Phenomenal!”

“What do we need to do?”

“You’ll sit just over there,” the fox instructed, nodding to where they sat. “You won’t speak, and I’ll look at you from the corner of my eye because I’ve never seen men like you before. Then you’ll come back every day, and every day I’ll allow you to sit a little closer. Taming is an endeavor of patience.”

They came to see the fox again. They never spoke ("Language is the source of misunderstandings.”), only sat closely side by side and allowed the fox to creep closer, day by day. On their third visit Tom took a wide circle around the animal as its sharp eyes traced his movement, retrieved two apples, and returned to the little prince without the creature fleeing. The next visit Tom spent cutting their apples into thin slices and tossing every odd cut in the grass between them and the fox. Here the fox darted forward, grasped the apple between sharp little teeth, and retreated to gnaw on it as they watched.

Seven visits and the fox no longer retreated to enjoy their gifts. Nine and he could snatch it right out from between Tom’s offering fingers.

“For someone who’s never tamed anything, you’re quite good at this,” the little prince commented idly that day.

“Once,” Tom divulged, speaking through a throat of gravel and feeling as if he was giving away a great secret, “I loved a snake.”

On the tenth day the fox wandered right up and sat before them. The little prince held out gentle fingers and the fox butted his head against them good-naturedly. Tom watched with no small amount of awe as the little prince laughed primly and sunk his fingers into the fox’s red fur. “You’re lovely,” the prince declared, eyes wide and delighted. “Will you play with us now?”

✩ ☆ ✩

“There’s hardly a thing in the world I wouldn’t do for one of those little white pills right now,” Tom said, lying beneath his plane—still far from repaired—to avoid the beating sun. He should have been working but couldn’t summon up the willpower presently. His muscles ached and his mouth had gone as perpetually dry as the sand he lay in. There was hardly any water left.

There was no way around it; Tom was going to die here.

The little prince laid beside him, head pillowed on Tom’s chest as he plucked at the fraying seams of his shirt. He didn’t put off body heat, so Tom saw no harm in letting the man curl in as closely as he desired—which, for the little prince, was often as close as he could possibly be.

“You think so?”

“Surely. It wouldn’t solve the problem of not having anything to drink, but I wouldn’t be thirsty anymore.”

“I’m thirsty too,” the little prince sighed. Tom, with the slightest pinch of resentment, stopped himself from pointing out that the prince didn’t drink anything. “My rose said-”

“This has nothing to do with your rose,” Tom cut in, sharp but not unkind.

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to die of thirst.”

With this the little prince twisted, propping his little elbows against Tom’s chest and leaning over him to peer down speculatively. “You look okay to me,” he said unsurely.

Tom, tired and weak and hopelessly endeared, shut his eyes and smiled softly. “That’s a relief, at least.”

There was the brush of fingers against his cheek and Tom braced himself for the whirling rush of being pulled into the little prince’s memory. The prince would take him to a spring or a fountain and allow him to drink his fill happily. When they came back Tom would still be thirsty, still be dying, but the relief would be real enough in the moment. The prince granted Tom these mercies.

When nothing came Tom cracked open an eye, brows furrowed at the prince. He was still looking at Tom, face soft and open and thoughtful, and Tom thought about kissing him. Thought about sinking his fingers into the prince’s ringlets and tugging him down. His mouth was dry and his lips were chapped and in any other circumstance those two things alone would make a kiss unpleasant, but he thought that kissing the little prince would be enough to keep him quenched until his last minute. The prince would be as good as a little white pill. Better.

“It’s good to have a friend,” the little prince said. “Even when you’re dying.”

Tom opened his mouth and shut it again. The prince didn’t understand the danger, he realized. A little sunlight was enough for him. His hand was still pressed against Tom’s cheekbone, thumb slipping up to trace the skin under Tom’s left eye, then down the bridge of his nose, then across his lower lip. Tom was now half convinced he’d died already.

Then a press of lips against Tom’s brow, soft and cupid bowed and just slightly wet. He let out a shuddering, desperate breath at the contact and tried not to move too much, lest he startle the prince away.

Then he sat back, casual as anything, and said, “I’m thirsty, too. Let’s find a well.”

Tom let out a strangled, exasperated noise and shut his eyes. There was no use searching for a well at random in the vastness of the Sahara, and all the effort of walking would kill him more quickly than just lying here, but he couldn’t think of a good enough reason to stay. He didn’t have enough water to last him through what remained of his repairs, anyway. 

So Tom and the little prince rolled out from beneath the plane and began to walk.

✩ ☆ ✩

Several hours into their trek the sun set and the stars began to blink overhead. Tom was beginning to feel feverish and confused with thirst and heat. Beside him, the little prince trudged along, breaths huffy and feet dragging in the sand. He was tired. They were both tired.

“Stop,” Tom said finally. He sat down where they stood and pulled the little prince with him until they were both laid out on their backs with nothing at all between them and the vast, vast sky. “I don’t want to walk anymore,” he said.

“Water can also be good for the heart,” the little prince said, as if carrying on a conversation that Tom hadn’t registered. He didn’t ask. He knew by then that it was no use questioning him.

After a silence he spoke again. “The stars are beautiful because of a flower you can’t see.”

Tom turned his head to the side, the little prince’s words drifting in and out of meaning. He instead set his attention on the pink of the prince’s cheeks and the slope of his nose, the freckles scattered across his cheekbones and his green eyes. Most green eyes looked brown in the dark, but not the prince’s. They never seemed to desaturate.

“Of course,” Tom answered.

“The desert is beautiful,” the little prince added, and Tom nodded.

This he agreed with. There was something about the desert, some unspoken magic that surpassed words. Here he and the little prince sat, and on either side of them for as far as you could see was nothing but rolling red waves—a boundless ocean of sand and sun and little else. Beneath it, though, something sang. Tom’s first solo expedition took him over the Sahara, although he had been fortunate enough not to land there. He still remembered seeing it, endless in front of him, and thinking that the world was larger than he’d ever dared hope for. It was a moment of epiphany.

“What makes the desert beautiful,” the little prince continued, “is that it hides a well somewhere.”

Tom watched him for a few moments longer before turning his gaze upward once more. Tom had never seen stars shine quite like they did here.

“When I was a boy I went to boarding school,” he said quietly, reckless within the silence of the desert. “There was this rumor—legend, almost, because the school was quite old—that there was a room hidden under the school. The Chamber of Secrets, they called it. It was supposed to have a monster, but if you got past it there’d be mounds and mounds of treasure and money… Fame and glory…” Overhead a comet shot past. Shooting stars weren’t nearly as rare as they’d have you believe. Especially out here. “I spent seven years looking for it.”

“Did you find it?” asked the prince.

“No.” Tom laughed a little. “Of course not. No one did. But it cast a spell over the school. It was the only good thing about the place, really, and no one had ever even seen it. The most interesting thing about that school was invisible.”

The little prince smiled, pleased. “You agree with my fox, then.”

Tom tilted his head, and the little prince shook his. He said, “I’m tired, and I don’t want to walk anymore. Let’s go speak with him.”

✩ ☆ ✩

The problem with taming the fox was that soon enough it came time for the little prince to leave.

“Earth is so big,” the little prince explained gently, eyes wide and regretful. “I have to see other things and tame other creatures.”

“I shall weep,” the fox declared, and did.

“Oh,” the prince breathed, falling to his knees to gather the fox in his arms and looking quite helpless. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry.”

The fox wept and wept and Tom found himself bristling with irritation at the display. It twisted the little prince’s features into something resembling guilt, and Tom couldn’t stand the look of it. 

Eventually Tom had had his fill. “It’s your own fault,” he snapped at the fox. “You’re the one who begged and begged to be tamed. We wouldn’t have done you any harm, but you insisted on it.”

The fox sniffed. “Yes, of course.”

“But you’re weeping,” the prince insisted, face still twisted with guilt.

“Yes,” the fox repeated, “of course.”

“Then you get nothing out of it?” the prince asked.

“I get something,” said the fox, “because of the color of the wheat.”

Tom stood silently, shocked into stillness. The prince, gentle as ever, released the fox and stood to lean against Tom’s side. A reassuring weight. “I think,” he murmured, “I’ll show Tom the rose garden. Then we’ll be back to say goodbye.”

The fox nodded gravely. “When you return, I will give you the promised gift of a secret.”

✩ ☆ ✩

When they reached the rose garden Tom drank his fill at the fountain, the water cool and sweet and real as anything. Then they perched on its edge, looking out across the greenery.

It was well taken care of, busy and green with bursts of color in every direction. Cobbled trails weaved between the garden beds, benches were tucked into alcoves between trees and flower bushes, insects buzzed happily. The little prince looked thoughtful. Across from them was a bed of rose bushes, dozens of perfect red knots poised beside each other. If Tom listened very closely he thought he could hear them whispering.

The prince spoke first. “My rose told me she was the only flower like her in all the world.”

“She lied to you,” Tom said, not unkindly.

The little prince smiled at Tom, eyes soft and a little sad. “No,” he said, but didn’t explain further. Instead he turned back to the roses and went on, musing. “If she were here she’d be terribly embarrassed. She’d cough and pretend to fall ill so I’d be forced to nurse her rather than confront her about it. She always hated being caught in lies, but she lied anyway. About such silly things, as well.” 

Tom said nothing. They sat that way for a long while longer. At some point the little prince reached over to interlace his fingers with Tom’s.

“But she didn’t lie,” the prince said abruptly, startling Tom out of thought. Now he looked at Tom rather than the flowers, eyes bright and piercing and intense, searching, like he was waiting for some sign that Tom was hearing him. “The first day I saw them I laid down and wept because I thought she had, but it wasn’t a lie. These flowers are lovely, but they’re empty. I’ve never watered them or listened to them boast about their thorns or complain about the drafts. She’s the one I tucked behind a screen and admired the beauty of. She’s my rose.”

“She’s the one you tamed,” Tom said.

The little prince’s gaze softened with relief, content now that Tom understood. “She’s the one who tamed me.”

“There is no one like you,” Tom confided desperately, chest full to bursting with something he couldn’t name. “I have never known anyone like you and I will never meet anyone like you again.”

The prince kissed him then, lips at once gentle and violent, cruel and kind as anything. Tom tangled a hand in the curls at the back of the prince’s head and surged forward, thirstier for this than he’d ever been for water. The other man gasped into Tom’s mouth and met him in the middle, delicate hands raising to Tom’s cheeks to hold him in place. Not that Tom was going anywhere. Not that there had ever been a place he wanted to be more than he wanted to be pressed against the little prince just then, tasting his lips and basking in his not-quite-warmth and feeling his little hands holding onto Tom for dear life. The prince fell forward, nearly in Tom’s lap now, and Tom only tugged him closer. He was so light, too light, but he felt solid and real against Tom’s chest and his lips tasted like apples.

Later, much later, when Tom would be forced to ask himself whether the little prince was ever a real man at all, he would come back to this. He never knew the little prince’s name and he never really found out where he came from. No one else had ever known him, and when the sun rose on that final morning there was not even a body for Tom to take with him.

But he would come back to this. The proof of the little prince’s existence was that he was lovely, that his laughter sounded like church bells, that his lips tasted like apples and that he wanted a sheep. When someone wants a sheep, that proves he exists. When someone kisses you in a rose garden then presses his cold nose against your cheek, when he blooms like a flower under your reverent hands. Later, Tom wouldn’t remember this moment like a dream or a childhood memory, blurred at the edges and warped in places; Tom would remember this moment like its own pocket dimension, like he could relive it one hundred times and still taste the same air.

When the little prince started to pull away for breath Tom didn’t let him. He laid him out in the grass beside the fountain and tasted every inch of starlit skin, traced every curve and dotted line with hungry fingers, pulled noises out of his chest that the man would deny later. 

Tom proved his existence, as the little prince proved Tom’s. 

There would be no one else to remember this. The grass couldn’t memorize the sonnet they’d written in its blades and the roses wouldn’t care to, but Tom kissed the little prince and the entire garden burst into life. Every whisper of wind through the grass or leaves, every birdcall and whistling song, was for them. Tom plucked the prince’s body like a string and the garden wrote a symphony in his wake. Every noise Tom coaxed from the prince’s tongue was music.

When two people make love in a rose garden and every flower and bumblebee and blade of grass wakes up to sing their names, that proves they exist.

And if nothing else in the world remembered, Tom would.

✩ ☆ ✩

“Here is my secret,” said the fox. “It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

“Anything essential is invisible to the eyes,” Tom repeated, in order to remember.

“It’s the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important.”

“It’s the time I spent on my rose…” the little prince repeated, in order to remember.

✩ ☆ ✩

Tom mustered up what was left of his strength, driven on by the memory of sweet fountain water, and lifted the sleeping prince into his arms. The prince himself was no weight at all—it was the weight of Tom’s own body that threatened to down him.

As he walked he looked down at the prince. He gazed at his long, long eyelashes and pale brow marked by lightning, intersected by the single curl that always fell over his eyes. The little prince’s eyelids fluttered lightly and for a moment Tom thought he would wake, then his furrowed brow relaxed and he breathed more deeply still—steady, even breaths like the heartbeat of the desert. 

Tom thought, What moves me so deeply about this sleeping man, this little prince, is his love for a flower that I have never seen. A steady flame burning in his chest like a light within a lamppost. Looking down at him then he seemed impossibly fragile, a steady flame burning in his chest that could at any moment be blown out. The little prince may not have been capable of starving or dying of thirst, but he was not immortal. Flames must be protected; the slightest gust of wind could blow them out.

The little prince curled closer to Tom in his sleep, one fist tangled in the collar of Tom’s shirt and the other tucked against his chest like a safeguard. Tom positively ached. He leaned down to press his lips against the prince’s brow, and when he pulled away realized that the pressure had split his dry lip and set him bleeding. He tried to swallow but found that he couldn’t, and if he had an ounce of water to spare he might have cried.

He looked at the prince. He thought, What I’m looking at now is only a shell. What’s important is invisible.

Trudging on like that, Tom found the well at daybreak.

✩ ☆ ✩

“It doesn’t make sense…” Tom trailed off, feeling his head spin impossibly. Wells in the Sahara were rare and scattered, often dried up entirely, and when you came upon them they looked to be nothing but holes dug in the sand. This one looked like a village well, with cobbled sides and a pulley and a bucket bobbing at the bottom.

There was no village anywhere near them. Tom was sure he must be dreaming.

The little prince had startled into wakefulness at Tom’s shocked, mangled noise and was making quick work of the bucket now. The pulley groaned and sang like an old rusted gate as he tugged at it. The little prince laughed. “Hear it, Tom? We’ve woken the well, and now it’s singing.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Tom repeated. “The rope, and the bucket, and the pulley…”

By then the little prince had finished heaving and a bucket of clean, sparkling water sat on the well’s edge. “Weren’t you thirsty?” the prince questioned.

Tom was. He approached slowly, terrified with every step that his next footfall would send out a ripple that destroyed the entire mirage, the prince and the well and the water gone in one fell swoop. He fell to his knees once he was close enough and the little prince approached him, cradling the base of his skull in one hand as he tipped cool water into Tom’s mouth with the other.

“There,” the little prince murmured with some satisfaction. He set the bucket aside after Tom had finished half of it and the pilot protested, but the prince shushed him. “You’ll make yourself sick. Wait a few moments. Here, I’ll drink—water can also be good for the heart.”

When the little prince tipped water into Tom’s mouth for the second time he understood what he meant. The water tasted sweeter than the water from the rose garden, sweeter than any spring Tom had ever drunk from. This water was the labor of their walk under the stars, of every step that Tom had cradled the little prince’s tired body, of the song of the pulley and rope and the strength of the little prince’s arms. It healed Tom’s heart as much as it healed his body.

“People where you live,” the little prince said as Tom drank, fingers gentle in the hair at the nape of his neck, “grow five thousand roses in one garden and don’t find what they’re looking for. When what they’re looking for can be found in just one rose, or a little water…”

Tom pulled away to look up at the prince. The sun was somewhere behind him, its glow outlining every dip and curve of the little prince’s frame. He raised one hand to touch the prince’s cheek and the man leaned into it, smiling softly.

“But eyes are blind,” he added. “You have to look with the heart.”

✩ ☆ ✩

Tom and the little prince sat against the well, shuffling now and then to remain in its shadow, for the rest of that day. They did nothing but pass the bucket back and forth between their hands, only rising to drop the bucket once more into the well and hear the pulley’s song.

Now and then Tom would lean over to kiss him. He could do that now. It was too hot here to get up to much else, but Tom thought he could live off the prince’s kisses the way the prince lived off sunlight. He was soft and pliant and cool as starlight, heart beating like a startled bird beneath Tom’s palm. Tom wanted to fold him up and place him in his pocket and take him home, but he couldn’t picture the starlit prince under the dreary grey skies of London.

Tom told him about London.

For the first time in all his life he told someone what it was like growing up at the orphanage, all grey matrons and distasteful children and bone-deep loneliness. He told the little prince about the snakes in the bushes, about Nagini, that his eyes were the same colour as her scales—almost eerily so. He told the little prince about Lucius Malfoy and his shattered wrist and the prince didn’t look at him with disgust or fear. He said, I love you in beautiful and terrible ways that I cannot begin to understand, although not in so many words, and the little prince held tightly to his hand.

Later, much later, Tom said, “You knew exactly where to find this well.”

“I’ve been here before,” the prince replied simply.

“When?”

It took the man some time to respond. “About a year ago.”

A strange grief that Tom didn’t entirely understand began to swell in his chest. “And when you passed me two weeks ago, on your way through the desert…”

The little prince let his head fall to rest on Tom’s shoulder and shut his eyes, looking pained. “I was on my way back here.”

“You have plans I don’t know about,” Tom stated, unease wrapping steadily around his throat like a vice.

“I’d like to rest now,” the prince said, and fell soundly asleep.

Tom woke some time later, unsure of when he’d followed his prince into slumber, to the sound of conversation.

“I arrived at night last time, and not here—just over there. We have to get it just right, or I’ll end up somewhere ridiculous.”

Tom crept to his feet, craning his ears for the sound of a second voice.

“And you have done this before, correct? You know how?”

Just beyond the well stood the ruins of an old cobbled wall, twenty feet long and fifteen feet high, although well chipped away at the corners and sides. Tom’s heart dropped at the sight of his prince perched atop the crumbling brick.

“Your poison… you told me it’s swift. Is that still true? I don’t want to be in pain.”

Tom rounded the side of the wall and looked up at the prince, perplexed as anything. He was twenty yards from him and still saw no sign of a second speaker.

“Fine, fine. Now get lost, I want to get down from here.”

Tom followed the prince’s gaze and cursed at the sight of a little green snake, hands flying for the pistol at his side. The snake was brighter than Nagini and patterned differently, and he recognized it as an extremely venomous breed. A snake like this could kill a grown man in thirty seconds flat with one bite, and here his prince was, talking to it!

Tom took a step forward, revolver in hand, but at the sound the snake darted away and slipped like liquid metal between the stones. Tom reached the wall just in time to catch the little prince in his arms as he jumped from the top, face as pale and sickly as Tom had ever seen it.

“What’s going on here?” Tom demanded, loosening the prince’s scarf and brushing a worried hand over his forehead and cheeks. “You’re talking to snakes, now?”

The little prince wrapped his arms around Tom’s neck and looked up at him seriously, making no move to leave his arms. “You caught me.”

“You shouldn’t have been so high up. How did you even climb up there? In those ridiculous boots, too.”

The prince allowed Tom to sit him back in the shade of the well and drank the water Tom put to his lips and assured him that he wasn’t feeling ill. Logically, Tom knew that the prince probably wasn’t capable of falling ill, but it was the most he could do then.

“What were you thinking? Why were you talking to that snake? They’re poisonous, you know. Extremely.”

“Tonight,” the little prince said, “it’ll have been exactly one year. The stars will be exactly where they were when I fell to Earth.”

“You’re talking nonsense,” Tom said sharply.

“You shouldn’t come,” the little prince continued. “It’ll look like I’m in pain—it’ll look like I’m dying.”

Tom’s heart was beating wildly. “Stop this talk. We’ll start walking back to the plane now, that way most of the trip will be after dark.”

“No need for that,” the little prince said, and pointed somewhere past Tom’s shoulder. When he turned, there was the plane—two hundred meters away, in clear sight of the well.

Tom stared at it dumbly. “That’s… not possible.”

“I think… the next time you look- you’ll see what’s wrong with it. You’ll be able to leave soon, and you’ll have water now.”

Tom turned back to the prince, heart hammering in his chest. “I won’t leave you.”

“I’m leaving today too.” Then, more sadly, “It’s much further. It’s much more difficult.”

“I won’t leave you.”

“I have your sheep, and your crate. Tonight… you shouldn’t come.”

Something strange was happening to Tom. He was sitting in front of the little prince, his own hands tangled in the other man’s, his eyes locked on his own, but it seemed to him that the little prince was tipping headlong into an abyss that Tom could neither understand nor pull him out of. The little prince craned his head forward and kissed Tom, lips soft and honest and forgiving, but all Tom could taste was salt. The prince was crying. So was Tom.

The sun fell behind the skyline and the little prince didn’t protest as Tom pulled him down to lie next to him, gathering the man to his chest tightly, arms like a vice. Whatever plans the prince thought he had for the night, Tom wouldn’t allow them. He planned to stay awake, watchful as a guard, until the sun rose once more. If he did fall asleep any movement the prince made to pull himself from Tom’s arms would wake him. It was everything Tom could do short of physically tying the other man down.

This time, the little prince didn’t warn Tom.

In this memory, Tom couldn’t speak. He couldn’t touch the prince, either. The scene played out in front of him like a film.

He watched as the little prince stirred from where he lay in a heap on the ground, rising like a flower and taking in the desert around him with sharp, curious little eyes. He sat there for a few minutes, puzzled and unsure, before a second creature stirred beside him, and a small, bright green snake appeared.

“Good evening,” the little prince said.

“Good evening,” said the snake.

“What planet have I landed on?”

“On planet Earth, in Africa.”

“Ah!” the little prince nodded, looking around with interest. “And… are there no people on Earth?”

“We’re in the desert, and there are no people in the desert, but Earth is very big.”

The prince nodded again, and crossed a distance to sit on a large flat rock, chin tilted up toward the sky. “You’re a funny little creature,” he said, without looking at the snake. “No bigger than a finger.”

“I hold more power than a king’s finger,” the snake replied sharply.

“I suppose that depends on the king,” the little prince said, laughing lightly. “But you haven’t got any feet! Surely you can’t travel far.”

“I can take you further than a ship,” the snake hissed, and Tom watched on in terror as the creature curled tightly around the prince’s ankle. “My venom is more powerful than you can even imagine. If you ever grow homesick, someday, I’ll be the only creature on Earth who can send you back, and you’ll regret placing me below kings.”

The prince smiled down at the snake apologetically. “Forgive me,” he said lightly. “I must still be shaken from my journey here. I met a king, not long ago, and he was much sillier than you.”

The snake, seemingly appeased, slid back to the sand. Tom let out a quiet breath of relief.

“So where are all the people?” the little prince said, continuing the conversation after a long stretch of silence. “It’s a little lonely in the desert.”

“It’s also lonely with people,” the snake said.

Above them stretched hundreds of thousands of floating lights, blinking and dancing. The little prince gazed at them with a look Tom still couldn’t put a word to but had come to adore. He looked up too, wanting to see what the little prince saw—but he had never loved a rose.

✩ ☆ ✩

When Tom startled out of the memory the prince was no longer beside him.

He cursed, scrambling to his feet and spinning round wildly until he caught sight of the man, several hundred feet away and walking with purpose. Tom took off running after him.

He was still a hundred feet away when the little prince stopped. He looked like a dream, the wind catching his little yellow scarf and setting it fluttering. Tom kept running, but the day of water hadn’t been enough to replenish all his strength and his feet seemed to sink further into the sand with every step he took. 

He was close enough to see the flash of emerald green as the snake bit the little prince’s ankle but not close enough to pull him away. His body bowed, back arching as he hung there for a moment, utterly motionless. All the world seemed to stand still as the little prince hung there, on the precipice.

He fell the way a tree falls, and if Tom had not been there to catch him the sand would have swallowed the sound of his impact. Tom cradled him, brushing the curls frantically out of his face, cupping his chin and trying to tilt his head upward. The man didn’t so much as stir. Didn’t even let out a breath.

“No,” Tom said numbly. Then again, more surely, as if the little prince might wake up to respond if he demanded it. “No. Wake up.”

He felt unsubstantial, more so than usual, not the solid form Tom had grown used to holding against his chest. Perhaps… perhaps he really was only starlight in the shape of a man. With every second he held him Tom swore he grew closer to slipping right out of his grasp.

Remembering the snake all at once Tom looked around wildly, hand falling to the pistol at his hip, but the thing was gone. The little prince laid motionless. Tom dropped his head to press their foreheads together slightly as he rocked the two of them back and forth in the sand, inhuman noises escaping his throat. When he pulled back the prince’s eyes were closed and his face soft enough that he could have been sleeping.

This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.

The prince shifted and Tom choked, sitting the prince up more fully as he began to stir. His eyes fluttered open, and there was green, finally. 

“Tom,” the little prince said, surprised. “You’re here.”

It was a miracle Tom was breathing at all. “I told you I wouldn’t leave you, didn’t I?”

The prince frowned a little, but the expression was too soft at the edges to be truly disapproving. “And I told you not to come.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“You understand,” the prince said softly, and lifted little fingers to brush Tom’s hair from his eyes. The touch was so tender that Tom thought it might kill him. “It’s too far. I can’t take this body with me—it’s too heavy.”

“How can you leave me here?”

“But Tom,” the prince whispered urgently, “it’s okay. It will be an empty shell. There’s nothing sad about an empty shell.”

Tom held the man closer. He couldn’t speak. The little prince hushed him, and when Tom pulled him fully against his chest he wrapped his arms around Tom’s neck, pulled Tom’s head to the crook of his shoulder, and let his tears gather there. The prince didn’t feel solid enough. Tom thought that at any moment he might turn into mist.

The little prince spoke softly into Tom’s ear. “It’s too small where I live to show you the exact star, but that will be better. My star will be one of the stars, so you’ll love all of them. When you look up at night, because I’m laughing on one of them, for you it will be as if all the stars are laughing!”

“This is a dream,” Tom said. “Tell me this is a dream.”

“It’ll be nice,” the little prince continued, and it was almost song. “I’ll be looking at the stars, too. Every star will be a well with a rusty pulley, every star will have water for me to drink and a tamed red fox. When you look up, you’ll have five-hundred million little bells; and I will have five-hundred million of you, Tom. All of the stars will look like you…”

“What’s your name?” Tom asked.

But the little prince didn’t answer, because by then he was weeping too. Their kiss tasted of saltwater and desperation and God, don’t go, you said you’d show me the world. You told me… You told me… You swore it… 

Tom remembered the fox; you risk tears if you let yourself be tamed.

Tom told the little prince he wouldn’t leave him, and he didn’t. He stayed there, holding the prince’s body against his chest even after it had gone motionless and slack. The prince’s body, his shell, did not grow colder, but rather lighter, more transparent as the night went on. Tom thought it felt like trying to hold onto a cloud. He didn’t let go, not even when his back began to cramp.

The first vestiges of sunlight burned away whatever was left of the prince, and Tom was left empty-armed and empty-hearted there. No emerald snakes; no little prince. The desert sky burned red, the sun burst from the skyline like the fires of hell and blazed. 

The sun was unkind to Tom. He could not understand where the prince’s body had gone. He wanted to lie down there, with the sun beating down cruelly and the last remnants of his prince in the air. The sunrise seemed to last hours.

“You know,” the prince responded finally, “when you’re feeling very sad, sunsets are wonderful.”

“And on the day of forty-four times, were you feeling very sad?”

But the little prince did not answer.

✩ ☆ ✩

The prince had been right. Later, when Tom returned to his plane, the final repairs needed seemed clear as day, and it took him no more than forty-eight hours to return his plane to flying condition and escape. It took him another twenty-four to convince himself to leave.

His drawings were gone. The little prince had taken them with him, the little sheep and his crate. 

Everyone at the Academy was very glad to see Tom alive. He was deeply sad in a way he’d never thought himself capable of being, and he told them all he was very tired and required time away to recover from the entire ordeal. Before he left the Academy he bought his plane because he couldn’t bear the thought of another flying it, touching the metal that he and the little prince slept beneath, that the prince’s starlight had touched.

Tom tried to go on. He half convinced himself that none of it had been real, that he’d only thought the little prince up in his half-starved, dehydrated state. There was no body, after all, although the prince told him there would be. No one else in the world had known him, and for all his trouble he could never find the rose garden by the apple tree with the fox or the railway station with the switchman. The little prince left nothing behind, no physical mark or object Tom could hold in his palm as proof of the prince’s existence, but he remembered the rose garden and the taste of apples on his prince’s lips, clear as anything.

Tom understood quite well that he might have gone mad. He was a reasonable man.

But when they asked him, “How did you survive for three weeks in the Sahara on only twelve days worth of water?” Tom could give no reasonable answer.

Tom remembered, much later, that he’d never drawn the prince a muzzle or a fence for his flower and spent nights agonizing over the small mistake. Most nights he assured himself that his little prince was a cautious man. He put his rose under glass, he kept his sheep inside his crate, he let him snack on the baobabs. On those nights all of the stars laughed.

Other nights Tom agonized over how fickle minds can be. One slip-up, one night that the little prince might have forgotten, and his flower could be gone in seconds. On those nights every one of the stars wept.

It was both a gift and a curse, what the prince had given him. A sky full of tinkling bells or a sky full of sorrow, and always an Earth full of the absence of him.

Tom did try to go on.

He never truly succeeded in convincing himself that the little prince wasn’t real.

In a drawer on his bedside table was a sun-worn pad of paper with several pages torn out and unaccounted for, and on the front cover Tom had scrawled a line of coordinates.

✩ ☆ ✩

Five years passed before Tom returned to the Sahara Desert. In all that time he could not even bring himself to fly over it.

This time Tom didn’t crash the plane.

After landing he walked for hours through sand until he found a well, and with the rope and bucket he pulled up water to drink and listened to the pulley sing. 

He sat against the wall and watched the sun set. The stars appeared in full force, the sky clear as anything, and Tom listened to the tinkling of bells. Tonight the stars were laughing. Tom thought that perhaps the little prince knew.

Curiously, despite five years passing between when Tom and the prince had first found it and then, the stone wall and the rusted pulley looked exactly the same. Not a single stone had fallen; the pulley sang at the exact same pitch.

Later he stood and walked again. So vivid was his memory of that final night that he knew exactly which direction to walk and for exactly what distance. If he squinted his eyes and peered very closely into the distance he could almost make out the memory of him—his fluttering scarf, his bowed body.

When the snake came he coiled around Tom’s ankle as easily as Nagini, as easily as a creature tamed. There was no need for Tom to provoke him. He wasn’t a cruel creature, after all; he worked in the business of mercy.

“What makes a desert beautiful,” Tom told him sincerely, “is that it hides a well somewhere.”

A flash of green.

It hurt. Of course it did.

Tom fell the way a tree falls.

✩ ☆ ✩

Here, then, is a great mystery. For you who also love the little prince, and for me, nothing in the universe can be the same if somewhere, we do not know where, a sheep that we never saw has—yes or no—eaten a rose… 

Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves: is it yes or no? Has the sheep eaten the flower? And you will see how everything changes… 

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “The Little Prince”