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“Take my jacket, it’s cold outside.”
he says it on their way to Hogsmeade on a December afternoon, the cold biting at their skin, turning the words to mist as they’re released into the air. The other boy has, of course, forgotten his own and is shivering from head to toe. He then realises it might be weird because even though they’ve traveled through time together offering your jacket is a very boyfriend thing to do and he is, of course, not Albus Potter’s boyfriend. “Unless, of course, you — uh — don’t want it.”
The other boy looks like he’s about to protest, but changes his mind with a gust of wind and gratefully takes the jacket, pulling it on with a small smile on his face.
Now he has no jacket and is bitterly cold, but he finds he doesn’t mind at all.
—
“It’s okay, I couldn’t sleep anyway.”
it’s a white lie he tells when Albus wakes him up in the middle of the night, gasping for air and crying because he was having another nightmare about a world he didn’t exist in. Albus keeps apologising for waking him up, an endless chorus of “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry” but it doesn’t matter to him because, he realizes, he’s happy Albus thought to wake him, and there’s no one else he’d rather wake up to.
—
“One more chapter.”
he mumbles it when he’s sick, bundled in blankets because he feels chilly down to his very bones. He could go to Madam Pomfrey, but he’d much rather be here, where Albus has broken out a worn copy of Hogwarts, A History and is reading it to him, turning the pages with a careful reverence because he knows how much he loves this book. The other boy complains, messing up his dark hair and pointedly yawning, but he knows he’s joking.
He doesn’t know why he’s so determined that Albus stay by his side, but he never wants him to leave.
—
“I want you to be happy.”
he says it simply, as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world after Albus tells him he wants to join the Quidditch team but isn’t sure if he’s going to be good enough. He insists that he at least tries out though, because if there’s one thing Albus got from his dad it’s Quidditch genes. He’s seen him fly before, in the downtrodden garden of the Potter household, weaving around trees, green eyes bright with amusement. And if there’s one thing he knows, it’s that he’d give anything to make sure Albus was that happy.
—
“You’re important too.”
he shouts it, because he needs Albus to hear it. It’s the night of the Quidditch tryouts, but the other boy is in the hospital wing and detention. If he closes his eyes, he remembers the impact of fist on skin, of how Albus tried to take on a boy two feet taller than him because he called his sister a “son of a whore”. He remembers sitting on the same hard stool he’s sitting on now three hours ago, and listening to Albus go on and on about how he needed to keep Lily safe, and that she was important — and suddenly he can’t take it anymore.
After he shouts, everything goes quiet. All he can hear is the sound of players on the field yelling and the whistle blowing, signalling the end of the tryout.
“Results don’t have to be in until next week. I can talk to Zabini, have her get me another tryout.”
He raises his eyebrow. “You hate Zabini.”
Albus grimaces. “Yeah, well. You gotta take your punches. I think I’m done with that for a while, though.”
When silence falls between them again, the other boy clears his throat. “You know my parents need her right?”
His own voice cracks when he says, “but I need you.”
—
“I think you’re beautiful.”
he blurts it out when they’re trying on dress robes at the Potters’ house, enclosed by wooden walls, pictures in frames of the two of them on the mantle. Albus is wearing the old ones his dad wore 23 years earlier at the same school. He’s worried about it looking old, and him not looking good enough because as a Potter he needs to look acceptable. No matter how many times he reminds Albus that his dad’s hair wasn’t even fixed during his own ball, he won’t listen, and so he finally tells him what he thinks.
Because he is. From his hair to his eyes to the tips of his fingers and the bones in his body. He is, and he isn’t sure how he didn’t notice before.
He looks down at his hands folded across his own robes in the silence that follows, so that he can hear the crackling of fire in the hearth but can’t see it. Finally, he chances a look up and sees that the other boy has turned slightly red. Green eyes meet silver, and they both know.
But neither of them want to admit it.
—
“Can I have this dance?”
he asks it tentatively, because he isn’t quite used to the words in his mouth. He’s just asked Rose to the Christmas Ball, and surprisingly she agreed, albeit with a lot of eyerolling while he stuttered. Now, he’s worried because he has absolutely no clue how to dance and Albus, having had a younger sister, stepped in and taught him a quick routine.
“Just be glad you’re not doing this with Slughorn.” Albus quips. “Heard from my dad that they used to practice with their Heads of House.”
He’s about to take it again from the top, when the other boy stops him, grinning. “Hold up. Where’re your manners? You have to ask first.”
“Ask?”
“Uh, yeah.”
So he does, and Albus says yes, and they’re two boys slow dancing in an empty dormitory. He finds that he likes the way Albus’s hand fits around his back.
Later that week, he’s dressed in pale silver robes and he has to admit Rose looks rather nice in her deep red ones, but he can’t keep his eyes off the boy in bottle green. He knows it, and he knows Rose knows it too because she rolls her eyes and pushes him in his direction.
“What?”
“You’ve been staring at my cousin for the past hour we’ve been dancing. Looked like a bit of a prat really.”
“What about you?”
“Well, Lysander Scamander is looking fine tonight.”
“Not as good as Albus.” he says without thinking.
Rose raises her eyebrows. “I fucking knew it.”
So he goes to Albus and asks him the way he taught him, and he says yes again, and for two weeks after the halls are filled with whispers about the two boys slow dancing underneath the stars of the Great Hall.
—
“Can I kiss you?”
he says it all of a sudden on the Quidditch pitch, sun shining down on them both. Albus caught the Snitch and won the final match of the season against Ravenclaw, winning Slytherin House the Quidditch Cup for the first time in 2 years. A sea of green and silver cheers, the Hufflepuffs are waving banners in the air, and even the Gryffindors and Ravenclaws are clapping.
They come back to the ground and Albus is buried under the weight of six sweaty Quidditch players yelling and slapping his back. He’s waiting on the sidelines and when Albus somehow fights his way out of the pile, he’s the first thing he sees. Green and silver Quidditch robes billow around him as Albus pulls him to the centre of the pitch and he’s wrapped in a hug and even under all the salt and sweat he can still smell Albus, the smell of warmth and sunlight and everything good in the world wrapped into one.
When they pull away he asks him the question, his heart thudding in his chest, and Albus’s eyes crinkle as his face breaks out into the most beautiful smile he’s ever seen before he says he can, and there’s a huge swell of cheering for the Quidditch player kissing his best friend, both their hearts thumping the same rhythm.
—
“There’s enough room for both of us.”
he says it the night before their Transfiguration O.W.L., when Albus looks up at him in the empty common room with bleary eyes and says he’s too tired to walk to their dormitory. He looks around at the chairs stacked with essays and papers and moves over in his own chair and opens his arms. The other boy crawls into them and falls asleep immediately, a mess of dark hair covering his face. He stays up a little bit longer, looking at him with warmth spreading through his chest, before falling asleep.
The next morning Kreacher comes in to clean the room and pauses at the sight of the yellow-green light shining on the Potter boy and the Malfoy boy asleep, limbs tangled together. He shakes his head and mutters “Now, I’ve seen everything.” before going to wake them up.
—
“I love you.”
he whispers it in the middle of the night in front of the Great Lake on the event of the year after he’d almost lost Albus in it. They had nicked James’s invisibility cloak and had snuck out, laughing the whole time because they couldn’t wait to see James try to leave the dorms to snog his girlfriend without it.
They’re lying side by side on top of the cloak and multiple other blankets, fingers entwined, and looking up at the stars. They’d tried coming up with new constellations, and were planning to convince Professor Sinistra that they were real the next day.
Now, not even the Giant Squid was stirring, and he felt content. Peaceful. Happy. And so he told Albus the story of the boy who had sweets and the boy who stayed for them, how they had become friends, how they’d almost lost each other, how they’d saved the world, and how all of those events lead up to them lying here right now. And that’s when he said it, because for all the time he'd spent trying to deny it, he did.
The sun was starting to peek through the surface of the water when Albus squeezed his hand.
“Scorp?”
“Yeah, Albus?”
“I love you too.”