Only Time

Chapter One

Who can say when the roads meet,

That love might be in your heart

And who can say when the day sleeps

If the night keeps all your heart

Night keeps all your heart

Who can say if your love grows

As your heart chose

Only time

~Enya, Only Time

Trust yourself to know when you've grieved enough.

Time. As much as you need, as long as it's not too much.

They've said their pieces, really. There's nothing left to work out.

Harry is here because he's done grieving.

Scott welcomes him because he's done grieving.

It's enough. They don't have to say anything.

They settle into the Blackbird and take flight, and Harry perches on the arm of Scott's chair—first as a blackbird (for irony's sake), then a raven, then a kestrel, then a black cat, then a moon-faced barn owl, and finally settles as a Greater Bird-of-Paradise, like the ones he had seen New Guinea as he passed through. The shape amuses him, makes him think of Fawkes and his beautiful plumage, and it seems to amuse Scott as well, because whenever he doesn't have his hands on the controls, he finds some excuse to run his fingers over Harry's feathers, ghost a touch across his silver-yellow head, down his russet-maroon body, and over the yellow, white, and violet tail feathers.

Harry is happy just to enjoy the touch (warm, and gentle, and really everything he's been missing for the last year—or longer). He keeps the form, because for all he's been doing well, Scott is hardly the only one around him. The rest are strangers, and while he can deal with that, they are also held close by the cramped interior, which is something Harry cannot deal with. Being an animal makes it seem easier, though, makes it simpler to push through the panic that rises at the thought of closed spaces and the inevitable correlation to the coffins they placed in the ground. The friends who were buried, and shouldn't have been.

He distracts himself, though, watching Scott and the other man interact.

He's scruffy, and smells weird, and drops down into the copilot's chair but makes no move to help fly, and Scott sighs wearily at him but doesn't make him leave. Harry lets his feathers bristle just a little bit, because he thinks that Scott is probably a fair judge of character, and everything about him right now is screaming "Put me out of my misery."

Harry's not about to oblige him, but if the scruffy man makes one wrong move, Harry won't have any compunctions about jumping in.

"So, Slim." The scruffy man swivels his char to stare intently at Scott, his cigar hanging unlit from the corner of his mouth. Scott looks at him, one eyebrow raised in silent question, and then turns back to his work.

"Yes, Logan?"

"I've been thinking—"

"That never ends well."

Logan looks like he can't decide whether to flip him off or laugh. He settles with a somewhat amused, somewhat derisive snort and plows onward.

"So, Slim, there somethin' goin' on with you an' the bird?"

Harry gives him the look that question deserves. It would probably be more effective if he weren't only a little bigger than the man's hand, but he's not about to waste a transformation on telling off the would-be lumberjack.

Again.

He's not a bird, damn it.

Scott seems to have similar feelings. He stares at Logan for a moment, then shakes his head with something like pity or disgust or a combination of the two and starts them on their descent. Behind him, the white-haired woman smothers a chuckle, and the blond boy winces.

Were they visible, Harry is fairly certain that Scott's eyes would be rolling.

The Blackbird sinks down below the basketball court, which closes over them, and Harry shifts again—a russet fox this time, as red as Ron's hair—jumping down from the arm of the chair and picking his way towards the doors. Scott follows quickly, as though they're joined by an invisible rope, and as soon as they're on the ground in the hangar, Harry lets the changes fade away.

Scott smiles at him, and though Harry can't see his eyes, his face is warm.

"Staying for a while?" he asks, as though the answer isn't already obvious.

Harry, too, responds as though it isn't. "A while," he agrees, and it really does sound like "forever."

Scott holds out a hand, and Harry takes it, and they walk into the school as though they are a single entity.

Harry's somehow rather sure they are.

It's so astonishingly simple. They're strangers, and then they're acquaintances, and then they're friends, and then they're more. Like climbing down a ladder in the dark, one more step, one more change, obvious and there and clear even when it's invisible. Scott's not sure it's ever been like this before, for anyone, ever, and he finds himself a little bit in awe of it.

When they get to the school, Scott goes to report to the Professor, and Harry comes with him. He smiles at Xavier, as though they're sharing a secret, and the Professor smiles back just a little, eyes kind.

There's no mention of it made, no formal announcement, but Harry stays.

He's just…there. When Scott wakes up in the morning, Harry is right where he was the night before, curled against Scott like a drowning man clings to a lifesaver. Nothing's happened between them yet, barely more than a few chaste kisses here and there. Still, in Scott's mind it's already a permanent thing, like the sun rising and the earth spinning and Logan being an asshole. Were they normal, were it legal, Scott would already be going to one knee and promising forever.

He gets the feeling that Harry wouldn't say no.

Harry murmurs something in his dreams, and Scott—usually up before dawn, completing his daily training, eating a good breakfast and bucking down on work—can't bring himself to crawl out of bed. Not if it means leaving Harry and the warmth that surrounds him and the smell of pine that clings to him, as though he's brought a piece of Alaska with him.

It's different than it was with Jean, even more so in the fact that he has no idea what "it" is. Love, he wants to say, but too much, too soon. Lust, he wants to say, but that's not right either. Connection, he wants to say, but that's too little, too late.

This is something else now, and even if it doesn't have a name, it has him, and Harry, and that's enough to make it complete.

They need no words, no anything, and Scott can only think of one thing to encompass them.

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Scott's previous world has ended, and he did not even hear it fade.

He mourns for it, just a little, but he's happy, too.

A new world waits.

He wraps his arms a little tighter around Harry and lets the day pass them by. It's Sunday, the sky is bright with sunshine, and Scott is content.

Not with a bang but a whimper.

One world is gone, but there are so many more stretching out before them.

"You and Slim, huh? How's that work? Does he pull that massive stick out of his ass when you're screwing?"

Harry wants to be mortified. He wants to turn beet-red and glare at Logan with all the ire that wounded dignity and pride can afford him.

He wants to, but unfortunately questions like these have become so commonplace that he barely raises an eyebrow. His gaze never wavers from his book on the rituals of Mithraism and their contrast with those of other Persian-based religions exported to Rome.

Merlin. He's worse than Hermione, really.

"Oh, gross." Bobby—Iceman—turns on his heel and marches right back out of the kitchen. "That's disgusting, Wolverine. Why do you want to know that? God, I'm scarred for life!"

Logan snorts and pours himself a cup of coffee that seems more like a small bucket, and keeps his gaze on Harry. "So?"

Harry lifts his head long enough to give him a flat look and says, "So this is the girl's dorm now, is it? We'll talk about our sex lives, discuss our feelings and all that? Maybe when we're done we can braid each other's hair."

The grin he gets in response is feral, with far too many teeth to be as harmless as Logan probably wants it to look. "Hey, Princess, if you're gunnin' for a sleepover, you'll have to go to your boy toy for that. I don't swing that way."

In all actuality, neither does Harry. He really thinks he's more asexual than anything. What he has with Scott…well, that's more of a Scott-and-Harry thing than a gay-or-straight thing.

For love is love, no matter whence it comes or in what form.

That, Harry thinks, smiling into his cup of tea, is one proverb the Portuguese got very, very right.

And this form, what he has with Scott, is something special. He knows that in the same way he knows air is for breathing and water is not, or that lightning is attracted to metal and Dumbledore was a good man. Simply knowing Scott leaves him at ease. There have been no more panic attacks when he spends his days around the professor, no more nightmares where he wakes screaming so long as he passes the night curled close in Scott's warm bed.

Logan's still watching him, but Harry, feeling at peace with the world and rather generous, goes back to his book and takes a sip of Earl Grey. There's a bit of wickedness in his smile, when it comes.

His father was a Marauder, after all.

"Yes, Scott and I," he answers, thinking of the original question. "For your information, it works quite well, and in regards to the stick, I wouldn't know." He flashes a bland smile at Logan, collects his book and tea, and stands. "Scott's not the one taking it up the arse, mate. And with his size, I'm not about to ask him. Hung like a horse, he is. Bottoming's really quite fun. You should try it sometime, Wolverine, but with your own boy toy, rather than mine."

The sound of choking comes from two directions at once. Harry casts another bland look at Logan, a kind smile at his lover, and strides calmly out the door.

Scott and Logan stare at each other in mute horror. There are no words, not in all the languages on Earth, and Scott buries his face in his hands with a groan.

Mortification. That's all that he can feel.

It's little consolation that Logan seems to be feeling the same.

After several long moments, Logan clears his throat and tries for a joke. "Hey, forget it, Slim. Someday we'll all—"

"Look back on this, cringe in horror, and shoot whoever brought it up?"

"Yeah, I'll go with that."

Scott recovers, eventually. After a while he and Logan even manage to meet each other's eyes. Harry just smiles at them whenever they're in a room together, like a private joke—and Scott's rather certain that he doesn't want to get it.

But Harry smiling is good, and Scott thinks he'll suffer any embarrassment if it keeps that expression on his face.

There's no doubt now, if there ever was. Harry whispers the words to him as they walk to Scott's next class, sweet and smiling, and somehow, Scott couldn't imagine a more perfect setting.

"I love you."

It's ridiculously easy for him to whisper it back.

"I love you, too."

Simple words really are the best.

Some souls are made broken, and the pieces have to find each other before they can be whole. They're the ones who are fated, born for each other and no one else; the ones fate can't seem to touch.

Other souls break in the process of living, and must find another who is similarly broken before they can even think of becoming whole again. It's a change of fate, for them, to find the one person whose jagged cracks and flat lines even somewhat complement their own, and they seem to re-break easily, even after they've come together.

Then there are the rare, rare souls who are not born to complement another, who break. And when they break, when their edges shatter from the blunt trauma of simply living, they just happen to break in the exact way that complements someone else perfectly, as though they were born for each other from the very beginning.

The last are the ones who truly withstand fate, in all its guises.

Scott and Harry are the third, edges lining up even though they were not fated to, bodies fitting together so perfectly that there is not an inch of contention between them. They have their differences, of course, and their arguments, but no matter what happens, none of their edges crack. None of their lines bend. They remain for each other, of each other, a pair and a partnership and bonded through everything.

They never say "soul mates," because that implies something more than chance, something very much like destiny, and they've both had far too much of that in their lives. No, their meeting, their encounter was nothing more than happenstance, despite cliché titles and facetious remarks from those who see them together.

It's absolutely ridiculous, when Harry really considers it. Out of all the seven billion people in the world—and counting—he and Scott managed to find each other. They gave each other time, and they healed, and they healed each other in way they could have never managed alone.

Harry thinks about the lake and how close Scott was to walking to his death, how close he himself came to being killed by Voldemort so many times, and knows that if there were ever miracles in this strange, beautiful, achingly imperfect world, he's found one.

Scott wanders into their room, carrying a cup of coffee, his hair sleepily tousled, and he smiles at Harry through the rising steam from his mug.

Harry returns the smile, and goes to kiss his miracle.

.

~.*.~

And that, as they say, is that.

~.*.~

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