To Live is the Rarest Thing

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

“It’s been more than an hour since we arrived home,” Tom said as they carried their dirty dishes to the kitchen. “Yet the Polyjuice potion hasn’t worn off yet. How curious.”

“What?” Harry looked over his shoulders at Tom while getting the dishes going with a charm. “What Polyjuice potion?”

“Yours, obviously.” Tom leaned his hip against the kitchen counter, arms crossed as he offered Harry an amused smile. “You cannot possibly be my Harry.”

Harry blinked in confusion, wondering what the hell Tom was getting at but deciding to just play along. Knowing Tom, it was bound to be something interesting. “Well, you got me, pretending to be your soulmate and all. What gave me away?”

Tom swept an arm around the kitchen. “The distinct lack of dog. My soulmate would have at least three of the things barking around by now.”

Chuckling, Harry went back to charming the dishes dry. “Oh, I was tempted, babe, but since I had no clue what the future would bring and when it would bring it, I controlled my baser impulses.”

“Let me guess,” Tom said with a knowing curve of his brow. “You’re either volunteering at a local shelter at least once a week, or you’re walking a bunch of dogs for the neighbours. Or possibly both.”

“You don’t know that.” Harry levitated the last of the dishes inside the cabinet and turned to glare at Tom. “I’m feeling very attacked right now.”

“You’re entirely predictable, darling. So, which is it?”

“You don’t have to sound so smug. And it’s just two dogs for some neighbours who needed help.” Harry wasn’t pouting. He was not pouting at all.

“See, now I’m sure you’re my soulmate after all.” Tom stepped up to Harry and wound his arms around Harry’s waist, pulling him closer. Harry went willingly, pressing his face against Tom’s shoulder. “I’m glad we get to have a quiet life this time and we can be together without society keeping us apart,” Tom whispered against Harry’s ear.

They held each other, their arms tightening, just basking in the other standing so close. During their previous life, Harry’s life-sentence in prison had kept them apart, but the life before that they’d lived in 1700s Britain, both of them male. Harry had been given to the catholic church as a young boy to be educated as a priest, as was not uncommon in those days, especially with families who had more children that they could reasonably expect to feed. Harry had been the youngest son of 8 children in total. And Tom had been a teacher at Eton College, working his way up to headmaster eventually. They met when Harry, as a young priest, started work in the catholic church of Windsor, just across the river Thames from the small town of Eton.

While they’d maintained a very close friendship that lifetime, for obvious reasons they hadn’t been able to openly engage in any kind of intimate relationship. Other than some very quick hand or blowjobs during some stolen moments in either of their private quarters, their relationship had been mainly platonic, because it was suicide to try to change society at large.

Harry had learned over his many lifetimes, that while actively working to improve a society’s morals and customs was all well and good, one couldn’t enforce such changes before they were due without great cost and consequences. In other words, you had to make do with the customs and mores of the era you lived in, no matter how frustrating such things usually were.