It takes a long time, after the Return (the Return and Before – they go together), for things to even begin to normalise between them. There are nightmares and fights, lingering tensions after so many years apart and so many misunderstandings, festered like untreated wounds, weeping still.
But yet, it does normalise, somehow. There are late mornings and early mornings, kisses and quiet missions, him left alone, confined to this house. And their friendship glows into what it had been for so long Before, a foundation to build on. There has always been so much between them – words left unsaid, actions unfulfilled and now the weight of thirteen years thinking him a murderer. (Not his fault, of course. Can't pawn it off on anyone. It was everyone at fault, everyone who thought him a traitor and didn't acknowledge that there could be any other explanation. Though of course there was.) And yet, in spite of so much history and agony, something more is able to grow back through the cracks, so that one night, a year after the truth becomes known, they tumble into bed again, tasting of whiskey and chocolate, and the pain which they've each kept pent up for so long.
Afterwards, it is still, the old house settling around them, falling back into place as if their activities had disturbed it. They lie tangled in each other, fingers intertwined and sheets gathered around their legs, bodies pressed close for warmth, security of another person. (Was he always so gaunt before? No. That's a new development, result of the last terrible decade and the rest.)
It's intimacy that they each crave now more than anything – familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. There was little time for such intimacy before once they'd left school – there's little time for it now, too, but now there is a sense of claustrophobia, of this all gradually moving towards some sort of an end, and so they make time for such intimacy and gentleness, for fingers played across skin, heads pillowed on chests and lips on foreheads.
They know the end is coming, try as they may to deny it. Yet, in the midst of so much else, they cling to this, to what they still have. A microcosm of reasonable normalcy.