Author's note: As much as I love living in fluffy worlds where bad things don't happen, sometimes HP fanfic writers forget how homophobic and transphobic the timeline was when our favourite characters were up and at it. Hence, this. Also don't mind the canon timeline here, I aged up Theo and Blaise for my purposes and that's that on that. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns the canon, world, and characters portrayed below and you can tell I'm not J.K. Rowling because #transrights

Content Warnings: Homophobia and heteronormativity; anxiety about coming out

I Especially Am Slow

Yours was the first face that I saw

I think I was blind before I met you

And I don't know where I am, I don't know where I've been

But I know where I want to go

And so I thought I'd let you know

Yeah, these things take forever, I especially am slow

But I realized that I need you

And I wondered if I could come home

-First Day of My Life, Bright Eyes

It took Blaise a second to realize why Theo was trailing behind as they made their way back to the Slytherin Common Room, eager to get there and squeeze in some, well, extracurriculars before the other three boys came back. Quidditch practises had been cancelled all week, so Draco, Greg, and Vince had been lurking. Blaise and Theo hadn't been able to have any time alone because of it, and it was starting to make Theo moody—Blaise could tell.

He followed Blaise's gaze to a pair sitting in the Great Hall, which was just crowded with panicked students cramming. The seventh and fifth years were especially a mess, with their OWLs and NEWTs coming up, but Theo's blue eyes had zeroed-in on a specific pair of students—Oliver Wood, the Gryffindor team captain, and their obnoxious prefect, who had become everyone's obnoxious Head Boy, Percy Weasley. They were studying together with Percy perched on Oliver's lap as they went over flashcards together. The hall was too noisy and Blaise was too far away to hear what they'd been saying but he had a feeling that whenever Oliver got the answer right, Percy would kiss his forehead before flipping to the next card in their pack and starting all over again. Eventually, Oliver got a wrong answer and Percy shook his head before returning the flashcard to the deck so that it would come up in their rotation later. Oliver protested the lack of a kiss (Blaise knew the sight of someone being clingy and needy) and while Percy stuck to his guns at first, eventually Oliver started tickling his ribs and he started howling. He must have cried mercy or something, because Oliver stopped with a satisfied look on his face—as if Gryffindor had just gotten a penalty shot or something—and Percy kissed his nose.

Blaise's eyes flitted back to Theo. He was a romantic at heart; he cried when he read those cheap paperback books sold on racks at the entrance of Flourish and Blotts, and loved to see wedding announcements in the paper while Blaise skimmed through literally any other section but that. But Theo's face didn't look quite as mushy as it did when he heard a good story or, if there was extra magic or something in the air, Blaise managed to say something sweet and romantic himself. There was longing in his eyes, and it was sad. It ached; Blaise felt it in the bottom of his stomach because he and Theo so often thought and felt the same thing. That was one of the luckiest things in Blaise's life, after all.

"Hey," Blaise said, tugging at Theo's uniform sleeve since taking his hand would have been too obvious. "Come on."

"Right, sorry," Theo said. He shook himself out of it, and the brown curls around his face spun as he did.

They made their way back to the Common Room without touching and made their way back to the dormitory quickly enough. Usually, Blaise was in a rush to pop the top few buttons of his uniform shirt to throw it all off as quickly as possible (especially on a week like this where their luck had been as bad as it had been) but he could tell that Theo wasn't in the mood from the slowness of his steps and the mindfulness taking over his eyes.

So, Blaise contented himself with shrugging off the robe over his uniform and popping the sleeves at his shirt's cuffs. He untucked it from his pants as he watched Theo who was usually eager to slip out of his binder at the end of the day, when he felt safe and sound in the Common Room, but who was currently sitting on his bed and leaning against one of the oak bed posts. His curls covered his eyes, partially, but Blaise could tell he was thinking of something.

"Is everything alright?" he asked, trying to sound nonchalant and approachable.

"Weasley and Wood are cute together," Theo said.

"I suppose," Blaise said.

"Everyone says so," Theo said.

"That's true," Blaise admitted because it was. It had been all the school could talk about for weeks after they had first come back from Hogsmeade holding hands—even in the Slytherin Common Room, which had driven Draco insane. "What about it, Theo?"

"Nobody seems to care that they're both boys," Theo said quietly before looking up at Blaise with a bit more daring in his eyes, as if he was challenging him to say something different. When in fact… Well, Blaise knew that some people disapproved, but they were quiet about it. And wasn't that the worst part? That people were so quiet about the things you tried to look out for, so that it was impossible to get your bearings…

"I don't know if that's true," he said carefully.

"If I had said something to them just then, in front of everybody at the Great Hall, do you really think that everyone would have just let that happen?" Theo asked. "Do you really think that I wouldn't have had ten Gryffindor wands, and maybe some Hufflepuffs, on me immediately? Even from our own House, do you really think Daphne Greengrass wouldn't have kicked my ass?"

"I don't know, Theo," Blaise said.

"That can't be your answer to everything," Theo said.

"I said I don't know," Blaise repeated, the snap of his voice as harsh as a shut door—like it always was when he was trying to get out of a conversation. He immediately realized that that wasn't fair to Theo and tried to throw more words on the pile. "People don't behave the way you expect them. They only like certain things in certain contexts, they let others get away with things that you can't, they celebrate some people for doing some things and let others struggle alone, they… it's complicated."

"I know it's complicated, but still," Theo said. "Is it… is it really that much better not to know?"

"Yes," Blaise said. He started unbuttoning his shirt now to give himself something to do, his fingers almost moving too fast to catch his buttons properly.

"Really?" Theo asked, standing up.

"You haven't been in the Pureblood world for a long time, Theo, you don't know what it's like now," Blaise said.

"I haven't been in the Pureblood world since I transitioned," Theo corrected Blaise with a slap like a clap of thunder—so loud and clear in its displeasure that it put Blaise's slammed door to shame and blew it wide open, making it obvious that this was a conversation that they would finish one way or another. "Because my dad rightfully decided that his son did not need to be exposed to purebloods and Sacred whatevers and all the little comments he gets about whatever it is these people think my life means."

Blaise froze. A thousand things he'd overheard at family reunions or been told straight up came to mind like a restless wind. The way adults would talk about his mother's serial marriages and wonder how Blaise would grow up to be a strong man without a healthy male role model. Old gossip about how Sirius Black hadn't been much of a loss to his family anyways, since he wouldn't have continued the bloodline, and how much worse that had made the Blacks's loss when poor Regulus had died—no wonder it had killed Orion too. His mother, when she'd had a few too many drinks of wine in-between husbands, telling him that men weren't worth the trouble and thank goodness he would never have to deal with them because she hadn't had a daughter. There were so many other things, Blaise couldn't remember them. It would be like keeping track of papercuts. You knew they had happened to you, maybe you even felt a recent one on your fingertips, but there were too many to tell anything more than the fact that they had drawn blood.

"That's different," he said quietly.

"Is it?" Theo said. "The first time my dad let me walk around the house in boys' clothes, I felt like it was the first day of my life. It's weird, to remember your own birthday, but that's what coming up is. You get to be there for yourself. Do you really think you wouldn't be happier, if you got to watch yourself be born too?"

"I don't know," Blaise said quietly. "Not as surely as I know that what we have right now is safe, Theo, and I like us being safe. Did it occur to you that that was all I wanted?"

"Did it occur to you that I don't want to be safe, I want to be happy, and that's why you have the person that I am in the first place?" Theo asked, crossing his arms.

Blaise took a shaky, panicked breath.

"Please don't leave me," Blaise said.

Theo's shoulders collapsed.

"What?"

"Please don't leave me," Blaise repeated just as shakily. "I—I know I'm slow, but I'm going to work on it. I'm going to—eventually I'll come out, I'll do it, I'll—"

"No, no," Theo said. "No, that came out wrong, that… oh, Blaise…"

Theo climbed over a bed to get to Blaise faster, and wrap him in his arms. Blaise took in the smell of his soap and aftershave the same way you would grab a biscuit off the dessert tray before it was carried out of the room, but Theo stood still and stayed put.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said quietly. "And I'm not going to make you come out. I shouldn't have said it like that. It wouldn't be right to do that. You need to do it when you're ready, when you want to, but I just… seeing Weasley and Wood just hit differently today. I want what they have. I want to hold hands without having to worry about being seen, I want to kiss you without having to make sure I'm hiding how much I love you at the same time. That's all."

Blaise's hands curled into Theo's shirt, despite his promises to stay as he was and as they were. He took a deep breath.

"I… I haven't done what you've done. I haven't been brave enough yet," Blaise said.

"It's got nothing to do with bravery," Theo said. "It's not cowardice, keeping you in the closet. It's self-preservation. It's valid fears and anxieties. I get it, Blaise. I understand those things."

Self-preservant. That's what the Sorting Hat had told Blaise before shipping him off to Slytherin. At the time, Blaise had been eleven and cocky and annoyed that a sad-looking hat had apparently decided it knew him inside out—but maybe it had been right after all. Blaise had kept himself safe for now, but when would he be doing more harm than good? When would his life stop being good enough to postpone the first day of his real life, as Theo put it? What would it take? And if Blaise wasn't brave enough now, with Theo at his side, would he ever be?

"I'm sorry," Theo said. "I had a lot of feelings going on, and I got defensive."

"I made you defensive, I'm sorry," Blaise said. "I… I love you, you know, I really do. Even when I'm like this, even when I'm scared. It's not about you at all, please know that."

Theo's arms stiffened around Blaise and he pulled away to look down at Blaise, eyebrows high above his forget-me-not blue eyes.

"You… you love me?" Theo asked. "Did you really just say that?"

"I did," Blaise said in realization, since there was no point in lying.

Theo cupped his cheek and smiled.

"Remind me of that if I ever seem pushy ever again," he said.

"Okay," Blaise smiled. He reached up to cup Theo's cheek too. "Can I remind you before?"

"Of course," Theo said.

Blaise nodded, feeling the ground stilling under his feet as they softened again.

"I can't give you what Percy and Oliver have, not… not right now, anyways," Blaise said. "But we could sit on my bed and you could sit on my lap, if you want. And I promise I'll kiss you a lot while you read."

"That can teach me some patience," Theo said. So, they settled in quietly and slowly, pulling Theo's blanket off his bed so that they could bundle up properly. It was while Theo was leaning against Blaise's chest that he whispered "I love you too" back.

WC: 2165