uly sauced, was supposed to be more dignified than this. He knows it was. He’s just sure.

“Zabini,” Harry says, instead of this. “Right? Blaise Zabini, from school?”

Zabini nods, looking pleased. “And you’re Harry Potter, of course. I don’t think we ever ran across each other much at Hogwarts; I’m surprised you remember me.”

“Ha!” says Harry.

“Pardon?” says Zabini, cocking his head to one side.

“Er,” says Harry, and tries frantically toe up with something to say that isn’t, ‘Of course I don’t remember you, I know we went to school together and all but I’m pretty sure that I’ve never actually laid eyes on you before now, I just recognized your voice from when I was secreted away on Malfoy’s second floor landing yesterday, listening to you ask him if he was keeping me as his prisoner. Nothing weird or unprofessional about that, right?’ He’d settle for almost anything else.

His mind, unhelpfully, spits back nothing but an image of a bottle of Firewhiskey with a sign sticking out of the top that reads, “Careful, I bite!” So, y’know. Hooray. For that.

“'M…quite drunk,” Harry admits, because it seems the better part of valor in this moment and, also, because it’s true.

Zabini looks amused. “You shock me, Mr. Potter.”

“God, Harry, please,” says Harry, waving a hand. “I hate when people call me Mr. Potter, it makes it sound like I’m somebody who knows, you know. When the times are…ing.”

“I’ll…take your word for that,” says Zabini slowly. “And it’s Blaise, if it’s Harry.”

“Blaise!” Harry declares, drawing himself up to his full height—which is still about three inches shorter than Blaise’s—and clapping him, hard, on the shoulder. “Great talk. I’m going to go outside and vomit in a bush now.”

And then, a man of his word, he does so.

When he straightens, head swimming, and stumbles back a few steps, a hand lands between his shoulder blades and stops him from overbalancing. Harry turns expecting Ron but it’s—Blaise Zabini, again, and wearing a wry expression this time.

“Are you like,” Harry says, and grimaces, trying to remember the word. Fellow… fallow…“Following me?”

Blaise makes a face and then mutters something Harry can’t quite hear, but which sounds like it might be, “Merlin help me.” Then he smiles at Harry, which is friendly. “No, Harry, but what a perfectly salient question. I am not following you. I just happened to be walking into the bar, and you just happened to be walking out of it, and as luck would have it I was, actually, hoping to have a brief chat with you. And as we seem to have met so fortuitously—if you have moment?”

He gestures over to a nearby bench, which is at least a) not the bar and b) quiet and c) not the bar, and where he clearly means for Harry to go and sit.

“Er,” says Harry. “I mean, sure? I s’pose? if you don’t mind. Uh. That I probably won’t remember. Tomorrow.”

“That might be better for everyone,” says Blaise.

Cryptic bastards, these Slytherins. No truck for it at all.

Blaise steers Harry over to the bench and then sits down on it next to him, his whole body angled towards Harry. For a horrified second Harry thinks that it’s ae-on—which, hey, not that Blaise isn’t a bit of all right, but it’s not like Harry can go around sleeping with Malfoy’s friends. That’d be…weird.

It’s just for a second, anyway, because before Harry has the chance to really spiral deep into awkward, sweaty, drunken panic, Blaise says: “So. How are things going with Malfoy?”

Harry freezes, one hand that he was planning on using to scratch his nose hanging stupidly in mid-air for too long before he notices and drops it. “With,” he says, and stops. “What’re you saying about?”

“The case,” Blaise pushes. “And, you know, Malfoy, in general. How does he seem? If you had to rate his sanity on a scale of one to ten, just for example, where do you think you’d place the marker?”

“Er,” says Harry, “which end’s the mad one?” Then he thinks for a second and squints at Blaise, adds, “Hey, wait. Wouldn’t—er—wouldn’t you know better than I would?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you,” Blaise says, and settles back against the bench, nodding thoughtfully. “You’re very astute, Harry Potter, I’m sure people appreciate that about you. The strange thing, though—and stay with me now—is that Draco’s apletely barmy little terror who never tells me when something is wrong. I mean, for Merlin’s sake, I had to find out about the break-in through my channels—”

“What channels?” says Harry, or at least the little part of Harry that is an Auror every second of every day, even when he’s in the shower or asleep.

“What perfectly absurd rot are you talking? Who said channels? You should have yourself checked for head trauma, you know, Auroring is a dangerous job,” says Blaise, honey-smooth. “And of course we’re all so grateful for what you do, it’s really an inspiration, I donate to the department every year. My point is, I would like to know if you suspect Draco to be in any actual danger. You know. As a talented, qualified professional, whose opinion I implicitly trust to make me feel safe.”

“Sorry, 'm sorry, but d’you mean to tell me that this,” Harry says, gesturing between the two of them and making an incredulous face, “is a professional conversation right now?” And then, in a contribution from his tiny hard-wired Auror brain that has been yelling CONSTANT VIGILANCE for several minutes, adds, “Wait, is that why you’re being all— with the like—very weird—flattery? And the thing with the donations, god, that’s like. Wow, mate. Really the very wrong way to go there. Barking up the wrong…er. Thing…with the leaves.”

Blaise stares at him for a long moment, face scrawled over with almostical dismay; Harry resists the urge to snicker, fails, and hides it badly behind his hand. Blaise’s eyes widen, and then he puts a hand to his temples and lets out a snicker of his own.

“Merlin’s saggy balls, I see it. Not for myself, of course, but for him,” Blaise stops, drops his hand, looks at Harry again, and lets out a huge peal of laughter, tipping his head back. It takes almost half a minute before collects himself enough to say, “Oh, it all makes perfect sense. God, if only I could go back in time and tell myself years ago, it all could have been so much funnier.”

“What’re you talking about?” Harry says, squinting at him. Did he lose his glasses? He feels like he’s squinting a lot.

“Nothing, you imagined it,” Blaise says, tone abruptly switching back to neutral pleasantness, and sweeps right on to: “Look, Potter—”

“Don’t call me Potter,” Harry mutters. He’s tired; his eyes are drooping. “Only Malfoy calls me Potter.”

“I want you to know I literally couldn’t make this up,” Blaise tells him earnestly. He pulls a notebook out of his breast pocket, rips out a page, and writes something on it. Then he holds the little piece of paper up in front of Harry’s face. “Harry? Yes? Hello? Okay, this is my address. I’m going to stick it in your wallet and if Malfoy is ever in danger, or doing something really, really mental, you Owl me, all right?”

“I already told you,” Harry says, grumpy, eyes falling shut again already, barely slitted when he says, “'m not going to remember anything tomorrow.”

“I think I’m sort of operating on the same principle as hypnosis at the moment,” Blaise says, sounding thoughtful. “You know, the theory that you’re so far gone that I’m actually tapping into your subconscious mind just by sitting here saying things at you. It’s a bit of a flier, I’ll admit, but I’m hopeful it might work out.”

“Sure,” Harry says. “You do that.” He closes his eyes.

Harry’s dreaming of the war.

It doesn’t happen very often anymore, rarely enough that usually, these days, when he finds himself in the tent in the Forest of Dean or walking Bathilda Bagshot’s halls, he knows that he’s dreaming. The knowledge never seems to be quite enough to change anything—he still has to sit and watch it all play out—but it’s be a strange sort offort, that he knows the ending. That he can't affect it either way.

Tonight he’s at Grimmauld Place, back when it was Grimmauld Place, Sirius’s ill- favored childhood home and not the airy, open museum Malfoy’s seen fit to turn it into. There is dust on every surface, the walls are grey, and in a minute Remus is going to walk through the door and Harry is going to say vicious, horrible things to him. That’s what happens here. That’s how this part goes. Remus wille, and Harry will say those things, those things that will be some of the last things he ever says to Remus; those things that will haunt him for years. It will hurt, and then he’ll wake up and it will still hurt, but at least it’ll be over. There’s nothing unpredictable about any of it anymore.

Except:

“Potter,” a voice says. Harry turns away from the door and sees—Malfoy, in a chair at this same table, in this same room, except it’s…later. Except it’s now, all at once, the space around Malfoy folding seamlessly into clean lines and polished counters, the only dust visible the motes falling through sunbeams and catching the light.

“Potter,” Malfoy says, head tilting curiously. “Where are you?”

Harry blinks at him, stunned. Maybe he’s not dreaming—but he must be. The real Malfoy wouldn’t be asking him such an uncannily perceptive question. Would he? Harry’s not sure, suddenly, and when he tries to open his mouth to give his answer he finds he can’t remember how to vocalize it. He’s…here, he thinks, and not here. Here, and where here used to be.

He can hear his heartbeat, strange and too loud in his ears, a furious thump-thump- thump.

“Potter,” Malfoy says. He scrapes his chair back from the table, stands up, and walks over to Harry, stoops to lean over him. Harry looks up with wide eyes, wondering what in the hell is happening and frozen with these words, too, trapped in his mouth. He just sits there, the thump of his heart growing louder, as Malfoy’s face gets closer and closer until it’s barely an inch away—until he can see little flecks of gold and blue in t

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