Dear Harry,

Remus Flooed me earlier today in something of a conniption, and I felt a responsibility to pen this letter to you. While I appreciate your situation, Harry, and while I understand that in a time of such grief as this, you might wish to take some time to calm, I do beseech you to be safe.

With that in mind, however, I will not demand, as Remus requested I do, that you keep yourself confined to the safety of Sirius' apartment. Please, Harry, keep yourself attentive, and at all times keep your wand to hand, but I will tell you, now, that I have no objection to your traversing Muggle London. Ensure Remus and Sirius know where you are, as much as you feel you can reveal such things.

In the coming year, I fear life will make it difficult for you to relax. Voldemort is rising, and you will need strength for the year to come. Do what you need to do.

Yours,
Albus Dumbledore

Harry lets out a slow breath. He hadn't been holding his breath, not exactly, but for a few seconds he'd not really been breathing properly, frozen as he had been with anxiety, and now it all melts away. He closes his eyes, holding the letter in his right hand as he leans in, pressing his cheek against Hedwig's. She lets out a soft coo of sound, nipping affectionately at his ear.

"Thanks, Hedwig," Harry murmurs, and he sets the envelope on the bed. After a few moments pause, he steps out into the corridor. The apartment is absolutely silent - there's no radio, no breathing, nothing. Remus and Sirius have gone to meet with some of the Order, explains the note on the kitchen table - it's about doing rounds in some of the magical communities, and they're not including the Hogwarts students in the round-up because they're not fully trained yet.

Harry knows it'll probably grate on the twins, but the explanation makes complete sense to him.

Sprawling over the sofa in the living room, Harry takes a cigarette from the box, flicking a match to light and setting the tip of it aflame. He doesn't even smoke most of it - he just watches its soft glow: he should take up making potions over the summer. He wants to see something burn, and he might as well actually be making something as he does it.

"Is that a cigarette?" demands Sirius, and Harry turns his head. Sirius stands alone in the corridor: to answer him, Harry takes a slow, too-deep drag, and blows out a deliberate cloud of smoke. His throat burns, but through sheer willpower, he keeps from coughing. "Gimme one. I'm gasping." Harry laughs, but it's too much for his throat: he coughs instead, and he holds the box out. Taking one of the fags from within, Sirius tries to light it with a wandless gesture, but succeeds only in lightly singeing the end.

Harry hands him a match, and Sirius sighs.

"It's bloody hard, you know, wandless magic. No one ever tells you." He gestures vaguely about the room, but Harry isn't convinced.

"People say that wandless magic is extremely hard, all the time," Harry points out, slightly hoarsely. Sirius scoffs.

"Shows what idiots they are." With a wave of his hand and a flamboyant, "Accio!", a black object comes whizzing through the air from his and Remus' open bedroom door, and with a triumphant grin, he catches it in his hand. Harry laughs again. Sirius sets the ashtray on the coffee table, and Harry looks at it. "Lily got me this, you know, when I had my first cigarette. We don't have them, you see, wizards - me and James tried it at some concert, and he wasn't a fan, but I just really liked it, you know?" Sirius looks at the cigarette in his hands, nostalgically, thoughtfully. "We used to share menthols, me and her. Remus hated them, of course - him and Peter, they never--"

"Where is Remus?" Harry asks. He doesn't want to hear about his mum right now, or his dad, or the good old days - he doesn't know why exactly, but for some reason it feels wrong to be able to hear about them. What nice stories is Draco hearing about Lucius right now, after all?

"He's walking in Godric's Hollow, with Moody and some of the lads," Sirius answers. Reaching out and tipping a little of his ash into the tray, he says, "These're bad for you, you know." Sirius looks tired, Harry thinks: he has the slightest of dark shadows under his eyes, and his lips are dry and chapped, like he's been licking them anxiously through the day. He's dressed in silvery grey robes, and Harry is so used to him wearing Muggle stuff around the house that he almost looks strange.

"So's being a wizard. No one ever tried to kill me when I thought I was a Muggle," Harry says mildly. "Except Dudley, and he wasn't very good at it."

"That's the real problem, isn't it?" Sirius says, in an equally light tone. "Not that they try, but that they're sort of good."

"Mmm." Harry takes the last drag of his cigarette, and he extinguishes the butt in the black tray, trying to blow a ring of smoke and failing miserably. Picking up the ashtray, he examines it: around the edge are words, imprinted in white. "Abyssus abyssum invocat," Harry reads, slowly. "Hell calls Hell?"

"One bad thing leads to another," Sirius explains. "She thought it fit me and James quite well."

"Yeah," Harry agrees, stroking over the white-painted letters in their flowing script. "How are the Order? Given- you know."

"They're flightly, to be honest," Sirius admits. He looks into the middle distance, thoughtful, and then he shakes his head. "Some of them think Lucius deserved to get killed - you know how Moody is - but most of them are really shaken by it. They're upset they lost one of their own, even if it was him, and before the war's really started again."

"Do you think it is starting again, then?" Harry asks. Sirius thinks about the question for a few moments, and then gives a very slow inclination of his head.

"Yeah, but not yet. He's preparing himself. He'll draw himself up, You-Know-Who, get all his followers together, contact beasts and old allies. The war won't start yet." Harry thinks about the prophecies, and he thinks about Voldemort. The sooner Voldemort kills him, if that's what's really prophesied, if that's what'll really sort things out... Well, the sooner he dies, the sooner Voldemort will follow.

"We should end the war before it starts," Harry says, firmly. He meets Sirius' gaze: the older man's eyes are tired, and now they have a deep sadness shining in them, obscured as they are by the soft, grey smoke that rises from the cigarette. Reluctantly, Sirius gives a short nod of his head, and opens his mouth as if to say something, but when the latch of the door opens, he freezes.

Hurriedly, Harry snatches Sirius' cigarette from his hands and extinguishes it in the ashtray, kicking it under the sofa; Sirius mutters a desperate spell to Vanish the smoke from the air and clear away the smell of the smoke. Harry and Sirius must be trying too hard to look casual in the living room, because when Remus looks at them from the doorway, he slowly narrows his eyes.

"What?" he demands.

"Nothing,"

"Nothing," Sirius and Harry say together, and they share a glance. "That is, uh, we were talking about..."

"Dumbledore sent me a letter," Harry says. "Said you'd talked to him, that you were real worried about me, and to chill out a bit."

"Yes," Sirius agrees, nodding his head. Remus' expression remains suspicious as he looks between Harry and Sirius' faces, but evidently, they convince him, because he relaxes slightly. Instead of suspicious, he just looks exhausted, and flicking his wand behind him, Harry sets the kettle onto the hob to boil. When Remus leaves the room to take off his coat and change into some more comfortable clothes, Sirius hisses for him to hide the ashtray in his own room, and Harry rushes to do so.

---

The next day, Harry sits alone in Trafalgar Square, a book settled in his lap. He sits on the edge of one of the monuments, his back resting against one of the Landseer's Lions: some elderly passers-by glare at him, but he just ignores them (at least he's not a tourist) and focuses on the text. It's Advanced Potion Making, which is actually on the Sixth Year reading list rather than his own, but it looks more interesting, and if he does make some of the potions in it, he'd like to play with them over the summer. As he idly pages through the instructions for Felix felicis, Harry wonders if his mum's old textbooks are in her storage locker - Sirius had said that they'd used this same book when he'd been at school, and he can't help but wonder if she doodles in her books, like he does in his.

But then, hadn't he felt guilty just last night for hearing stories about her?

Harry looks up from the book, thinking about Draco. Is he going through Lucius' possessions, like Harry sometimes feels the want to go through that of his parents, or looking through photograph albums? Is he crying? Harry needn't wonder about that. Draco cries like a tap, under the right circumstances, and this is definitely one.

Harry can't really imagine the next year without Lucius Malfoy there, sending him advice in the post or making snide comments when they meet.

"Hey," comes a voice from below him, and Harry glances down. It's the blond boy from the arcade, his schoolbag slung over his shoulder, along this time. "You're the gay guy from Penney's, yeah?"

"Uh huh," Harry answers. He makes no move to get down, instead keeping his gaze on the other boy: he's about the same height as Draco, but he's skinnier, and Harry can see he doesn't have the light muscle that Draco has. He also, from what Harry can tell, hasn't been recently crying. "I'm Harry. Harry Potter." The complete lack of recognition on the other boy's face is enthralling.

"I'm Adrian," the boy says, and he steps closer, reaching up to Harry and offering his right hand. Harry shakes it, remembering when he was eleven years old, and he'd refused Draco's proffered hand - and then taken it again, later the very same evening. "What school do you go to? I've never seen you about London before."

"I go to a private school up North," Harry answers. "I was let out early."

"Why, what'd you do?" Adrian asks.

"Family friend got murdered." Adrian stares at him, his eyes slightly wide. His features are angular, his nose unfortunately pointy, and he has a square jaw that Harry guesses will get squarer in the next few years - his eyes are very deep, Harry notices. He has eyes that look old, even though they're not. "Sorry to be blunt. I'm just not in the mood to dance around it at the moment. Or talk about it," he adds. To his surprise, Adrian nods.

"Makes sense, to be honest, mate. Look, I'm just gonna walk down to Penney's, now - you want to go head-to-head on that dance game?"

"Where're your friends?" Adrian gives a sheepish grin.

"They're in the rugby club. I didn't make the cut." Harry sniggers - and then feels bad.

"No offence," Harry says, "but you don't look like you're made for rugby."

"Oh, no, I tried out for the cheerleading team... 'Cept we don't have a cheerleading team." Harry, to his surprise, laughs. Marking his place, he closes his book and drops it into his bag, and he fall into step with the other boy as they make their way into town. "What're you reading? It looks complicated."

"It's, uh, it's Home Ec," Harry says. When Adrian looks at him in surprise, Harry adds, "We've got a weird teacher for it. He's very strict, gets really particular about stuff, so it's a good idea to study in advance."

"Expects every casserole to be Michelin Star, does he?"

"Yeah," Harry says, smiling to himself as he imagines Severus Snape, dour and brooding, in chef's whites. "You do Home Ec?"

"Nah." Adrian shakes his head. "I do English, Science, Maths, and then for my options I chose Classics, French, German and Economics. I want to go to Cambridge. Oxford would be alright as well, I suppose. Where do you want to go?" It occurs to Harry, in a way it has never occurred to him before, that wizards don't have higher education. Theoretically, he's known this since he was a child, but he'd sort of forgotten about university entirely - he'd been so used to the idea that upon leaving Hogwarts, he'd go directly into work.

Well. When he believed he'd live that long, anyway.

"I don't know," Harry says. "I never really thought about it."

"God, that must be nice," Adrian says, looking rueful. He walks with his hands in his pockets, and unlike Harry, who keeps a careful glance around them whenever they turn a street corner, and is constantly alert, he seems to not have a care in the world. "Seems every chance they get ours are nagging us about UCAS." Harry doesn't know what UCAS is, but he isn't about to ask. Adrian expects him to know, so he'll just pretend he does. They walk in silence for a few minutes, and when they see Penney's at the end of the street, Adrian says, "You really gay?"

"I guess," Harry answers. "I've been with lads more than girls." Adrian looks at him somewhat admiringly.

"Wow. So you've, uh, you know... Had sex?"

"Haven't you?" Harry asks, and a little colour comes to Adrian's tanned cheeks.

"Bet you a quid I'll beat you." He says it a little too hurriedly, and Harry shrugs his shoulders.

"Alright, but you won't." Adrian runs before Harry into the arcade, and for the longest moment, Harry watches after him. For the first time in weeks, he thinks about Blaise Zabini.

Then he forgets him again, and walks inside.

---

Later, when Harry has won four games in a row, and he and Adrian are both covered in a thin sheen of sweat, they stand outside together. Adrian is breathing heavily, evidently a little more unfit than Harry, who has a glow to his features from the exercise, but isn't more than a little out of breath. Harry almost feels bad for him, and had tried to call for a break after the second game, but Adrian had been competitive, and had insisted they play on.

That's the main difference - the boy is competitive to a fault, even when it's obvious he can't win.

In a way, Harry supposes that draws a parallel between them.

"You gonna be okay?" Harry asks. "You need to go get a drink?" Adrian shakes his head, and Harry leans against the wall, flicking a piece of gum into his mouth. He offers a piece to Adrian, but he refuses it wheezily, and when Adrian's two friends come up the walkway, Harry gives them an easy wave.

"What'd you do to him?" asks the taller one.

"Danced with him," Harry answers. The two of them chuckle, and Adrian waves them off as they mockingly pat his back and coo over him. "I'm gonna head home. See you, guys."

"You live in London?" Adrian asks.

"Yeah."

"You here the summer?"

"Yeah." Adrian smiles at him.

"Cool. That's, uh, that's good." Harry gives the other boys a polite nod, and he walks home three hours before the sun goes down.

---

"What are you doing?" Remus asks. Harry carefully pours Boomslang Skin into the cauldron.

"Baking a cake," Harry replies. Remus waits for him to finish pouring before he slaps the back of Harry's head - lightly - and Harry chuckles. "I figured I'd practice before I went back to the school. We can put Polyjuice aside, for the Order. Just in case." Remus is silent for a few moments, and then his hand alights gently on Harry's shoulder. Harry turns to look at him, and he reads the uncertainty in Remus' face. He'd been upset when Harry had come home, but he'd calmed when Harry told him he'd spent the majority of his day reading in the park.

"You shouldn't have to do that," Remus murmurs.

"Shouldn't have to do a lot of things," Harry points out, putting his hand on top of Remus', and Remus sighs softly. He nods his head, and he passes Harry the stirrer.