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Chapter Text

Harry almost doesn’t bother waiting up to watch the second hands tick down to mark the exact time of his fifteenth birthday.

It’s been a tradition, sure, for as long as he’s known how to read the time on Dudley’s second watch. But something about it feels different this year.

He’s been having trouble sleeping at night, for a start. That leads to falling asleep at odd intervals during the day, and usually being awoken within a couple of hours by Aunt Petunia’s shrieking, or by his own, as images of green light, the Triwizard cup and Cedric flash through his head.

There are more differences than that. When Harry’s awake, he thinks about Nizar, and about all those evenings spent talking to someone who should have been his enemy, in a room where he shouldn’t have felt safe. He thinks about those three ridiculous Slytherin children who were always so excited to speak parseltongue to him, and about the strange tampered-with Salazar portrait in the Entrance Hall.

And then there’s Adele. A Slytherin who spent however much time protecting him – protecting Harry – over the course of the year. With no motive, and for no reason, and without even telling Harry that she was doing it, for most of the year. He hadn’t even thanked her for it, let alone offered the slightest thing in return.

And yet she’d snuck out after curfew to find him in those last two weeks of term where it felt like Harry’s world was ending. She’d snuck out, and kept sneaking out – and it didn’t make things okay, but it had definitely made Harry feel better – and she hadn’t seemed to mind.

They’d gone down to the library on the last night of term, and Adele had been so determined to help get rid of Voldemort that for a moment Harry had almost believed it was possible.

Now, of course, she might as well be a million miles away, doing whatever pure bloods do when they’re not at school. He hasn’t heard from her.

Hermione and Ron have sent letters, like they always do – even if these ones are dull and insubstantial, and almost as maddening as pure silence would have been. He misses them too. It was just... such a year, and Harry worries that he didn’t treat them as well as he should have.

He should have told them about Nizar. And about Adele, and the other Slytherin portraits, and all that sneaking around in the dungeons he’s been doing over the last two years. He should have trusted them more.

Harry sits on his bed, staring across at the opposite wall, as the seconds tick down on his wrist in the darkness, and he starts to realise that he isn’t really expecting to go back.  

It’s a grim thought. But with only a couple of weeks of the summer break having passed, the remaining month looms ahead like an insurmountable Dursley blockade, even if Voldemort doesn’t manage to finish him off first.  

What’s the point in counting down a few seconds, anyway?

His watch alarm chimes suddenly, its little digital display lighting up to show the full display of zeros.

Midnight. Depressing as hell.

Harry sighs and rubs at his eyes. “Well, that’s ‘happy birthday,’ I guess.”  

“This is terrible. This is worse than I thought it would be.”

Harry’s wand is in his hand before he’s had time to draw a breath. There’s someone in his room. Someone in the corner, half hidden in the shadowy gloom. Definitely magical, if they’ve managed to get in here, but not somebody that Harry recognises.

Or- not someone Harry was expecting. Not that he was expecting anyone! His heart is racing. The voice has some familiarity about its tone that sounds like- or a bit like-

“You’re not a painting.” Harry’s wand dips and sways as he holds it out, but he doesn’t dare lower his arm completely.

“I’m sorry?”

The person, the someone, the magical stranger steps forwards far enough to be illuminated by the light from the street outside the window.

Harry flinches.

It’s a real person. Someone has really appeared in his bedroom. In the flesh. Right in front of him. Not a portrait.

Not Nizar either. In fact, Harry doesn’t know why that was the first place his thoughts went.

This strange person – whoever they are – looks nothing like Nizar, now that Harry can kind of see them.

Or, not enough to mistake them for a painting-come-to-life, at least.

Or- okay. The stranger does look a lot like Nizar. With the shape of his face and the look in his eyes and the way that he stands like he knows exactly what space he occupies in a room. He’s older than Nizar – physically at least. Nizar doesn’t have any silver in his hair, but he is also made of paint so there is that. Harry highly doubts that this stranger has been wandering around the Earth since anytime in the 10^th century. (Which makes this stranger quite young, compared with most of the portraits that Harry regularly spends time with.)

Apart from that obvious thousand year gap, they could almost be siblings.

But this stranger is wearing modern clothes. Modern muggle clothes, and kind of scruffy ones at that. The mental image of the thousand-year-old portrait brother of Salazar Slytherin dressing himself in jeans and a t-shirt is too much for Harry’s brain to comprehend.  

The stranger frowns. “Are you well?”

“Huh?”

A look of genuine concern crosses their face. “Only, you have been staring for quite a while now.”

“You did just appear in my bedroom,” Harry accuses. “In the middle of the night. Completely unannounced. I don’t have a clue who you are.”

“Well, I apologise for not announcing myself properly,” the stranger says. “I wanted to avoid waking your interesting relatives. That had the potential to become all kinds of complicated. Are you going to point that wand at me all night?”

“Well, if you’re planning to kill me, you don’t have to worry about them,” Harry says blandly. “They’d throw a party for it if you gave them enough warning.”

Something flashes in the stranger’s expression and disappears before Harry can identify it. “As I said, complicated. And I would prefer not to deal with the stabbing accusations that would inevitably follow such an interaction. May I turn on the light?”

Harry officially gives up hoping for things to make sense. “Hold on,” he says, and stands. There’s a jumper somewhere, and if he can just shove it along the bottom of the door it’ll block out the light.

He pitches forwards instead, ground tilting under his feet until he collides with the stranger’s hands, suddenly right where they need to be to stop Harry from smashing face first into the floor.

“I’m fine!” Harry insists, speaking over whatever reassurance the strange wizard is trying to offer him. Well, he’s either fine, or just about to be murdered, but that seems like arguing semantics.

“You really aren’t.” The wizard sighs, but releases him, reaching past to flick the light switch on the wall.

Harry squints up at the unfamiliar (and yet strangely familiar) face in the dim glow of the single failing lightbulb. “Have we met?”

“That is a rather complicated question.”

“Can you answer it?” Harry asks. He’s pretty sure he knows the answer to both questions.

The wizard smiles wryly. “No.”

"You know me though?"

"I do." There's fondness in his voice. Definitely. Mixed in with some other emotions that are much less easy to pull apart but that doesn't matter. This stranger sounds so much like Nizar when he speaks like that.

Harry chews his lip in thought. “Who are you?”

“I can’t tell you that either. And not because I don’t want to.” The wizard’s voice is all apology.

“Is there anything you can tell me?”

“I can tell you that I’m here to save you.” The wizard hesitates. “And I can tell you that it’s going to take a while.”

“Save me?” Harry echoes with a bewildered frown. “Why?”

“Because I, and a number of other people, would rather not see you dead.”

Harry blinks.

He’s never heard anyone admit, quite so abruptly, that he might die. Everyone’s so keen to soften the risk behind hopeful words and what ifs. Or just avoid the topic entirely, as if they’re scared that Harry’s going give up and let it happen if they ever acknowledge it.

This approach is refreshing. Which means that it is also definitely one hundred percent too good to be true.

“If I go with you...” Harry says slowly. “If I go off with you, other people are going to die. Right?” He knows he’s right. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

The wizard gives him a very serious look. “If you die, a lot of other people will die anyway,” he says. “I can offer you a chance to learn the skills to protect yourself and those that you care about. As well as the opportunity of surviving long enough to put those skills into action."

“But you can’t tell me anything about it beforehand.”

“No, I can’t.”

“So, what, you want me to trust you just like that?” Harry asks, rather than admitting that he already does kind of trust this strange and objectively deeply suspicious wizard who appeared in his bedroom under mysterious circumstances.

“I believe that you are intelligent enough to realise that I haven’t lied to you.”

Harry huffs in amusement. “Okay, yeah, very clever. You’re definitely a Slytherin.”

He means it as a compliment too, which isn't nearly as surprising to Harry as it might have seemed a couple of years ago. Meeting Nizar really has changed his perspective on certain things. 

From the wizard's poorly concealed expression of wide-eyed shock, Harry can be pretty sure that his meetings with Nizar aren't common knowledge in whichever secret Slytherin circles this stranger and his supposed 'number of other people' move in. (That rules out Professor Snape, probably, but not much else.)

“I mean, if you even went to Hogwarts,” Harry adds, suddenly self-conscious. Since he’s actually aware that other magical schools exist now.

“I did go to Hogwarts, yes,” says the wizard, and his voice is so thick emotion that there is definitely some kind of a story attached to that. “A long time ago.”

“Alright.” Harry nods firmly as if that settles it. He’s pretty sure that it’s been settled since the wizard indirectly threatened to stab the Dursleys, if not before, but that is not the point. “When do we leave?”

Chapter Text

Salazar takes a moment to just breathe, under the dirty flickering light of his little brother’s empty childhood bedroom.

Tonight isn’t the first time that he’s seen the sight, thank the fucking stars, or he would not have been able to remain quite as calm as Nizar needed him to be in this moment. Even now, the urge to waken his brother’s former relatives rises up in his chest, more fiercely than he’d like to admit.

But what he had said to a (far too tired, far too thin, terrified and doing his best to avoid showing it) Hari is still true, and stabbing a Dursley really would draw far too much attention.

So he stands and tries to remember to breathe. In and out, over and over, his brother’s absence a pain in his chest – now more than ever to know that he is so near and yet so impossibly far away.

All will be well. He must remember that.

His brother is safe in a portrait in one of the best protected magical institutions on this entire continent (if he does say so himself), and his brother is also safely on his way towards meeting a much younger Salazar, somewhere in the year 990.

No, he will not allow himself to feel jealous of his younger self.

Nor will he allow nostalgia and longing to paint over the absolute sheer panic inflicted by the appearance of his severely traumatised, curse damaged and very very lost, soon-to-be hermanito.

Salazar sits down of his not-yet brother’s recently vacated bed. It creaks and groans underneath him, and the springs poke up through the fabric itself in sharp spikes of metal. It really is no wonder that Hari spent so long sleeping on a poorly bound mattress without complaint, if this is what he was accustomed to.

With a vicious sense of relief it occurs to Salazar that Hari will never sleep on this mattress again. Not anymore.

He will never spend another night under this roof. He will never have to suffer the knowledge that his very existence is unwanted by those that live under this roof.

And he will not be afraid. Not when it comes to family, at least.

He wasn’t worried by the realisation that Salazar is a Slytherin, not even at this time and in this place. It is so rare to hear his House spoken of in a positive way these days, but there was no hesitation or doubt in Hari’s voice.

He wasn’t afraid.

And he will not be afraid in 990 either, although 20-year-old Salazar will interpret the wide-eyed expression of speechless shock as fear all the same.

Finally, finally, Salazar’s brother is free.

Salazar disappears from the Dursley residence as silent as a ghost - silent as he arrived. Standing on a dimly lit street corner, he brushes off his clothes as if he can somehow remove the taint of the absolutely vile family of Number 4 Privet Drive, and then disappears from that street corner as well.

He had a task, and he has completed it; the ends of the circle are all tied up neatly as promised.

They’ll see each other again soon. 

Chapter Text

Harry wakes up in a field and wonders, almost immediately, if he should have asked a few more questions about where exactly it was that he was supposed to be going.

The sun is bright and high in the sky – midday, probably – and while it’s not exactly cold, it doesn’t feel as warm as if should be for the end of July in England.

Harry sits up, dislodging Hedwig, who hoots at him irritably.

“Sorry,” he tells her absently, more preoccupied with what exactly he’s managed to land himself into this time.

It definitely is a field.

“That hardly narrows things down, does it?” he asks aloud, because talking to a bird might make him feel marginally more normal. “Do you know where we are?”

If they are anywhere at all. It’s clear that the strange old wizard was a fan of secrecy, but did he really have to drop Harry unconscious in the middle of nowhere?

And what exactly is Harry supposed to do now? The only landmarks he can see around him are trees, and he can hardly ask one of those for directions.

Not that he even knows where he’d be asking for directions to.

Harry gets to his feet anyway, and waits for Hedwig to settle into a perch on his shoulder. He’s glad that she agreed to come with him. Between the two of them, he’s sure that they’ll figure this out.

**

It doesn’t take long to lose confidence.

Harry is absolutely nowhere that he recognises, and that is probably good from a Voldemort-avoiding perspective, but it’s a lot less good on every other point. Slowly starving to death in a random bit of scrubland is only a slight upgrade from staying with at Privet Drive, after all.

He has met some of the local people of wherever this place is, and they did offer him food rather than scream at him, so that’s definitely something to be positive about, but if Harry can’t even figure out what language they’re speaking then he isn’t going to be much good for anything.

They weren’t speaking Spanish, he’s fairly sure, which is a shame. Not because Harry knows much Spanish – because he really doesn’t, despite Nizar’s attempts – but it might at least help to narrow down his location a little bit. At the moment he could be anywhere in the entire world, and that’s more than a little bit daunting.

Harry scuffs his foot through the grass and nearly trips over a snake.

An adder, he thinks. Maybe?

That might mean that he’s still in England. Do other countries have adders too? Or maybe Harry’s snake identifying skills are horribly inadequate. If only that weird old wizard had given him a reptile guidebook before sending him off into the middle of somewhere!

Nizar would know where Harry was. If Nizar was here. Which he isn’t and can’t be, because he’s a portrait and Hogwarts must be miles and miles away from wherever here is, and even if Nizar wasn’t a portrait what are the chances that he’d choose to be right here with Harry anyway?

“Where are you going?” he blurts out, more to stop himself from spiralling into a panic than anything else. Maybe the snake will know what type of snake it is? Okay, that’s probably not the priority here.

Now, chicken egg theft, that’s something that Harry can focus on. He may not be great at identifying trees or geographical locations, but he knows how to talk to a reptile! Maybe they can be friends.

“Terrible human boy! Insulting my hunting prowess.”

The snake slithers away in a huff, and Harry finds his mood brighten as he calls after it, “you were trying to hunt for chicken eggs!”

Looks like he isn’t befriending that particular snake after all.

“Oh dear gods.”

Harry turns, still smiling, expecting to find another potential friend waiting somewhere in the grass.

Instead, he finds himself facing a man: dark brown hair, bronze skin, hazel eyes, with a wide smile that doesn’t seem to have diminished from the sound of Harry failing to make friends with a snake. 

This is not the usual reaction that he gets to parseltongue. Or at least, parseltongue spoken outside of the Slytherin Common Room.

It could be that the man was a Slytherin. Maybe he’s spoken to Nizar?

If he went to Hogwarts. If he’s even a wizard.

 Harry doesn’t think he’s ever seen that style of clothing before, but magical fashion trends tend to look a little bit like picking random centuries out of a hat and hoping for the best, so what does he know? The clothes look fancy – all black, with some gold and silver detailing embroidered in very expensive looking swirls.

Harry has been staring for too long. He takes a breath and forces his shoulders to relax.

“Um, hello,” he ventures.

The man’s expression remains set in that now slightly frozen smile.

Okay, so Harry knows he’s being stupid here. It’s been a couple of years talking to Nizar and Kanza, but he can recognise parseltongue when he hears it now, even if the only people he’s ever heard it from have been a portrait or Voldemort up until now.

“Hello.”

That causes the man’s face to widen back into a pleased grin. “I wasn’t mistaken! You’re a parselmouth!”

“Uh...”

“Gods wept and thank them all, someone else who can finally understand what I’m saying all the time!”

“Right,” Harry mumbles, trying to keep up with this strange man’s apparent delight. He’s not used to people being so pleased to see him. “I, um. Sorry. I mean- Can you tell me where we are?”

The stranger peers at him in sudden worry. “Are you lost?”

“No!” Harry snaps. Then he wilts, “...okay, well, yes.”

The stranger is kind enough not to laugh at him. “I am not native to the area either. It’s lucky that I found you. Where is it that you are trying to go?”

“I...” Harry’s mind goes blank. Where is he trying to go? He doesn’t know what the old wizard’s plan was. He didn’t even ask- of all the stupid, reckless things he’s ever done!

“You do have somewhere to go?” The stranger’s concern deepens. This isn’t good, this isn’t good at all.

Harry opens and closes his mouth, trying and failing to find words through his panic. He hasn’t been here a day and he’s already messing things up. He still doesn’t even know where ‘here’ is.

“...family? Where have you come from?” The stranger is still talking.

“S-Surrey,” Harry manages to stutter out. If this isn’t the UK, that might not be specific enough. “Southwest of London?”

“You sound unsure.”

“That’s where I was, before... well. Before I was here instead.”

The stranger tilts his head. “We are on the outskirts of the village of Castleview. In the kingdom of Moravia. Moray.”

“I don’t even know where that is,” Harry says, as the blank horror of his situation starts to sink in. He’s still not entirely sure what the old wizard who appeared at Privet Drive was trying to achieve, but does Harry really want to try turning up on the Dursleys’ doorstop again, now that he’s had this glimpse of freedom? Would they even let him back into the house? 

This is better than being locked in that room for any longer. It’s better than imprisonment. It is.

“You really do not know how you got here?”

The beginnings of a frown appearing on the stranger’s face makes Harry swallow nervously. This is the only hope that he’s got, and the stranger’s patience will run out if Harry drags this conversation out for much longer. “I- Can you help me?”

“Most likely. What can you then do for me?”

The stranger’s tone isn’t unkind, but Harry feels it like a brick slamming into his chest. What can he do? The only thing he’s ever been good at is flying, and that’s hardly useful unless the stranger wants him to go up against another Hungarian Horntail. Hell, the one thing the magical world needed Harry to do was stop Voldemort from coming back to life, and yet there he was in that graveyard, that night, and Cedric- Cedric-

Harry grits his teeth to stop his jaw from shaking. “Never mind,” he tells the stranger, appalled to hear the hint of a wobble in his voice. “It’s fine. I can stay lost.”

He turns away and heads for the trees, hoping that it’ll seem to the stranger more like he is storming off than running away.

It’s fine.

A silent change in space and the stranger is standing in front of him, eyes wide with a strange familiar distress, and Harry is tripping backwards, stumbling away and falling because fuck, who moves that fast?

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Twice over, it seems!” At least the stranger seems more intent on apologising than murdering him. Harry will take that as a minor victory. “Here, let us try again. I’m Sal.”

Harry narrows his eyes, before taking the stranger’s hand and allowing himself to be pulled back to his feet. He does need help. “I’m Harry.”

“Hari?”

“Uh, yeah, sure, let’s go with that,” Harry says. The pronunciation of his name doesn’t really matter. It sounds familiar even, although he can’t quite remember when he’s heard it before. “Sal, I really don’t have much of anything that would be worth a trade, I...” he hesitates, “to be honest, I hadn’t really expected to end up here at all.”

Sal looks him up and down. “That does not entirely surprise me. Did somebody leave you here to be rid of you?”

Harry blinks. “Well, that hadn’t cross my mind until you mentioned it, thanks,” he says, and it comes out slightly more sarcastically than he intends it too. It’s not good form to offend the person who you’re asking for help from. “Sorry. I mean- I don’t think so? This is better than imprisonment.”

It doesn’t sound much better when he says it out loud, but Sal nods anyway.

“Surrey is that way, south of the Tamesis.” Sal says, pointing in what Harry assumes is the right direction. That’s a pretty good hint that they’re in the UK somewhere.

Which makes the fact that Harry hasn’t been able to understand anyone even more concerning. 

“Uh, Sal? What language do they speak in the village? Castleview? I mean, I kind of guessed ne and sorig a-and gyft, but apart from that I’ve got no idea.”

“That is West Saxon,” Sal looks baffled. “Are you sure that you have family in Surrey?”

“Yes! That’s where I was before I came here. I’ve lived there for fourteen years!”

“Where you were imprisoned.” There is a hard note in Sal’s voice.  

“It... it wasn’t exactly like that,” Harry says weakly. If Sal refuses to help him, he’ll be right back where he started.

Sal gives him a disbelieving look. “Very well. We can go to Surrey and find your... family.”

He says ‘family’ in a similar kind of way to how the old wizard said ‘interesting relatives’, like he really, really would prefer to be using a less polite term. Harry doesn’t understand what the Dursleys have already done to offend Sal, but he can’t quite bring himself to defend them.

“We can desplazarse. Oh, you don’t know Castellano—”

“Are you Spanish?” Harry blurts out, unable to hide his sudden excitement.  

Sal scowls. “That is not the correct term.”

Harry grins at the man’s offence. “Oh you sound exactly like—” He hesitates, still not sure how much to reveal to someone who is most definitely a stranger. “You sound like someone I know.” 

“They taught you castellano?” Sal looks doubtful.

Harry shrugs. “Hola. Gracias. Qué puto mierda. He didn’t teach me that last one on purpose though.”

“Your accent is appalling.”

“We haven’t really had time to continue the lessons.” Harry decides not to mention that he was pants at it. He half suspects that Nizar was close to giving up in despair, and then they both got distracted with the whole trying-not-to-die-in-the-Triwizard-Tournament situation, and things got out of hand.

Sal seems to be assessing Harry again. The expression on his face is so mindful of the looks that Nizar sometimes gives him that Harry is having to remind himself that this is not a terrifyingly brilliant ancient literal Slytherin that he is talking to right now, even with the lack of a portrait frame between them.

“So, desplazarse?” Harry prompts, absolutely mangling the pronunciation of the vowels.

“You know how to do it? I keep forgetting the word in other languages. Magically moving ourselves.”

“Oh, Apparating,” Harry says, relieved to finally have an answer to the ‘are you a wizard’ question. It would have felt so unsubtle to just blurt it out. Not to mention the potential for a couple of awkward questions if Sal had said no.

And he’s known what Apparating is since Nizar first started complaining about the stupidity of requiring a licence, sometime back in third year. Hermione was so surprised that Harry already knew what it was when she mentioned it a couple of months ago. He’s still trying to figure out how to convince her that he still knows absolutely almost nothing about the wider magical world. He can’t exactly admit that he’s been sneaking off to talk to a thousand year old Slytherin portrait for nearly two years now, even if Adele thinks that he should.

“You know how to do it?” Sal is asking.

“Er, no. Not yet.” Nizar wants to teach him, but it’s not the kind of thing that is easy to learn from a portrait – or safe, if what Harry’s heard about ‘splinching’ is to be believed.

“Never mind. I can take us both,” Sal says, holding out his hand once more.

Harry hesitates. Sal has ignored every opportunity to kill Harry so far, even going so far as to apologise for scaring the hell out of him, and he acts just like Nizar when he’s being offended about Spanish. Apart from that, he’s the only being that Harry has been able to communicate with apart from a single chicken-egg-hunting snake who is long gone.

He can get Sal to drop him off somewhere in Surrey, and then he can- he can travel to London from there. And go to Gringotts. Surely the goblins will have some way for Harry to prove who he is – even wizards must lose their vault keys sometimes. He only has to survive until the Hogwarts term starts up again.

It’ll be fine.

“Alright,” Harry says, taking Sal’s hand, and tries not to feel like he’s making the same stupid mistake of trusting the first random wizard who promises to help him – for the second time in less than twenty four hours.

**

Salazar tries not to show the ridiculous level of relief that he feels when Hari finally accepts his offer of desplazarse. He is confused about the sudden presence of the snowy owl, who Hari introduces as Hedwig, but offers no other explanation for. Perhaps the owl was a gift, from a different person to those who were supposed to be responsible for providing Hari with clothing and food.

They land on a small hill, far enough away from any of the villages to avoid notice. Salazar does not know the area well, and Hari has not been specific, for all that he claims to have lived here for over a decade.

Not that Hari will reside here any longer, if Salazar has anything to say about it. He was not lying about being pleased to find another parselmouth, even if his concerns now revolve around the imprisonment that Hari mentioned, among other things.

It will not matter, though. Salazar is good at being persuasive. He should have little difficulty convincing Hari’s family to allow him to take Hari with him back to the castle – assuming that Hari himself is willing, of course.

“Here we are,” Sal says unnecessarily, “Surrey, overlooking the River Tamesis.”

Hari is staring around at landscape that is completely unexceptional for the south of the isle, as if he has never seen it before in his life. Salazar is starting to feel very worried about this supposed imprisonment.

The snowy owl on his shoulder – Hedwig – shuffles her wings in agitation.

“Is something the matter?” Salazar hardly dares to ask.

“If I asked you to show me London, could you?”

It is an odd request. Most people that Salazar has met do not wish to see, or smell, that city unless they have no other option.

London causes the same look of disconcerted horror to flash across Hari’s face, before he turns and requests that Salazar move them somewhere further away, which Salazar is very willing to oblige.

“We are safe here. There is no one here for at least half a day’s walk in any direction,” Salazar says. “What’s wrong?”

Hari looks to be debating his options. “I’m a student of Hogwarts. Do you know of it?”

“Hogéwaþ?” Salazar frowns. Hari says the word as if he has years of familiarity with it, but the school’s name has not been known of for long enough for the people of this isle already to have begun to mispronounce it. “You are not one of our students. We know them all by face and name, and you, my friend, are a parseltongue-speaking stranger.”

Hari looks to be about to swoon. “I was afraid that you would say that.”

Then he asks Salazar for the date. And Salazar feels his heart sink slowly into his boots.

“Yesterday, when I was in Surrey, like I mentioned,” Hari says in a quiet voice, “it was 31^st July 1995.”

That. That explains everything and absolutely nothing at all.

“Ah,” Salazar says calmly, “it sounds like you’ve had rather a complicated day.”

Hari gives a choked laugh.

Salazar is not sure if the boy is about to drop into a dead faint, or burst into tears, but ideally they will be saving either options until he has managed to persuade Hari to return to the castle with him.

His mind still reeling over the thought of 1995 – the thought of Hogéwaþ in 1995, even if the pronunciation of the name of their school is to be mauled almost beyond recognition. They’d never expected- they’d never dared to dream that their school would survive for so long into the future. Just wait until the others hear about this!

“Um,” Hari says, very cautiously. “If you’re a teacher at Hogwarts- Hogéwaþ, sorry – do you think- I mean, there’s not much for me here, unless I want to sit around a thousand years, waiting for my aunt and uncle to be born, and—”

“I can bring you back to the castle,” Sal offers, trying to contain at least some of his eagerness lest he risks scaring Hari away once more. “Between the six of us, I think we will be able to find a way to help you.”

Not that Salazar has any intention of allowing Hari return to the future, if that means returning to relatives who will lock him up and imprison him. Besides, if Hari was sent here, and sent so close to Castleview in particular, then surely the mysterious magician who sent him meant for Hari to end up at Hogéwaþ.  

Hari narrows his eyes suddenly. “Six?”

“Six of us teachers, yes.” Salazar feels the need to explain. “We only officially opened the school recently-” today, “-and there have been many things to organise. I’m sure that it is very different from the Hogéwaþ that you are accustomed to. We have but fifteen students for the moment.”

“Different, yeah,” Hari echoes absently. Then his eyes widen. “Wait.”

“What is it?” Salazar tries not to feel alarmed by the wide eyed look that has appeared on Hari’s face. He is not at all prepared to deal with more shocking news today.

“Oh, I am an idiot!” Hari says, throwing his hands in the air. He begins to pace back and forth, alternating between slightly hysterical laughter and loud exclamations in a language that definitely is not West Saxon.  

“Hari?” Salazar tentatively interrupts.

“Oh! Sorry.” Hari stops mid-step and grins sheepishly. It is as if all his nerves and cautious behaviour towards Sal have completely disappeared with his realisation. “I just can’t believe it took me so long to figure out who you are.”

“Ah.” Salazar’s shoulders relax with the feeling of immediate relief.

So Hari has recognised him. That must mean that the memory of Hogéwaþ’s first teachers and early history have been properly preserved. With any luck, it will also allow him to earn more of Hari’s trust.

“You’re Salazar Slytherin!” Hari says delightedly, and Salazar’s relief melts into horrified despair.

“Are you being absolutely serious right now?!”