Alfred only barely remembered how to get to Ottery, since he'd only been once and it had been over a month ago, but luckily Zelda hadn't had so much to drink yet that she was incapable of guiding them. In fairness, if Alfred actually thought she was drunk they wouldn't have been here in the first place, because it would have felt like he was taking advantage of her lack of good judgement to even offer to go somewhere else with her. And obviously they both knew it was a bad idea. Once they were through and alone in the street, however — alone in a more tangible way than they had been alone on the street in Hogsmeade, because Hogsmeade always felt a little crowded even when you couldn't see anyone else — it was difficult to regret it.

"Yeah," he agreed, pulling her arm close to him so that his side was brushing up against hers as they walked. He didn't really know where they were going, but assumed she did. At the moment he was quite happy to be led — he didn't have anywhere he wanted to be, particularly, just a growing list of places he knew he didn't want to be.

They walked in relative quiet for a moment. There was something lighter in the air here, but it felt like it only affected the surface of him. Beneath all of that, he was still weighed down, and thought she probably was, too. In theory this would be the ideal time and place to air whatever grievances were left to talk about between them, to fix whatever was wrong, except Alfred didn't even know what was wrong. He didn't think talking about the same thing they'd talked about last time would help, but he was finding it hard to fully invest in anything else. So where were they supposed to start, if they did want to fix things?

"We're going to be alright," he said after a long moment. "Right?"

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