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Headlines
The world is in a sorry state, Zacharias says, and it's people like him who are keeping the balance in check. He sits in his green metal chair and flicks cigarette ashes at the passing bourgeoisie, sipping cafe lattes in cupfuls and making like he's misunderstood, worn denim jacket clutched about him like a shroud. Here he talks like a Starbucks prophet, everybody's critic, and Harry lets him because Zacharias likes to feel as though he has the authority to comment.

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Editorial
The problem, he explains (and Harry leans his head on his hand in lieu of a pillow), The problem is that there is nobody out there who cares about the common man. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the ones with the power are the ones choking the life out of the working class. Worst of all, nobody cares! The strong have built lifeboats from the bodies of those they have crushed along the way - we might as well just be putting the money in their pockets ourselves and just skip the middleman.

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This Day In History
Zacharias reads over like a Parisian pamphlet from 1789, celebrate of the Third Estate and ideal model of a working man. Harry doesn't mention that he doesn't work, because that will leave the blond snippy and irritable, and he's really forthright enough without being accusatory. Instead he lets Zacharias ramble and wave his cigarette through the air, tracing orange neon trails through the London gloom as his mouth rattles off catchphrases that were vogue in the 60's, but now from the bow of his lips sound almost classic.

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Classifieds
They live together in a shabby old flat some blocks from the café where they're now seated, that was advertised as a charming and quaint one-bedroom with a view, never mind the fact that the faucet leaks and the neighbors are noisy and the only view they have is of the building directly across from them. Such a stomping ground is a hassle, but they go here anyway because Zacharias says the place support the workers of the South American coffee plantations, not the fat, dozy white men in suits running the conglomerate corporations. You will find them both there on Saturday mornings where the blond drinks his coffee (milk, three sugars) and rants on current affairs to whoever will listen, while Harry quietly sips his tea and reads the paper. He's long ago given up on the coffee here--he thinks it tastes like horse piss. When Zach isn't looking he sneaks the chain-store stuff, because if he ever saw Harry drinking "that commercialist crap" Zacharias would probably chase him out of the house, never mind that Harry is the one who pays the rent.

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Crossword
None of their friends understand how they can stay together. When Hermione comes over on Sunday afternoons and asks where Zacharias is, Harry calmly sips his tea and responds "out" in the tone of voice often used by parents whose delinquent children have told them they've gone over to a friend's house to study. She purses her lips and frets over Harry, asks him what he's doing wasting the best years of his romantic life with a noncommittal, radical nonconformist, but she never garners a response. Harry shakes his head and tells her to drop it, and it's dropped like a hot potato, because the ex-Gryffindor is infamous for hs ability to clam up like, well, a clam. He rustles the paper and asks her what a four-letter word for "meddlesome" would be.

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Funnies
They've got absolutely nothing in common, and the extremities of their differences are almost laughable when observed; Harry likes to think of it as a farce on par with a comic strip. While he sits at home watching the telly or reading a book, or doing other normal, placid things to pass the time between work and bed, Zacharias is entering and leaving at his own discretion, sometimes with a gaggle of eccentric "colleagues" at his heels, more often than not surrounded by a cloud of marijuana smoke. Several times a month he'll go marching past the living room with a plethora of crudely-painted picket signs over his shoulder, and stop to bicker with Harry over his complacency towards the state of the world. He will call him a "capitalist" and a "burden on the free-thinking man", drop a few witty and scathing one-liners on Harry's head, and be off in a flurry of poster board before Harry can even comment. At times in the past, it's taken Harry up to three days to come up with a sufficient retort.

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When Zacharias leaves for days on end, Harry goes about everything as if it's business as usual. But every time he hears steps in the corridor, he can't help but glance up at the door expectantly.

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Sport
When it does open, it's often late in the evening, and like a picture of defeat Zacharias shuffles in dragging his picket behind him and hanging his head so that the mass of blond curls tumble into his face. Sometimes, especially in the spring months, it's been raining and he's soaking wet through and through, soggy cardboard smearing a paint trail on the hardwood behind him. Harry watches him toe off his shoes and chuck the sign into the corner from the bedroom door, surveying the droop to his shoulders and the hunched slope of his back, and knows he's overdone himself. Zacharias is passionate about everything he does, but sometimes he doesn't know how to quit--he keeps driving and going and pushing for change, shouting and leading and trying to shake people up. He will sleep for days; but not yet. First, he will look up and see Harry there, and they will both stop and stare at one another, intense and understanding and words are never needed. Harry thinks about asking the blond if he's been off shagging some scruffy hippie in his place; but when Zacharias touches him, as though it's the first human contact he's known in years, all such thoughts will disperse. Off comes the soaked-through denim jacket. Shucked are the soggy clothes and hot are the kisses from his numb, slick lips. They tango back into the bedroom, stumbling and staggering and hitting their knees on furniture, until they make it to the bed. Foreplay's swift, kisses swifter, like fleeting memories against their skin because it's late and they need to fight the oppressive cold, and like he's read in old boy scout manuals, rubbing two sticks together does indeed make fire. It consumes them as they consume one-another, and Harry thinks oh, if only Zacharias could fuck for starving children in Kenya, this whole process might be a bit easier. But he secretly loves it when those nicotine-stained, splintered fingers dig into his hips hard enough to bruise; and if he could he'd have Zach engrave political theory into the back of his neck with his teeth. But everything moves so hard and so fast that before he knows it it's game set and match and he's so spent he can't see straight and, sinking into the pillows and now-warm, sweat-slippery arms, he returns to complacency as easy as anything.

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Political Cartoon
The next morning, rain or shine, they go out for coffee, and Zacharias spews more anti-establishment jargon into his cup as Harry serenely sips his tea and rustles the newspaper. It is their own particular intimacy, not exactly romantic, but it's rank of comfort and familiarity, a gesture as common to them as the way their fingers will casually brush together under the tabletop, or the way their eyes will catch in that moment before Zach begins a furious tirade on the very existence of nuclear weaponry. They both know that, before long, the process will repeat itself--and keep on repeating itself, ad infinitum, as long as there's a daily paper and a politics section worth ranting about--but neither really minds that. It's a bit funny, really. Rather like a clever joke that no one gets.