No. 12 Grimmauld Place
Soft, gentle daylight sieved through the window grilles of the boys' room on the upper floor into golden columns that fell in geometric patterns across two boys bent over their desks in a state of frantic, sweating concentration.
Quill scratched across parchment. The rushed, slightly desperate rasping sound filled the room, interposed by occasional muttered curses and the creak of chair legs as one or the other shifted restlessly.
Harry's wrist ached badly. But he didn't dare stop. He held his breath against the pain, his green eyes remained fixed not on the words his quill was leaving behind—he had frankly stopped caring whether those words made sense around three paragraphs ago—but on how much blank parchment remained between him and freedom.
The answer was: not much.
He scrawled on at breakneck pace, muttering the words under his breath as he wrote them.
Ron, sitting beside him with his own quill working heatedly, was in much the same state.
The old clock on the wall faithfully recorded each passing second with its tick. When the hour hand reached ten—
"Done!"
Harry flung down his quill and leapt from his chair with enough energy to rattle it backward.
Both hands went above his head in a whoop of release—the same cry that he'd let out after catching the Snitch in a hard-fought Quidditch match.
Ron, by contrast, looked as though someone had died—specifically, as though his own dreams had died.
He snatched Harry's parchment and scanned it resentfully. Once he'd confirmed that Harry's essay did indeed meet the minimum length Professor Binns had required—he let out a groan of despair and collapsed face-first onto the desk.
All the energy went out of him at once. His arms spread flat, his cheek pressed against the parchment, and he lay there exuding defeat.
"Hand it over, Ron—don't even think about wriggling out of it!"
Ron's dramatic groan of suffering earned him not a scrap of sympathy; if anything, Harry's grin grew wider and more satisfied. The hand remained extended, palm up, waiting.
"Fine—here—you absolute—" Ron let out a furious, mimed howl of betrayal.
He thrusted his hand into his pocket and produced a fistful of coins. He picked through them and extracted a single Galleon.
The rest he dropped back in: the Sickles, the Knuts, and, handled with slightly more care, the commemorative coin Professor Watson had given him.
"This Galleon was destined for greater things," Ron said with tremendous mournfulness, pressing the gold coin into Harry's waiting palm.
"A bet's a bet, Ron—" Harry laughed. "It's only one Galleon. Don't lose your dignity over it."
At that moment the door swung open.
Someone they'd known would appear today—yet whose actual appearance still sent a jolt of delight through both of them. She stood in the doorway for a moment.
Harry hadn't even managed to call out in surprise before the girl in the doorway crossed the room in three quick steps and threw her arms around him.
"It's only been two weeks, Hermione—" Harry said, though the happiness surging through him at that moment was many times greater than winning any single Galleon or any Quidditch match. He hugged her back tightly.
Then it was Ron's turn. There had been a faint, involuntary nervousness on his face until that moment.
Hermione turned to him with the same bright, genuine smile she'd given Harry and pulled him into an equally warm embrace, and the nervousness dissolved completely. Ron's face broke into a wide wholehearted grin.
"How was the holiday, Hermione?" he asked, stepping back to look her over.
She was wearing a pale blue sundress in Muggle style. Her feet were in light sandals. She'd clearly been too eager to see them to bother removing her straw hat, which remained perched on her head trimmed with a white ribbon tied into a jolly bow.
The generous sunshine of wherever she'd been had given her skin a faint, warm tan.
Not that it diminished her appearance in the slightest—rather the opposite. Both Harry and Ron noticed with some surprise that in just two weeks, Hermione seemed noticeably taller.
"Phew!" Hermione's smile was every bit as bright as theirs, warm with relief and pleasure at being back. She cast her eyes around the room; the rather worse state of things compared to before made her nose wrinkle slightly.
But then she let out a happy breath.
"Dad and Mum took me to Dijon. The scenery was genuinely stunning, all that rolling golden farmland and those neat vineyards, though the weather was much drier than London and I never quite got used to the dust in the air.
But never mind all that—how are your summer assignments coming along? You haven't left them all for the last week, have you?"
"Finished!" said Harry.
"Nearly done!" said Ron.
Both of them shifted subtly in their seats, blocking the view of the parchments on the desk behind them—the half-invented History of Magic essays they'd dashed off in a race. Not that Hermione would have thought much of them even without that particular detail.
"Oh, really!" Hermione looked genuinely, perhaps naively pleased. "I honestly thought without someone keeping a proper eye on you, you'd both leave everything until the last possible moment. I'm impressed."
Both boys smiled. Neither corrected her.
"Anyway—" Hermione tucked a strand of hair back from her face.
"Dad and Mum weren't really happy about me leaving for Grimmauld Place this early. They wanted me to stay home until term starts. You know I didn't spend much time with them this summer—the hearing, and then the battle at Diagon Alley got in the way—"
"How did you convince them, Hermione?" Harry asked with eagerness, pretending to be deeply interested. Because if Hermione noticed the state of their essays, her stubborn, exacting nature would almost certainly compel her to make them write the whole thing over again.
"I told them I needed to come early to buy things for next term before the rush—which is genuinely true, by the way, there are always long queues in the shops the week before term starts. I didn't tell them the wizarding world had just been through a fairly significant battle and general period of crisis.
I only said that things had been a bit unsettled lately, and that I'd feel better going to buy supplies with Harry and Ron rather than on my own. And then they agreed, eventually."
She seemed entirely comfortable with this selective presentation of facts and looked to be in high spirits.
"Oh, and—did you both receive the Hogwarts booklist? Something rather strange—I went through it twice, and I couldn't find any required books listed for Defence Against the Dark Arts next term. Usually there's at least something—"
"Maybe they haven't decided who to lumber with the job yet!" Ron said. Like Harry, he was doing his best to keep the conversation going and away from the essays.
"We've all been waiting for you to arrive, actually—now that you're here we can leave for Diagon Alley straightaway!!"
"They're already downstairs waiting for us!" Hermione suddenly remembered.
She grabbed Harry and Ron each by one arm and began hurrying them toward the door and down the stairs.
"How did you get here, Hermione?" Harry asked, managing to glance sideways at the large trunk sitting neatly outside Ginny's bedroom door as they passed the second-floor landing. A month of living out of that trunk, judging by its apparent weight. "Muggle taxi?"
"Don't be silly, Harry—the Knight Bus, of course—"
"But—!" Ron started, looking puzzled. Before he could voice the question, Hermione answered it.
"I know what you're thinking, and yes, the Death Eaters did use the Knight Bus during the battle—the Prophet reported it, they hijacked it to transport the giants to the battlefield. But they didn't kill the driver or the conductor."
"Why not, though?" Harry asked, genuinely baffled by this particular restraint from people who hadn't shown much restraint about anything else. "Why spare the Knight Bus crew? Did the Death Eaters suddenly grow integrity?"
"Maybe You-Know-Who has a particular soft spot for the Knight Bus," Ron said, his mouth twisting in a wry grin. "Perhaps he rode it in his youth and it holds warm memories."
"Ronald—"
"I'm just offering an explanation—"
They came down into the kitchen of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, to find the rest of the party already gathered and clearly having been ready for some time.
Mrs. Weasley stood near the fireplace, Ginny beside her. Fred and George occupied their usual positions near the door.
"Get a move on, Ron!" Ginny said while watching without sympathy as Ron descended the last few stairs and immediately managed to snag his robes on a splinter at the base of the banister.
He struggled with increasing frustration to free himself, the fabric were tight in a way that made clear the robes were a size too small in addition to being poorly maintained.
"We still have to go to Gringotts first, and I want to look at the bookshop properly—"
Harry and the Weasleys had made this journey to Diagon Alley many times over the years.
But something was different about Mrs. Weasley this morning that Harry noticed. She often had an anxious, restless caution before these Diagon Alley trips. Never before had she looked quite so self-assured.
She stood by the fireplace smiling not saying a single word about how Ron was manhandling his robes or about timings or about anything at all really.
Harry knew where that confidence came from: the prize money Ron had brought home from the Triwizard Tournament and then the significant rise in Mr. Weasley's salary.
"Stop complaining about the robes, Ron—we can get you a new set while we're there. Consider it advance encouragement."
"Encouragement for what?" Ron's head snapped up from his struggle with the splinter, sudden hope flared in his face.
"Do you even need to ask?" Hermione had been standing slightly to one side, looking at each of them in turn and was the first to work it out.
She drew a small breath, looking a bit apprehensive. "Fifth year is O.W.L. year, isn't it. We'll be sitting our Ordinary Wizarding Levels this year—all of them—oh goodness—"
She pressed a hand briefly to her chest. "Just thinking about the number of subjects involved makes my heart race a little."
"If it meant skipping O.W.L.s," Ron said, instantly deflated, "I would wear these rags every single day for an entire year without complaint."
"Don't be dramatic," Hermione said.
"I'm being entirely sincere," Ron said.
They crowded toward the fireplace in a cheerful tangle, every face was wearing a smile.
The prospect of Hogwarts starting, of returning to the familiar world of the school, had lifted the room's spirits.
Harry thought it was a bit like the Olympics. On a day like this one, other concerns had to step back.
"Wait—wasn't Gringotts damaged in the battle, Mrs. Weasley?"
Harry suddenly thought to ask, turning to her at the back of the queue, catching his memory.
Fred and George had already stepped into the fire with twin pops of green flame.
He'd deposited his Triwizard Tournament winnings in his vault on their last Diagon Alley visit—walking around with that quantity of Galleons on his person would have been conspicuous and frankly uncomfortable.
It had been the first time, in the years since he'd inherited his parents' vault, that he'd ever put money in rather than taken it out. Which meant that all his running funds were currently sitting in that vault. If it had been destroyed, he'd have had to go cap in hand to Sirius.
"Oh, don't worry yourself about that, dear—" Mrs. Weasley beamed. "The vaults are extremely deep underground. The fighting stayed above ground level; it never came anywhere near the vault levels. And Gringotts has stated officially that they'll compensate fully for any minor damage to individual vaults."
"I barely recognize the goblins anymore," Harry muttered and stepped into the fireplace.
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