The days after the Chamber had a strange quality to them — the particular unreality that followed large events, when the world insisted on continuing at its normal pace despite the fact that the people in it were still catching up.
Madam Pomfrey kept them for the night and released them the following morning with a list of instructions that Harry accepted with resigned familiarity and he read carefully and actually intended to follow. His mother had stayed, occupying the chair beside his bed with the immovable quality of a woman who had decided her presence was non-negotiable and dared the universe to argue. His father had taken Ginny home the previous evening with the gentle efficiency of a parent who understood when a child needed their own room and their own quiet.
The morning was clear and ordinary and entirely surreal.
"How are you feeling?" his mother asked, over the hospital wing breakfast that Madam Pomfrey produced with professional adequacy and no particular warmth. She asked it the way she had been asking it since last night — frequently, specifically, with her eyes doing the additional work of watching for things his words might not include.
"Good," he said honestly. "Better than yesterday. The — everything is still sharp. The thinking."
She nodded slowly. She'd stopped pushing on this, which he suspected meant she'd decided to observe rather than interrogate, which was, if anything, more challenging to manage. Molly Weasley observing quietly was considerably more thorough than Molly Weasley asking questions.
"Your father and I," she said, after a moment, "are very proud of you."
He looked up from his breakfast.
"What you did," she said. "Going back through those rocks. Getting to Ginny in time." Her voice did something complicated on Ginny's name that she smoothed over quickly. "You didn't have a wand. You had no way of knowing what you'd find on the other side. You just —" She stopped. Started again. "You're very brave, Ron."
He was quiet for a moment, because the thing about being told you were brave was that it required you to consider whether the assessment was accurate, and his assessment was that it had been less bravery and more the particular kind of forward momentum that happened when you knew what was on the other side and couldn't stand not doing something about it.
But she didn't know that. And what she was describing — the choice to go forward alone, without a wand, into something unknown — that had been real, regardless of what had informed it.
"I knew Harry was in there," he said finally. "Ginny was in there." He paused. "What else was I going to do?"
She looked at him for a long moment with an expression he had to interpret through Ron's memories of her, which described it, accurately, as the face she made when one of her children said something that reminded her, with pleasant surprise, that they had turned out well.
She reached over and covered his hand with hers and didn't say anything else, which was its own kind of answer.
They got his wand the next day.
Ollivander's had the same quality it always had — the dusty, expectant stillness of a place where something important was always about to happen. Ollivander himself appeared from the shadows between the shelves with the unhurried certainty of a man who knew exactly where everything was and had never felt the need to rush about it.
He looked at the broken wand — the two pieces of willow and the curled unicorn hair, which his mother had carefully wrapped and brought — with the expression of a craftsman examining something that had been misused.
"Mended with spellotape," Ollivander said, in a tone that suggested spellotape was a personal affront.
"It worked for a while," he offered.
"It worked poorly for a while," Ollivander corrected, without heat, "and then it catastrophically failed, which is the inevitable destination of a mended wand." He set the pieces down and turned his pale eyes to him with the full, slightly unsettling weight of someone who had been reading people through their wands for a very long time. "You will need a new one."
"Yes."
The process was different from what Ron's secondhand experience of wand shopping had been — faster in some ways, slower in others, Ollivander going through his initial selections with methodical efficiency before the narrowing happened and arrived somewhere definitive.
Hawthorn. Eleven inches. Thunderbird tail feather.
He picked it up and felt it the way you feel something that was made for you — not a dramatic event, just a rightness, the specific absence of wrongness. It was lighter than Ron's old wand and balanced differently and when he gave it the smallest test movement the resulting shower of amber sparks had a sharp, almost electric quality that Ollivander observed with the particular attention of someone making mental notes.
"Interesting," Ollivander said.
"Good interesting or concerning interesting?" he asked.
"Hawthorn is a complex wood," Ollivander said, which was not exactly an answer but was very much in the Ollivander tradition. "Suited to those who are more complex than they appear. Thunderbird tail feather is rarer — it responds to the caster's instincts, to the part of them that acts before they've finished deciding." He tilted his head. "It will serve you well, I think. If you're honest with it."
He wasn't entirely sure what to do with that, so he thanked Ollivander and paid for the wand and added a holster — dragonhide, right forearm, enchanted to release with a flick of his wrist, the kind of thing he'd thought about from the moment he'd been standing in the Chamber with nothing to defend himself with and found it somewhat inconvenient — while his mother looked on with the resigned expression of a parent watching a child discover practicality.
"You've never wanted a holster before," she observed.
"I've recently updated my views on preparedness," he said.