He found the Room of Requirements on a Wednesday evening in the second week of May, three days after Hermione had been released from the hospital wing and two days after the rest of the school had begun the particular collective exhale that preceded end of term.
He hadn't been looking for it specifically. He'd been walking, thinking, which had become a more active and deliberate process since the Chamber, his mind turning over problems with a thoroughness that occasionally required physical movement to accompany it - and the seventh floor corridor had presented itself in the way that the right place sometimes presented itself when you were moving with enough purpose.
He walked past the stretch of blank wall three times.
He needed a base of knowledge to build on
What would a second year at Hogwarts be required to know?
He had to start slow. Even if he Ron's memories, he had never cast a spell or made a potion. He had to start from the beginning
The door appeared on the third pass. Unassuming. Old wood, iron handle, set into the stone as though it had always been there, which perhaps it had.
He opened it.
The room on the other side was not large, but it was exactly right in the way that things the Room produced were always exactly right — a study space, clean and quiet, with good light from sources he couldn't identify and a desk that was the appropriate height and a chair that had the specific supportive quality of something designed for long use. Two bookshelves stood against the far wall, full but not overwhelming, their contents organized with a logic he understood immediately upon looking at them.
First and second year curriculum. All core subjects. Organized by topic rather than by class, which was, he noted, a more efficient system than Hogwarts generally used. Some general topics that would be needed by a new entry into the British magical world, like magical districts, basic laws, transportation avenues.
He stood in the doorway for a moment and took stock.
One and half months . That was what remained of the year after the exams had been cancelled — Dumbledore had made the announcement quietly, with the particular diplomatic care of someone managing a situation in which the normal mechanisms of assessment had been rendered somewhat beside the point by the events of the previous several months. One month in a school that was mostly emptying out, with Harry occupied by Quidditch practice- Wood, who was entering his final year, had scheduled sessions with the focused intensity of a man who had decided that the universe owed him a Quidditch Cup and he intended to collect. Hermione was occupied by the twin projects of catching up on two months of missed work and beginning, gently but unmistakably, to add planning for next year's five electives on top of it.
He had time.
He sat down at the desk, pulled the first book from the relevant shelf — second year Charms theory, which he'd technically attended the classes for but had not, as Ron, paid adequate attention to — and began.
The work was not glamorous. That was the first and most important thing he established for himself, early, because glamorizing it would have been a way of making it about something other than what it was.
What it was: systematic. He worked through first and then second year curriculum subject by subject with the methodical attention of someone who was not trying to impress anyone, not performing effort, but genuinely learning — filling gaps, correcting misunderstandings, building the kind of solid theoretical foundation that Ron had never quite assembled because Ron had been operating on the assumption, conscious or not, that getting by was sufficient.
Getting by was not going to be sufficient for what was coming.
The Occlumency helped in ways he hadn't fully anticipated. He'd understood it as a defense mechanism — and it was — but the mental organization it produced as a byproduct was something else. Information stored cleanly. Retrieved accurately. Cross-referenced efficiently. He could hold the theoretical framework of a spell in his mind while simultaneously running through its practical variations, which made the shift from theory to practice considerably faster than it would otherwise have been.
He practiced the spells in the Room — it provided a practice area when he needed one, the furniture simply rearranging itself with the accommodating ease of something that understood what he was there for — and he brewed the potions in the small, perfectly equipped corner that appeared on the first evening he thought about needing it. He was not, he discovered, naturally gifted at Potions in the way that some people were. He was methodical at Potions, which was different but ultimately more reliable.
Harry came when Quidditch practice permitted.
This happened more often than he'd expected, which told him something useful about Harry's relationship to studying — that it wasn't the subject matter Harry resisted but the context. The classroom, the homework, the specific performance of being assessed. In the Room, with no one watching and nothing to prove, Harry worked with a focused attention that he suspected most of Harry's teachers had never seen.
They sat on opposite sides of the desk and worked in a silence that was comfortable in the specific way that silence between people who understand each other is comfortable — not empty, but full of the low hum of two minds engaged in their own processes, occasionally intersecting when a question needed asking or a problem needed a second perspective.
"You're better at the theory than I expected," Harry said one evening, without particular emphasis, looking up from a second year Transfiguration text.
"The memory charm," he said, which was the answer he gave for everything and had the advantage of being both true and incomplete.
Harry looked at him for a moment with that quality of attention he sometimes deployed without appearing to — the directness that saw more than it announced. Then he looked back at his book. "Right," he said, in a tone that was not entirely convinced and was clearly not going to push.
Later, he thought. Not yet. But later, when the trust between them had had more time, when he understood better what Harry could hold and what he couldn't, there would be more honesty available. Some of it. As much as was possible.
Hermione came after dinner most evenings, once she'd satisfied the first portion of her catch-up schedule.
She arrived with her own books and her own agenda and occasionally the slightly frantic energy of someone who had taken on more than was comfortable and was managing it through pure organizational force of will. He watched her across the desk and noted the specific signs — the ink stains that appeared earlier in the evening than they should, indicating longer daytime sessions than she'd planned; the way she occasionally reread the same paragraph twice without catching herself; the slight tension around her eyes that arrived on the days when she was pushing past tired into the territory beyond it.
He didn't say anything about it yet.
Some things needed to reach their own conclusions.
What he did instead was make sure there was tea when she arrived. And that the conversation, in the gaps between working, included things that weren't school — easier with Harry there, because Harry had a natural instinct for making space for ordinary things even in extraordinary circumstances. They talked about Quidditch and about Diagon Alley and about what books they might bring to read over summer, and Hermione sometimes looked slightly startled by the ordinariness of these conversations, as though she'd forgotten they were available, which he found quietly heartbreaking and filed away for future monitoring.