The last two weeks were now almost over.
Mornings were mostly his own — the practice room, the Arithmancy work, the Gobbledegook study that was progressing with the slow satisfying pace of a genuinely difficult thing being done correctly. He had passed what the texts described as the first competency threshold, which meant his vocabulary was sufficient for basic transactions and his grammar was functional enough that a Goblin would understand what he was saying, even if they found his accent and phrasing amusingly rudimentary.
He'd been told Goblins found humans' attempts at their language either annoying or endearing depending on the quality of the attempt. He intended to be in the endearing category.
Afternoons were collective — the whole house, the various projects and conversations and the specific warm chaos of too many people in a space that was now comfortable being occupied by too many people. Harry and Fred and George spent considerable time in the garden doing things that his mother had opinions about. Hermione spent considerable time in his room with the pensieve and the books and the organized note-taking that she approached with the thorough commitment of someone who had decided this was how the last two weeks of summer were going to go.
He didn't push her on the timetable she was running.
He noticed, over the course of the two weeks, that she was sleeping properly. That she came down to breakfast every morning. That she was present in the afternoons in a way that wasn't interrupted by the specific restlessness of someone managing too many competing demands on their attention.
She was, in the particular measure he'd been applying since June, not burning out.
She was going to burn out at school — he was fairly certain of that, because five simultaneous electives and the particular quality of Hermione's commitment to all of them was a trajectory he could see clearly — but she was arriving at school rested, which was the most he could have asked for.
He hoped it would make the landing softer when it came.
Harry, in the evenings, was different in a way he was still cataloguing.
The glasses were gone. The clothes fit. He had spent two weeks eating three meals a day, a fact that Dobby reported with the specific satisfaction of a house-elf who took their responsibilities seriously and was pleased to have them acknowledged. He was physically better than he had been in June — not dramatically, not in ways that showed to anyone who hadn't been paying attention, but in the way that adequate nutrition and adequate sleep changed the quality of a person's presence.
He also had a godfather.
This was the thing that had changed most deeply and most quietly. Sirius was still in St. Mungo's — recovering steadily, corresponding regularly, the letters arriving with the slightly unsteady handwriting that was getting steadier every week. Harry wrote back with a consistency that he thought was new — not the occasional letter of someone maintaining a distant connection but the regular correspondence of someone who had a person and was keeping in contact with them.
He was allowed to visit on the last Saturday before term. He went with him.
Sirius was sitting up and looked better than July — more solid, less translucent, the specific quality of someone whose body was remembering how to do the work it was supposed to do. The grey eyes were still clear. The humor in them was more present than last time, less effortful.
"Weasley," he said, when they came in. "You look less twelve than you did in July."
"It's the clothes," he said.
"No," Sirius said, with the assessment of someone who had been a very good judge of character before Azkaban. "It's not the clothes." He looked at him for a moment. "How's the owl?"
"Good," he said. "She's fast. Smart. She bit George last week, which I consider a mark in her favor."
Sirius grinned — a real grin, unguarded, the specific grin of someone who had remembered how. "You chose well, then."
"I did," he agreed.
Sirius looked at Harry, who was sitting beside the bed with the comfortable ease of someone who had been here enough times that the room had become familiar. "September first," Sirius said.
"September first," Harry confirmed.
"Third year," Sirius said. He appeared to be calculating something. "Lupin is teaching Defense this year."
"I know," Harry said.
Sirius's expression did something complicated and warm and briefly painful, the way it did when something touched the part of the last twelve years that wasn't fully resolved and probably wouldn't be for some time. "He's good," he said. "He's the best of us at it. Always was." He paused. "Tell him —" he stopped. Started again. "Tell him I'm alright. When you see him."
"I will," Harry said quietly.
He thought about Lupin — the werewolf, the best DADA teacher Hogwarts would have in Harry's time there, the man who had lost everything in one night twelve years ago and had been carrying it ever since. Another person for whom the Pettigrew revelation had meant something specific and large.
He thought about the year ahead.
Third year. Lupin. The Dementors on the train chasing Pettigrew this time. The Boggart. The things he could see coming and the things he couldn't. He felt the familiar shape of the constraint he was operating under — the events that had to happen, the things he couldn't prevent without unraveling consequences he couldn't calculate — and he felt, alongside it, the equal and steadier sense of what he could do within it.
Prepare. Be present. Make the choices that were available to him and make them well.
That was enough.
That had to be enough.
He looked at Harry, who was talking to Sirius about Quidditch in the easy way they'd settled into over the summer, and he thought about the long road from here to a graveyard in Little Hangleton and everything between, and he thought about a Cedric Diggory who was currently fifteen years old and had no idea that he was going to need someone to make a different choice on his behalf before the end of fourth year.
He would figure it out.
He had two years.
The night before September first, the Burrow was its fullest version of itself.
All the Weasleys, plus Harry, plus Hermione, around the table that had been enlarged three times since the original construction of the kitchen and that his mother managed with the specific genius of someone who understood that a table was only incidentally about food and primarily about who was sitting at it.
The food was extraordinary, because his mother cooked the way she did everything — with her whole self, and with the particular intensity that she brought to the last meal before the school year, which she had been cooking for children leaving home for long enough that she understood what it was and gave it the weight it deserved.
Percy proposed a toast — Percy always proposed toasts at family dinners and was always mildly embarrassed by this and always did it anyway, which was one of the more purely Percy things about him.
The twins interrupted it to propose a counter-toast that was nominally about the school year and actually about something they were planning that no one else had full information about yet.
His mother toasted her children, which she did simply and without drama, and his father's expression did the thing it did when he felt something large.
Harry was quiet through most of it in the way he was quiet when he was paying attention. He had learned to read Harry's silences over the summer — the ones that were distance and the ones that were presence, and this was presence, the specific quality of someone who was here and knew it and was holding it.
Hermione was making a mental note of something, which he could tell by the angle of her chin and the way she'd gone briefly internal. He would probably never know what the note was. He didn't need to.
Ginny caught his eye across the table and did something with her expression that was simultaneously very thirteen and very Ginny — a flash of something that was acknowledgment and affection and a kind of levity — and he smiled back without performing it and she looked away and there was nothing more to it than that, which was exactly as much as it needed to be.
He looked around the table. At his family — Ron's family, his family, the distinction had collapsed sometime in June and he had stopped marking it — and at the two people who were not family by birth and were family by every other measure, and he thought about what had been built over this summer, quietly and systematically and with the specific intentionality of someone who understood that the things worth having required construction.
The Burrow, improved and still itself.
The resources he'd assembled. The knowledge he was building.
The relationships that were what they were because he had shown up for them consistently, not because he had performed showing up but because he actually had.
September first tomorrow. The train. Third year. Lupin and Dementors and the long patient work of a year that was going to require him to be everything he'd been building toward being.
He was ready.
He was not fully ready — he was honest enough with himself to know that fully ready was not a state that arrived before the fact, only after it — but he was more ready than he had any right to be, and he intended to use every bit of it.
He picked up his fork and ate his mother's cooking and let the evening be what it was.
The table was full and warm and loud, and outside the Burrow's windows the last evening of summer was doing what last evenings did — being itself, completely, without apology, for as long as it lasted.