The Quidditch finals was against Slytherin
The season had arrived at this point through its own specific logic. Gryffindor had beaten Ravenclaw in February by two hundred and thirty points. They had lost to Hufflepuff in the first match of the year — a clean loss, one hundred and fifty to fifty, which had sat in the standings like a fixed number ever since. The arithmetic was straightforward: to win the Cup, Gryffindor needed to outscore Slytherin by at least two hundred points across the two matches combined. The Snitch was worth a hundred and fifty. Harry could not catch it until the Chasers had opened up a sixty-point lead. Harry knew this. Wood had written it on a board and underlined it twice.
The Cup was still possible — the arithmetic still worked, just barely, if Gryffindor won by enough and Harry caught the Snitch at the right moment. Wood had scheduled six additional practices in the intervening weeks. The team had not complained about a single one of them.
He watched the match from the Gryffindor stands with Hermione on his left and Neville on his right. He had taken two photographs already — one of the pre-match warm-up from the stands, which caught Harry against the grey April sky in a way that he thought would develop well, and one of Hermione watching the match, which he had taken without her noticing and which he thought would be one of the better ones in the album.
He had been watching Harry for fifty-two minutes with the camera ready and had not taken a single photograph of the match itself. Not because nothing was happening — things were happening, consequential things, the Chasers building a lead in careful increments — but because the photograph he wanted had not arrived yet. It would be a specific moment, and he would know it when it came, and pressing the shutter before it came would produce a photograph of anticipation rather than the thing itself.
He watched Harry and he watched the scoreboard and he understood what Harry was doing. Harry had seen the Snitch twice — he was certain of this, had watched the slight shift in focus both times, the almost-movement that wasn't pursuit because the lead wasn't there yet. Forty points. Then fifty. The Gryffindor Chasers working with the specific controlled urgency of people who knew exactly what number they needed and were building toward it with everything they had.
He waited. Harry waited.
The sixty came in the fifty-eighth minute. A goal that took it from fifty to sixty and there was a half-second where the whole stadium seemed to understand simultaneously what that number meant, and then Harry moved
Harry caught the Snitch from a position that should not have been achievable and was — rising from below the Malfoy, coming up from underneath, the gold already in his fingers before anyone in the stands had fully understood what they were watching. The Snitch had been there, waiting, and Harry had known exactly where it was and had been waiting for permission to take it.
The noise from the Gryffindor stands had the quality of something that had been building for forty minutes and had nowhere left to go except outward all at once.
Hermione grabbed his arm without looking at him, which was the specific response of someone who was more invested in Quidditch than she liked to admit.
He took a photograph from the crowd which was surrounding the team who had lifted up Harry who in turn was raising the Quidditch cup.
Sirius was in the stands.
He had not announced he was coming --- this was characteristic --- and Ron had not known until he saw him from across the pitch after the match, standing near the teachers' section with Dumbledore in what appeared to be a perfectly comfortable conversation, the two of them watching the celebrating students with the quality of people who had each decided the other was worth taking seriously.
Sirius looked well. Better than Christmas, better than the gaunt quality he had carried through most of the first months after Azkaban. He had the specific energy of someone who had been useful and knew it --- the private work Ron had heard about through his father, the Auror consultations on dark object identification, the afternoons in the Black library organising what was there into something that could be used. He looked like someone who had found a reason to be awake in the morning.
He found Ron in the crowd with the ease of someone who had been looking.
'Good match,' Sirius said.
'You were here,' Ron said.
'Dumbledore invited me,' Sirius said, with the quality of someone who had not asked why and had not needed to. 'I thought I'd come and see Harry play properly.' He looked across the pitch to where Harry was still in the air, doing a circuit with the Snitch still in his hand and the team around him. 'He's extraordinary.'
'He's been working at it,' Ron said.
'I can tell,' Sirius said. He looked at Ron with the warm assessment he always had. 'How are you?'
'Good,' Ron said. 'I have something I want to talk to you about. Not now. After.'
'After the celebration?' Sirius said. 'That could be quite late.'
'Tomorrow morning, then,' Ron said. 'If you're staying.'
'Dumbledore's put me in one of the guest rooms,' Sirius said. 'Come and find me after breakfast.'
The celebration lasted the entire night.
It began in the Gryffindor common room with the specific quality of a space that had been waiting for exactly this occasion --- the common room at full capacity, the noise genuine and unmanaged, someone having produced a quantity of Butterbeer through means that McGonagall later described in her report as unclear. It continued through the evening and into the late hours with the graduated quality of a celebration that had moved through its phases: the initial noise, the gradual settling into smaller groups, the conversations that only happened in the particular context of three in the morning when the event that had gathered everyone was still present but the urgency had passed.
He sat at one point with Harry, Hermione, Ginny, Neville and Dean on the floor near the fire in the way that was only comfortable for people who had grown up in houses without enough chairs. Harry still had the Snitch --- was turning it over in his fingers with the unconscious quality of someone who had caught something and was still understanding what it meant. Ginny was telling a story about the final from her position in the stands that was more dramatic than his own recollection and significantly better told. Neville was eating the last of someone's Chocolate Frogs with the focused appreciation of someone who had been nervous all match and was now working through the stress by other means.
Hermione was beside him with her shoulder against his, talking to Parvati and Lavender in the specific way she talked to them now --- more direct and less careful than it had been in September, the manner of someone who had found that people she had slightly underestimated had turned out to be worth the full investment.
He took two photographs. One of Harry with the Snitch. One of Hermione laughing at something Parvati had said, which caught something in her expression that the posed version would not have had.
Around two in the morning he sat with just Harry, the others having migrated to other conversations, and Harry said: 'Sirius came.'
'I saw him,' Ron said. 'I'm having breakfast with him tomorrow.'
Harry looked at him. 'He told me about the business idea.' A pause. 'He was excited. The actual Sirius kind of excited, not the performing it kind.'
'What did he say about it?' Ron said.
'He said it was the first idea he'd heard that sounded like something he'd actually want to do,' Harry said. 'He said the bookshop part was almost insultingly good as a cover because he knew Lupin genuinely would run a bookshop.' A pause. 'He also said it was your idea and he wanted to know how you'd thought of it.'
'I thought about what he actually is,' Ron said. 'Rather than what the situation usually asks people to be.'
Harry was quiet for a moment. 'That's what you do. With people.'
'It's useful,' Ron said.
'It's more than that,' Harry said, with the directness he occasionally produced at two in the morning. 'You see people. Actually. And then you figure out what they need rather than what's convenient.'
Ron absorbed this.
'You do it too,' he said. 'You've been doing it all year.'
'I've been learning it,' Harry said. 'From watching you.'
The fire had burned down to embers. The common room had thinned. Somewhere near the window, Seamus and Dean had fallen asleep in chairs.
'Good year,' Harry said.
'Yes,' Ron said.
'Next one's going to be harder,' Harry said. It was said without weight, just acknowledgement, the tone of someone who knew what was coming and had decided to look at it directly.
'It is,' Ron said. 'We'll be ready.'
Harry looked at the Snitch in his fingers.
'Yeah,' he said. 'I think we will.'
They sat in the embers of the celebration until the fire went out, and then went to bed, and it was the right ending for the right kind of night.