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. The opinions were specific, and they were not the only ones.
He witnessed the central incident on a Tuesday afternoon.
Fred and George had identified a section of the south-facing herb rows — Pip's rows, the ones laid in for the business — as an excellent location for a test of something they declined to name in front of witnesses. They had been out there for twenty minutes before Pip appeared.
Pip did not make a sound arriving. Pip simply was not there and then was there, standing at the end of the row with the focused stillness of someone who had assessed a situation and was taking a moment to ensure their response was proportionate.
Fred saw Pip first. He stopped mid-gesture and nudged George.
George turned. Looked at Pip. Looked at the herb row, which had been disturbed in a way that was not going to improve the yield of the third planting. Looked back at Pip.
"We were just—" he started.
Pip's ears moved. Not dramatically. They simply adjusted, with the look of a house elf who had heard many explanations beginning with 'we were just' and had developed firm opinions about how they tended to conclude.
Fred tried instead. "The thing is—"
The ears moved again.
There was a silence of perhaps four seconds, during which Fred and George Weasley, who between them had faced down Filch, Snape, and Percy at his most bureaucratic without visible discomfort, appeared to reconsider their position.
"We'll put it back," George said.
Pip looked at the row. Looked at George. The expression conveyed, without particular aggression, that putting it back was the correct decision and had in fact been the correct decision approximately twenty-three minutes ago.
"Right," Fred said. "Putting it back."
They put it back. Pip observed the process with the quality of someone who was not going to help but was going to ensure the job was done correctly. When they had finished, Pip looked at the row for a long moment, made a small sound that was not quite approval and not quite its absence, and moved on to the next section.
Fred looked at George.
"I think we've been told off," George said.
"By a house elf," Fred said, with the specific tone of someone revising their model of a situation.
"Pip," George said, with the gravity of someone according a title. "Not 'a house elf.'
Fred appeared to consider this. "Fair," he said.
He had watched this from the kitchen window while the kettle was heating. He did not mention having seen it. He thought about mentioning it to his mother, who would have had the expression she had when she received information that was both satisfying and entirely predictable, and decided against it. Some things were better left as Pip's.
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 depth 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, his body 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.