The expanded pouch was from a magical accessories shop in Diagon Alley proper — a small, dark green leather pouch, unassuming, with the Undetectable Extension Charm and a Featherlight Charm both woven into the interior. He had asked for the capacity of a medium trunk, which the shop assistant had confirmed was achievable, and had tested it by putting his arm in up to the elbow and finding significantly more space than the exterior suggested.
Into the pouch: his money, organized in the specific arrangement he'd settled on. The Invisibility Cloak, folded small. And space for the secondary broom, once he had it.
He wore the pouch on a cord around his neck, under his shirt, alongside nothing else. The weight of it was negligible. The security of it was not.
He remembered Ron had read about the language enchantments in a Ministry profile from three years ago — a piece in the Prophet marking Bartemius Crouch Senior's appointment to a senior Ministry role, which had mentioned in passing that he spoke over two hundred languages. Ron had read it with the specific attention of someone who had encountered a fact that didn't fit the standard framework of what was possible and had filed it for later investigation. The follow-up had been easy enough: a quiet conversation with his father, who knew Crouch professionally and who had said, with the careful neutrality he used for Ministry colleagues he respected but did not admire, that Crouch was known to have used magical linguistic acquisition extensively earlier in his career when he was building his international network. He hadn't named a shop. But Ron had enough to work from.
He found it on his second pass through the side streets off Diagon Alley proper — past the cartographers, past the specialty parchment supplier, a narrow frontage between two larger shops with a small brass sign that said simply Lingua. Est. 1842. The interior was the size of a generous study, lined with shelving, and smelled of something slightly mineral that he suspected was the enchantment process rather than the contents. The proprietor was a witch in late middle age who assessed him with the specific look of someone who was used to customers not knowing quite what they had walked into.
He explained what he wanted. She asked three questions — about purpose, about timeline, about whether he had any prior magical language work — and then turned to the shelving and produced three vials. French, German, Arabic. He had thought about this order: French first because the wizarding culinary tradition had borrowed from it and he intended to understand what he was borrowing from. German because the theoretical literature in Arithmancy and Ancient Runes was disproportionately German and he was tired of working from translations. Arabic because he was going to Egypt in two weeks and because the oldest living magical tradition in the world had done its thinking in Arabic, and he intended to think in it too.
'Three days apart,' the proprietor said, with the manner of someone who had given this instruction many times and was measuring whether the current recipient was going to follow it. 'One vial per language, at night, empty stomach. No more than three in a week.' She looked at him steadily. 'And not magical languages — Gobbledegook, Mermish, anything where the magic and the communication are inseparable. The enchantment transfers the structure but not the magical element, and the result doesn't function. Don't waste your money trying.'
'Any living non-magical language?' he said.
'Any of them,' she said. 'We owl-order as well, if you need more later.'
He noted the address. He paid for the three vials. He added them to the fifth compartment of the trunk, padded against the other contents, and made a note in his pocket notebook of what to order next: Mandarin, Sanskrit, Spanish. In time. Three days apart, no more than three in a week. There was no rushing the list.
Quality Quidditch Supplies was near the end of the alley, and he arrived there in the early afternoon with the focused attention of someone who had done their research and knew what they were buying.
The Firebolt was in the window.
He had known it would be. He had read about it in the Daily Prophet's Quidditch section the previous week — released earlier this year, the most significant advance in racing broom technology in a decade, the specific combination of engineering and enchantment work that produced something genuinely categorically different from what had come before.
He looked at it for a moment through the glass.
The Firebolt was not a sentimental purchase. He was not buying it because he'd read about it or because it was famous. In the original timeline Sirius had sent Harry one anonymously --- an act of love that had also caused Harry months of grief when McGonagall confiscated it on safety grounds. None of that would happen here. Sirius was free. He would give Harry his Firebolt in person, when the time was right, and Harry would know who it was from.
He was buying it because he had done enough flying with Ron's muscle memory integrated into his own to know that he was good at flying — properly good, not just adequate — and because a person who was good at flying and who expected to be in situations where fast, precise aerial movement might be the difference between a good outcome and a bad one should have the best available tool.
That was all.
He went inside.
The shop assistant — young, enthusiastic, with the energy of someone who genuinely loved the subject — began the sales pitch with the practiced fluency of someone who had been giving it all summer.
He let her finish. It was polite and it was thorough and some of it was genuinely informative about the specific enchantments on the acceleration mechanism, which he hadn't fully understood from the published specifications.
Then he said: "I'll take it."
She blinked. People apparently argued more.
He also took the latest Nimbus — the 2001, which had come out the previous year and was the best of the brooms currently available other than the firebolt, significantly better than what Hogwarts kept for lessons and adequate for any purpose he intended to use a secondary broom for. The secondary broom was for practical use and for the expanded pouch, where it would sit alongside the Invisibility Cloak as the quick-exit component of a kit that he was building with the same logic he'd brought to everything else this summer.
The Firebolt went into the broom holder on the trunk, secured with the dragonhide loops and the securing charms.
The Nimbus went into the expanded pouch.
He walked out of Quality Quidditch Supplies with the ease of someone who had crossed the last item off a list and found that everything on it had gone exactly as planned.
The owl came last, because Eeylops required time and he'd left himself time.
The shop smelled of feather and the specific warm darkness that birds preferred, and the owls regarded him from their perches with the varied assessment of creatures that had been evaluating people for a very long time and had strong opinions about the results.
He walked the length of the shop once without stopping, just looking.
He was looking for what he'd decided he was looking for: intelligent, hardy, not showy. Something that would work.
He found it on the third perch from the back — a medium-sized tawny owl, brown with darker markings, who looked back at him with the level attention of something that was also doing its own assessment and had not yet reached a conclusion. Not performing interest. Not performing indifference. Just watching with the focused attention of a mind that was engaged.
He held out his arm.
The owl looked at his arm. Then at him. Then at his arm again.
Then it stepped onto his arm with the deliberate weight of something that had decided and was implementing the decision.
"That one," he said to the shop assistant, who had appeared beside him.
"Good choice," she said. "Female. About two years old. She's been here for three months — most people want the more dramatic ones."
"Most people are wrong," he said, which made the shop assistant laugh.
He named her on the walk back through Diagon Alley, the owl sitting on his shoulder with the settled quality of something that had found its arrangement and was satisfied with it.
Mira.
It wasn't a grand name. It was a name from somewhere he didn't examine closely, a name that sat right in the way that the hawthorn wand had sat right — the specific absence of wrongness.
She turned her head and looked at him sideways.
"Yes," he said. "That's right."
She looked forward again.
He met his mother at the Leaky Cauldron for lunch, as arranged, and found her already at a table with her own purchases organized beside her and a pot of tea on its way.
She looked at his trunk — the new one, considerably more substantial than what he'd arrived with — and at the owl on his shoulder and at the broom holder on the trunk's side, which currently held the Firebolt.
She looked at the Firebolt for a slightly longer moment.
"Ronald," she said.
"It's the best one," he said. "I have the money and it's the best one."
She looked at him with the expression she wore when she was deciding between the argument she could make and the acknowledgment that the argument was not going to change anything.
"Sit down," she said. "The tea is almost here."
He sat down. Mira transferred from his shoulder to the back of his chair with the easy adaptability of a bird that had decided he was her person and was comfortable with wherever her person happened to be.
His mother looked at the owl with the slightly softened expression she had for animals in general, which was a consistent chink in her otherwise comprehensive parental armor.
"She's lovely," she said.
"Mira," he said.
His mother nodded, apparently satisfied with this, and poured the tea when it arrived, and they ate lunch in the comfortable quiet of two people who had spent the morning doing separate things and were now simply glad to be in the same place for a while.