The Gryffindor common room after the feast had the feel of a space resuming its identity. Over the summer it had been empty rooms. Now it was a place again — the fire going, the portraits commenting on things with the cheerful opinions of people who had been waiting for an audience, the particular warm noise of a house returning to itself after months away.
Harry came in from his conversation with McGonagall in a state that was less restored than Ron would have liked but more than he had feared. He settled into the chair nearest the fire with the specific exhaustion of someone whose first day back had contained considerably more emotional content than they had allocated space for. Hermione took the armchair across from him, Crookshanks arranging himself across her lap with the proprietary ease of something that had assessed the available furniture and made its decision.
Ron sat on the hearthrug with his back against the armchair and looked at the room.
The fifth-years were in the corner in the serious, slightly grim cluster of people who had remembered during the feast that O.W.L.s were this year and had already started recalibrating. The seventh-years were the opposite — the fierce, slightly desperate relief of people who had decided that N.E.W.T.s were seven months away and they were going to have one good evening before they thought about them. The first-years were in the uncertain huddle of people who had arrived somewhere new and were still deciding what kind of people they were going to be here.
His own yearmates were scattered through the room with the easy familiarity of people who had done this before and knew where they belonged.
Ron's memories had their names and shapes: Seamus Finnigan and Dean Thomas and Neville Longbottom and Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil, and the others around the edges. He was careful with himself about what those memories were. He had the history. He did not yet have the people themselves, and there was a meaningful difference between the two.
Neville was near the window, alone, with the quiet and slightly careful quality he had at the beginning of terms — the quality of someone deciding whether this year was going to be the same as the last one or different.
Ron had a theory about Neville that had been developing since the Chamber. It was informed partly by what the books had eventually revealed and partly by what he could observe directly, and the theory was that Neville Longbottom was considerably more than he had been given room to be so far. The question was less what was there and more what it needed to become visible.
He crossed the room and sat down beside him.
"Good summer?" Ron said.
Neville looked at him with the slight surprise of someone who had been expecting to be left alone and wasn't, and had mixed feelings about the disruption. "Alright," he said. "Gran took me to visit my parents." A pause, and something moved through his expression that he managed quickly. "She thought it would be good. To start the year with that."
Ron held the information with care. Neville's parents were in St. Mungo's. Had been for twelve years. This was not a thing to respond to with casual condolence or with the busy redirection of someone who found the subject uncomfortable.
"That sounds hard," he said. Simply, and left it there.
Neville looked at him. "Yeah," he said, after a moment. "It is. Every time." He exhaled slowly. "But Gran's right, I think. About going. It matters that they know someone came."
"It does," Ron agreed.
They were quiet for a moment in the way that two people could be quiet when something real had been said and didn't need to be added to.
"You were in Egypt," Neville said, moving to firmer ground with the instinct of someone who had learned to navigate away from things that had been said fully. "I read about the magical district in Cairo last year — for Herbology, there's an aloe variant near the delta that's supposed to have remarkable—" He stopped himself. "Sorry. You probably don't want to hear about aloe variants."
"I actually saw that aloe," Ron said. "In the market district. Bill pointed it out." He watched Neville's expression shift toward the specific animated interest he had when something botanical became relevant. "What's the remarkable thing about it?"
Neville told him. It took twelve minutes and was genuinely interesting, and by the end of it the careful quality Neville had arrived at the window with had relaxed into something more simply like himself, and Ron had confirmed what he had suspected: that the gap between Neville being alone and Neville talking was not one of willingness but of invitation.
He filed that away.
Seamus Finnigan was on the other side of the room telling a story to Dean Thomas and two first-years who had been adopted into the general orbit of people who found Seamus easy to be around. The story appeared to involve a dragon and a questionable decision made by someone's uncle, and it was being told with the particular energy of someone whose primary mode was social — not superficially, but in the specific way of someone who understood the world through other people and processed it through the telling. The first-years were laughing. Dean was drawing something in the margin of a piece of parchment and laughing at the same time, which was a skill.
Ron watched them from the hearthrug and thought about the year ahead, and about the photographs already in his coat pocket, and about the common room fire doing its warm and ordinary work.
He reached for his camera.
The photograph he took showed the room as it was — Neville in the window seat, turning back to the conversation with the beginning of something easier in his expression; Harry in the armchair by the fire, not quite all the way back yet but getting there; Hermione with her book open and Crookshanks ignoring it; Seamus mid-story with his hands doing something explanatory; Dean's pen moving. All of it.
He pinned it inside the lid of his trunk later that night, beside the one from the train compartment and the one of the staff table.
The collection was beginning.