He left on the twenty-third.
The train south had the particular character of the Hogwarts Express going home in winter — less raucous than September, more settled, the noise of it lower and warmer and threaded through with the particular relief of people who had been working hard and were now definitively not working. Hermione had fallen asleep somewhere near Birmingham with her book open on her chest and Crookshanks arranged across her feet with the proprietary satisfaction of a cat who had been waiting for precisely this configuration since September. Harry was quiet in the good way, the way he was quiet when something had been carrying him and had been set down.
Ron took photographs.
Hermione asleep with the book. Harry at the window watching the Midlands go grey and featureless in the December afternoon. Both of them together when the train went through a tunnel and the window went dark and what was left was the carriage light, warm and specific, the two of them in it looking like what they were — people he had chosen and who had chosen him, in a year that had asked something of all of them and had been met.
He put the camera away and looked at the winter England moving past the window and thought about the Christmas feast happening in four days in a castle he would not be in.
He thought about forty-seven suits of armour.
He thought about the five lords a-leaping and whether the suit on the third floor had sufficient ceiling clearance for any interpretive movement it might feel inspired to attempt.
He hoped it did. He had not, he realized, thought about the ceiling clearance.
He made a note in his pocket notebook: next time, ceiling clearance.
This was useful. He kept it.
They reached King's Cross at half past four. His mother was on the platform — she had come alone, because his father was picking up the twins from wherever the twins had been doing whatever the twins had been doing, and she arrived in the specific way she arrived, which was at the right moment and entirely unsurprised by her own correctness. She looked at the three of them with the expression that was no longer updating its model, that had settled over the autumn into something quieter and more simply like his mother looking at people she loved.
Hermione's parents were there too — the Grangers, composed and warm in the way they had been at the Burrow in August, her mother pulling Hermione into an embrace with the ease of people who knew exactly how to do this. Her father shook Ron's hand and then Harry's with the slightly formal warmth he had for them, and asked after the term with the genuine interest of someone who had been receiving twelve-page letters about Ministry examination requirements all autumn and was therefore relatively well-informed.
Harry went with Sirius.
Sirius was not on the platform — he was outside, in the car he had apparently acquired with the specific enthusiasm of a man who had been in Azkaban for twelve years and had developed strong opinions about freedom of movement. Harry had received a letter describing the car in terms that suggested Sirius had enjoyed purchasing it significantly. Harry went through the barrier at King's Cross with the quality he had developed over the autumn — less braced, more simply present — and Ron watched him go and felt the specific quiet satisfaction of watching someone arrive at something they had needed for a long time.
The Burrow received him the way the Burrow always received him now — with the warmth of something that had been improved and was still itself, the particular smell of his mother's kitchen and the garden in winter and the specific sound of a house that had too many people in it and had been designed, at some level, for exactly that.
His room was the blue room, his books on the shelves he had specified, the Egyptian artwork on the wall cycling through its ten minutes of Nile evening with the patient continuity of something that had been doing this since August and intended to go on doing it indefinitely.
He sat on the edge of his bed and looked at it for a while.
Then he went downstairs and offered to help with dinner, and his mother handed him a knife and a board and a pile of carrots without comment, and he began, and the kitchen filled with the warm noise of a house at Christmas doing its necessary work, and he was in it, and it was good.