Sirius's flat was on a narrow street in Islington, four floors up, with a window at the front that looked out over the rooftops and a fire escape at the back that he had already used twice for reasons he described as 'taking in the view' and which were more likely the same reason anyone used a fire escape at three in the morning, which was that the inside had become temporarily insufficient.
Ron understood this instinct.
The flat itself was warm and slightly chaotic in the specific way of someone who had spent twelve years in a cell and was now, with the focused intensity of a man with something to prove to himself, in the process of discovering what he liked. There were books on every horizontal surface — not organized, not curated, the books of someone who had walked into Flourish and Blotts in August and bought what caught their eye and had been doing so every few weeks since. There was a motorcycle print above the fireplace that Ron suspected had been purchased within the first week and was possibly the first thing Sirius had ever bought for a home that was his. The kitchen table had a crack in it that Sirius had repaired badly with a charm and then left, apparently having decided he liked it. The sofa was enormous and slightly too large for the room and was clearly the sofa Sirius had wanted rather than the sofa that fit, and it was covered in a blanket that had the specific worn quality of something that had been used every night since the day it arrived.
Harry had slept on that sofa for two nights already and had the comfortable, settled quality of someone who had found that a place felt right and had stopped analyzing why.
Ron took a photograph of the room on the first evening before anyone told him not to. The books stacked on the kitchen counter. The motorcycle print slightly crooked above the fireplace. Sirius in the armchair with a mug of tea, not aware of the camera yet, looking at Harry across the room with an expression that was still learning how to be ordinary. Harry on the sofa with Crookshanks — who had decided, with the sovereign authority of a half-Kneazle, that the enormous blanket was partly his — reading something with his feet up.
He took the photograph and lowered the camera and Sirius looked over.
'For the record,' Ron said.
Sirius looked at the room — at the crooked print, the too-large sofa, the books that had no particular system — and then back at Ron.
'Yes,' he said. 'Alright.'
Ron took two more.