March was a month that was not trying to be anything in particular. February had the Valentine's weekend and the Patronus work arriving at its conclusions; April had Quidditch finals and the end of year pressing. March was the middle --- the long steady part of the year when the work was the work and there was no occasion to structure it.
He found he liked this.
He used the time the way he used all the time that was not pointed at something specific: systematically, from the most important constraint outward. He had set himself a target --- fourth-year level across all subjects by end of term, fifth-year in the areas where he had been running ahead. March was where that target either held or did not.
He made a chart on the first Sunday of the month. Not for anyone else --- he kept it in the back of the notebook, the one with the Runes annotations and the Horcrux list and the Parseltongue phonology notes. The chart had subjects down one side and weeks across the top and a simple assessment in each cell: where he was, where he needed to be, what the gap required.
Arithmancy was ahead. Runes was significantly ahead --- he had been working with Babbling on the Chamber notations through February, two sessions in her office with the photographs spread across her desk and both of them reading the runic working in the alcove wall, and those sessions had pushed him into territory that was not third-year or fourth-year but somewhere past sixth in certain specific areas.
'This section here,' Babbling had said in the second session, pointing to a sequence in the upper right quadrant of the photograph. 'This is a containment structure I've seen in one other place. A seventh-century manuscript from the Ptolemaic collection at the Cairo Institute.'
'I know that manuscript,' Ron said.
She had looked at him over the photograph with the expression she reserved for moments that required recalibration.
'You've read it,' she said.
'My brother Bill helped me access it,' he said. 'Last summer.'
'Bill Weasley,' she said. 'Of course.' A pause. 'The containment structure in the manuscript --- what did you make of it?'
'Incomplete,' he said. 'The scribe stopped mid-sequence. I thought it was damage at the time. Looking at this ---' he indicated the Chamber photograph --- 'I think the manuscript was copied from something older and the copyist did not understand what they were transcribing. They stopped when it stopped making sense to them.'
Babbling looked at him for a long moment.
'I have been teaching Runes for twenty-two years,' she said, 'and that interpretation did not occur to me.'
'You did not have the Chamber photograph,' he said.
'No,' she said. 'I did not.'
After that the sessions had a different quality --- less teacher and student, more two people reading the same difficult text from different angles. He was careful about how much he led. Babbling was not a person whose expertise needed managing around, and the sessions worked best when he brought his observations and she brought hers and they let the intersection produce what it produced.
He filed this as one of the better things the year had given him.