The exams were the second and third weeks of June.
He sat them with the quality he brought to things he had been ready for since February: present, methodical, not urgent. The third-year papers were asking for things he had consolidated months ago. The Runes practical produced what he suspected was an unusual result — he answered the standard questions in approximately forty minutes and then, with the remaining time, added an annotated note on the variant appearing in question seven that connected it to the pre-medieval forms. He did not know if this would help his mark or harm it. He had been unable not to.
The Defence Against the Dark Arts practical was the one he was most careful with. Not because he found it difficult — he was well past third-year standard — but because the question of how much to show required more thought than the question of what he could do. He showed enough to demonstrate competence clearly and not enough to demonstrate the full gap between his competence and the curriculum's expectations, which was considerable.
Hermione came out of the Transfiguration written exam on a Wednesday with the expression of someone who had found the paper adequate rather than interesting.
'Question four,' she said, walking beside him across the courtyard.
'The partial transformation boundary conditions,' he said.
'You got it too,' she said.
'I answered both interpretations,' he said.
'So did I,' she said, and the specific satisfaction in her voice was the satisfaction of two people who had arrived at the same place independently and found each other there.
He took a photograph of her in the courtyard. She was looking away, thinking about question four, the June light at the right angle.
She heard the shutter and turned.
'Was that —?'
'Yes,' he said.
She looked at him. 'You do that.'
'When it's the right moment,' he said.
She held his gaze. 'Is it always the right moment when it's me?'
He thought about the album — seventy photographs, a year documented. How many of them had her in them.
'Fairly often,' he said.
She looked at him and her expression had the name in it now, clearly, and he thought: there it is.
'Ron,' she said.
'Yes,' he said.
'When you come back from Uganda,' she said, 'I want you to know that I —' She stopped. 'I'm not good at starting things. I'm better in the middle of them. But I want there to be a middle.'
'There already is one,' he said.
She looked at him.
'The foot under the table since February,' he said. 'The card on the shelf. The way you save the chocolate cauldrons and the way you tell me things you don't tell other people. We're already in the middle of it.' He paused. 'I just wanted to let it become itself at its own speed.'
She was quiet for a moment with the quality she had when she was deciding whether to argue with something and had found she could not.
'That's actually the right approach,' she said.
'I know,' he said.
She looked at him and the expression was simply itself, clear and present.
'Bring back the books,' she said. 'And something from the market that you chose.'
'I will,' he said.
They walked back across the courtyard in the June light, shoulders touching.
He had been thinking about the Divination exam since April.
Not the exam itself - he wasn't sitting for it. The exam was not the point. The point was what happened in the office afterward, the thing that had happened in the original timeline between Dumbledore and Trelawney during Harry's exam. The genuine prophecy. The one Trelawney had no memory of making.
He had gone back and forth on whether to engineer being present for it. The prophecy itself added no new information he didn't already have - the servant returning to the master, the Dark Lord rising. He knew the timeline. He didn't need the prophecy to confirm it.
What he had decided, in the end, was that Dumbledore needed to hear it. Not for Ron's benefit. For Dumbledore's own planning, and for the specific weight that a genuine prophecy carried in the wizarding world that a student's careful analysis did not. He had positioned himself on the staircase outside Trelawney's office on the day of the third-year Divination exams, with a plausible reason for being there if anyone asked.
He had not heard the prophecy himself. He had heard the silence afterward, through the door, and then Dumbledore's footsteps on the stairs, and had filed those away with the same care he filed everything. Dumbledore had passed him on the landing with the expression he wore when something had confirmed a belief he had hoped not to have confirmed.
They had not spoken. There had been nothing to say.
The prophecy had been made. Dumbledore had heard it. That was enough.