The leaving feast was on the last Thursday of June.
He had been thinking about the photograph since April.
Not the technical question — he knew which photograph, had known since he took it. The question was the quote, and the quote had come to him in March, sitting in the Room of Requirement at six in the morning with the album open on the desk and the year laid out in front of him. He had written it in the notebook and looked at it for a week and decided it was right.
You were here. You made an impact. However small. That will never stop being true.
The photograph was the Great Hall at the leaving feast — the full hall, all four tables, the candles at their evening height, the enchanted ceiling showing the clear June sky, three hundred and more faces of people who were simultaneously celebrating and ending something.
He had taken it from the doorway, which gave him the angle he needed: the full depth of the hall, the four tables in their colors, the staff table at the far end with Dumbledore at its center. The moment he had chosen was not the toasting or the announcements but the moment between — when the feast had settled into itself and people were simply present in it, talking, eating, being here, unaware of being documented.
It was, he thought, the truest photograph he had taken all year.
He had the negatives developed and printed in the last week of term — three hundred and forty-one copies, every student and every member of staff. The printing had taken four evenings in the darkroom he had set up in the Room of Requirement, and he had come out of each session cleaned out, the way a place that asked for nothing except attention left you.
On the last night of term he folded each photograph into a small envelope with the Witness symbol on the seal — the eye inside the circle that had appeared on the noticeboards in September and October.
He took the envelopes to the kitchens at midnight.
Sable received him with the silence she reserved for his late arrivals — without comment and with the implicit communication that she had expected something of this kind.
'I need a favor,' he said.
He explained. She listened. Then she looked at the stack of envelopes.
'Three hundred and forty-one,' she said.
'Every student and every member of staff,' he said. 'Students' trunks, if possible. Teachers' desks.'
She said something to the three elves nearest her in the rapid low register of house elf communication, and the three of them dispersed.
'It will be done,' Sable said.
'Thank you,' he said.
She looked at him with the expression she had used since January — the one that was not specifically about cooking.
'The young Weasley has had a full year,' she said.
'Yes,' he said.
'Next year will be fuller,' she said. It was not a question.
'Yes,' he said. 'I expect it will.'
He went back to the dormitory and lay in bed, still, the way you could be when something that had taken a whole year was finally done.