It was Percy's last year. Ron had registered this in September and had been sitting with it at intervals throughout the year without finding the right words for it. Percy had occupied the castle for seven years with the specific thoroughness of someone who treated school as the most important thing in the world, because for him it genuinely had been. After June it would be the Ministry. A desk. A different kind of institution to master.
He would be good at it. That was not in question. What Ron wondered, sometimes, was whether Percy knew yet that being good at something and finding it worthwhile were not the same question. He suspected Percy would take another few years to work that out, and that the working out would be uncomfortable, and that he would be fine on the other side of it.
He made sure he was in the right place when Percy crossed the Great Hall after the ceremony, and said simply: 'Good luck at the Ministry.'
Percy gave him the look he used when he was acknowledging something without naming it. 'Thank you,' he said. And then, after a moment: 'This year has been good, Ron.'
'Yes,' Ron said. 'It has.'
The album took shape in the last week of June.
He had been editing it since April — selecting from the year's negatives, deciding what made the final version, in what order, with what if anything written beside each image. He worked on it in the evenings after revision, in the Room of Requirement with the photographs spread across the study desk.
The principle for selection was simple: the photographs that were true. Not the most technically accomplished, not the most dramatic, but the ones where he had caught something real.
The first photograph was September — the Hogwarts Express platform at King's Cross, Molly Weasley checking Percy's head boy badge for the third time while Percy attempted dignity. He had taken it from the side, which caught her expression: the love in it, the particular pride that was not about the badge at all but about the boy wearing it.
Between that and the last: seventy-one photographs. The Cairo roof. Sirius in the study at Grimmauld Place. The Patronus session where Harry's stag had appeared, taken in the moment after, when all three of them were in the silver afterglow of it. Luna looking at the consommé cup. Ginny saying something to Harry on the Quidditch pitch after the final, her expression entirely unguarded. His father at the Ministry open day in March, standing in front of a Muggle radio exhibit with the quality he had when encountering things that made him genuinely happy.
Molly reading his letters.
He had not known she did this until his father had mentioned it, and he had gone back through the photographs from the Burrow visits looking for the right image and found it: Molly at the kitchen table in the afternoon light, a letter in her hand, her expression entirely private. He did not know which letter it was. It did not matter.
He wrote the captions in the margins in his own handwriting — not descriptions but the specific true thing about each photograph that made it the one he had kept. The September platform: she was checking the badge but she was saying I love you. The Egypt roof: this was when I understood what it meant to be here. The Patronus session: Harry's stag, three people who were not going to be the same after this.
He made three copies of the album. One for the shelf in his room at the Burrow. One for the vault at Gringotts. One for the expanded pouch.
He packed them carefully and put them in the trunk.
Then he went to the leaving feast and took the feast photograph and thought: this is the last image of the year and it should be the right one, and the hall was full and lit and the ceiling showed the June evening and he stood in the doorway and waited for the moment between, and when it came he took the photograph.