As the train pulled up to the station he saw his dad was the one who come to pick him and his siblings from the station. Ron then told his dad and had gone directly from the train station to the Alley via to get a few things needed for his summer trip. He would be taking the Knight bus back
His mother knew he was arriving even before he had barely cleared the garden gate. The kitchen door opened and she was there, in her work apron, with the expression she wore when she had been expecting someone and was glad the expectation had been met.
She looked at him.
Not in the checking way — not the way she checked Ron's brothers for injury or illness or evidence of questionable decisions. In the way she had been looking at him since Christmas, when something had shifted in how she held herself around him, the quality of someone who had noticed that the person in front of them had changed and was still deciding what to do with the noticing.
'You're thin,' she said. Not as criticism. As observation, the way she observed everything about her children — with the specific attention of someone for whom the physical state of the people she loved was information she needed to have.
'End of term,' he said. 'I'll eat.'
'You will,' she agreed, in a tone that made it a statement of intent rather than prediction.
She stood back to let him through the door, and he went past her into the kitchen, which smelled of the bread she had been making and of the particular accumulated warmth of a room that was always occupied and always in use, and something in his chest that had been slightly compressed since approximately March released.
'Sit,' she said, moving to the stove. 'I'll make something.'
He sat.
She made eggs, which she did with the efficiency of someone who had fed large numbers of people for a very long time and had reduced the problem to its most reliable solutions. She set the plate in front of him and made tea and sat down across from him with her own cup and looked at him with the attention she gave things she was thinking carefully about.
'How was the end of term?' she said.
'Good,' he said. 'The exams went well. The year went well.'
'You wrote you had a dinner.'
'In January,' he said. 'I cooked for friends and some staff.'
She looked at him with the expression he was coming to recognize — the one that was not surprise exactly but its quieter cousin, the expression of someone whose model of who their child was kept finding it had insufficient information.
'You cooked,' she said. 'For Professor Dumbledore.'
'And others,' he said.
She was quiet for a moment. He ate his eggs, which were exactly what he had wanted without knowing he wanted them, and watched her face do the thing it did when she was sitting with something she could not quite contain in the usual ways.
'Ron,' she said. And then stopped.
He waited.
'You have become,' she said, with the careful precision of someone who had been thinking about a sentence for a long time and had finally decided to say it, 'someone I am still getting to know. And I am' — a pause — 'very glad to be getting to know you. I want you to understand that.'
He looked at her.
'I understand it,' he said.
She nodded once, with the quality of someone who had said the important thing and did not need to add to it. She picked up her tea. Outside the kitchen window the garden was doing what it did in July — too much of everything, green and overflowing and entirely itself.
'Uganda,' she said.
'Three weeks,' he said. 'I'll write when I arrive.'
She looked at him for another moment with the specific expression she had — the one he had photographed at the kitchen table in the afternoon light without her knowing, the one that would be in the album. Then she went back to her tea, and he went back to his eggs, and the kitchen settled into the particular quiet of two people who did not need to fill the space between them.
The Burrow still had the comforting quality it had after long absences — the house asserting itself, the sounds and smells that were so completely themselves that arriving back into them felt less like returning than like being reminded of something he had always known.
He put his trunk in his room and stood at the window for a moment.
He looked at it for a long moment.
Then he unpacked.
He went into the garden that night.
Not for any particular reason — he had been sleeping well, the Burrow had that effect, of a house that knew how to hold people — but because the night garden in July was its own kind of room and he had been meaning to sit in it since he arrived.
He took the wolf carving Ginny had given him in March and sat on the back step.
It was a good carving. He had looked at it often enough to know all its angles — the posture patient and low, the wood worked to show the grain running along the line of the spine, the animal mid-rest rather than mid-motion. It was better than he had said when he received it. He had said thank you and she had said don't and that had been all, which was the correct exchange for the occasion, but the carving itself was extraordinary for someone who had taught themselves.
He had not asked how she had learned woodwork. He would have to ask.
'You're out here late.'
Ginny was in the doorway in her dressing gown, with the expression of someone who had woken up and come downstairs for water and found the garden door open. She looked at him on the step and at the carving in his hand.
'So are you,' he said.
She came and sat on the step beside him without asking, which was Ginny. She looked at the carving.
'I didn't know if you'd like it,' she said.
'You knew,' he said.
She looked sideways at him with the quality she had — the quick-assessing look that was very like their mother's but sharper at the edges, the look of someone who had spent years surrounded by people who underestimated her and had developed a specific attitude toward the experience.
'I thought the posture was right,' she said. 'Patient. Like it's watching something but it's not in a hurry.'
'It is right,' he said.
She seemed pleased to hear it, and seemed slightly annoyed at being pleased, which was also Ginny.
They sat for a moment in the garden dark. The Burrow made its nighttime sounds — the creak of the house, the distant hoot from the direction of the pond. The garden was silver and grey in the moonlight, the herb rows his mother kept in strict order looking almost architectural in the low light.
'Uganda,' Ginny said.
'Three weeks,' he said.
'What for?' she said. It was a direct question, asked with the quality of someone who had been thinking about it and had decided to ask rather than continue thinking about it.
'A school,' he said. 'Uagadou. Magical creatures, some Herbology. And practitioners I can learn things from that aren't available here.'
'What things?'
He thought about how to answer this. 'Ways of working with magic that the British tradition doesn't have,' he said. 'The animagus work, partially. And ritual practice that requires a different background than what the library at Hogwarts holds.'
Ginny was quiet for a moment. She was good at absorbing things — had learned it young, he suspected, from being the only girl in a house full of brothers, from finding that the way to get what she wanted was to understand the room she was in before she moved in it.
'You've been planning this for a while,' she said.
'Since last summer,' he said.
'Not since the Chamber,' she said.
'Also since the Chamber,' he said.
She looked at him. 'What happened to you in the tunnel?'
He had been asked this before, by Hermione, by his parents in their own oblique ways. He had answered with the partial truth and left space around it and that had been enough, for them, for now. Ginny was asking it differently — not as a question about what had changed but as a question she already had part of the answer to and wanted the rest.
'Something changed,' he said. 'The Lockhart spell hit differently than it should have. The effect was — not what he intended. I've been working with it since.'
'And it's why you're different,' she said. Not as accusation. As completion.
'Yes,' he said.
She sat with this for a moment. The garden was very quiet. In the pond the frogs were doing their nighttime thing, a low rhythmic sound that had always been part of what the Burrow smelled like in July.
'I'm going to ask you something,' Ginny said, 'and I want you to answer it honestly.'
'Alright,' he said.
'Are you going to be okay?' she said. 'Not this year. Not next year. Are you — the whole of it. Are you going to be okay.'
He looked at the carving in his hand. At the patient low shape of the wolf, the grain of the Mvule wood running along the spine.
He thought about the honest answer. Not the reassuring one — Ginny was asking for the honest one, had made that clear, and giving her a reassurance when she had asked for honesty would be a kind of dismissal.
'I think so,' he said. 'The work I've been doing is good work and it's going well and the people I have around me are the right ones. But I can't tell you there's no cost. There will be cost. There already is.'
She looked at him.
'Okay,' she said. It was said with the quality of someone filing the information and deciding what to do with it, which was not acceptance exactly but was something more useful. 'Then I'll be here,' she said. 'When the cost part happens. That's all.'
He looked at her.
'Thank you,' he said.
She stood, dusted off her dressing gown, and looked at the garden in the way she had of looking at things before she went back inside — taking a quick thorough inventory, as though checking that it was still itself.
'Bring something back from Uganda,' she said. 'Not for me. Just — bring something back.'
'I will,' he said.
She went back in. He sat on the step for a while longer in the July dark, with the wolf carving and the garden and the weight of a house full of people he was not going to let down,
and found that the weight of that, which could have been burden, was instead simply there — present and structural, the kind of thing that held you up if you let it.
He went in at midnight and slept without difficulty.
In the morning he began the meditation work.