The Gryffindor common room had decided, collectively and without requiring instruction, that this was an occasion.
By the time Harry came back from the brief champions' meeting — the specific quality of someone who had been in a room with three other people and two adults and had answered questions he did not fully have answers to yet — the common room was already at party density, which in Gryffindor meant loud, warm, and operating on the assumption that everyone present was included.
Someone had produced Butterbeers. The source of this was technically unknown, practically Fred and George, who were in the corner with the expression of people conducting a quiet inventory of outcomes and finding the current one satisfactory.
Luna was there, which surprised exactly no one who knew Luna — she had a quality of appearing in the correct place at the correct time while maintaining plausible deniability about how she had known it was the correct place and time. She had brought something from the Ravenclaw common room that she described as a celebratory confection but which looked, and tasted, like very good shortbread with a faint luminescent quality that she attributed to the butter.
'Is the luminescence intentional?' Hermione asked.
'It fades after twenty minutes,' Luna said, which was not an answer to the question but was the answer to the more important question.
Hermione ate two pieces.
He had gone to the kitchens.
Not for long — twenty minutes, enough to produce two things that required no complexity: a plate of proper sandwiches, the kind with actual bread and actual fillings rather than the abstract concept of a sandwich, and a pot of strong tea. The party had Butterbeer. What it did not have was anything that would absorb the Butterbeer, and Harry specifically was going to need to eat something before the evening was done.
He brought it up and set it on the table near the fire without announcement. Harry found it within five minutes with the specific radar of someone whose body knew it needed something and was grateful not to have to ask.
'You went to the kitchens,' Harry said.
'There was time,' Ron said.
Harry looked at the sandwiches and then at Ron with the expression he had when he was not going to say the thing he was thinking because the thing he was thinking was too large for a party and he was choosing to receive the practical version of it instead. 'Thanks,' he said.
'Eat,' Ron said, and went to find his camera.
The photograph he took of the common room that night was one of those that he knew, at the moment of taking it, was exactly right.
Harry in the chair by the fire with a sandwich in one hand and Ginny beside him saying something that had made him laugh — the real one, not the managed one. Hermione standing near the window talking to Neville, the starflower pendant catching the firelight. The twins in their corner with the specific quality of people who were planning something and had started planning it about thirty seconds after Harry's name was called. Luna eating luminescent shortbread with the equanimity of someone for whom most things were equally interesting. Seamus attempting to balance a Butterbeer bottle on his forehead for reasons that had not been explained and might not have existed. Dean drawing something on a piece of parchment and showing it to the two first-years who had adopted him as their default point of orientation.
All of it.
He took the photograph from the doorway, the same angle as the leaving feast last year, the same principle: the whole room, the whole truth of it, the specific unrepeatable quality of a specific night.
He put the camera away and went to sit on the hearthrug.
Hermione came and sat beside him, close enough that their shoulders were nearly touching, and handed him one of Luna's shortbreads without comment. He took it. She looked at the fire.
'Three weeks,' she said.
'Yes,' he said.
'We start tomorrow?'
'First thing,' he said.
She nodded once, with the quality she had when she had decided something and was satisfied with the decision. The fire did its warm and ordinary work. Around them the common room made the noise of a place that was full of people who were glad to be in it, and Ron sat with his back against the armchair and looked at the photograph in his mind that he had already taken — the whole room, all of them, this specific night — and thought: remember this. Before it gets difficult. Remember what we are.
He reached over and took another piece of shortbread.
It glowed faintly in his hand for about thirty seconds and then it didn't.
He ate it anyway.