The night before the task, he cooked.
This was not, strictly speaking, necessary. The kitchens would have produced anything required. But there was something in the specific physical act of preparation — the measuring, the timing, the particular attention that cooking asked for and rewarded — that he had found, across two years, to be the most reliable method he had for settling his own mind before something that mattered.
He made a simple broth. Not the consommé — that was its own thing, for its own occasions. This was something more direct: good bones, cold water, time, and the aromatics that turned the combination into something with depth. He had started it in the afternoon and let it go until the evening, and by nine o'clock it had become what it was supposed to be.
He carried it up to the common room in a pot Sable had lent him without asking why, with six cups on a tray, because there were six of them and all six deserved a cup.
Harry was at the fire. Hermione beside him, her book open and unread. Ginny on the hearthrug. Neville in the window seat. Luna, inevitably, in the corner armchair with a copy of the Quibbler open to a page about something that was or wasn't in Romania.
He set the tray on the table and poured without asking if anyone wanted any, because they all wanted some and asking would have required them to decide about wanting things when what they needed was for the decision to have already been made.
Harry took his cup with both hands. He looked at the broth and then at Ron.
'Tomorrow,' Harry said.
'Tomorrow,' Ron confirmed.
'We're ready.'
'Yes,' Ron said. 'We are.'
The fire did its work. The common room was quieter than usual — the rest of Gryffindor had taken the temperature of the room correctly and had either gone to bed or were keeping to the other side of the fireplace with the consideration of people who understood that something was happening here that did not require an audience.
Hermione put her book away. She wrapped both hands around her cup and looked at the fire.
'Whatever happens tomorrow,' she said, in the tone of someone who had considered several versions of what she wanted to say and had decided on the most honest one, 'I'm glad we did this. The three weeks. All of it.'
'So am I,' Ginny said.
'The footwork is genuinely useful,' Neville said, which was Neville at his most sincere.
'I have learned a great deal about what I am capable of when sufficiently motivated,' Luna said. 'It has been informative.'
Harry looked at all of them in the specific way he looked when he was receiving something and had decided to receive it properly — without deflecting, without the practiced self-deprecation that was his default for things he found too large. 'Thank you,' he said. 'All of you. For all of it.'
The fire.
The broth, warm and direct and tasting of the time it had been given.
Ron sat on the hearthrug and looked at the six of them — the fire-lit faces, the cups held in various attitudes of comfort — and thought about the photograph he was not taking. Some moments were for the camera. Some were for keeping.
This one was for keeping.
He drank his broth and let the evening be what it was.