The Broomstick Trust
He found Madam Hooch on a Wednesday afternoon in the equipment shed at the edge of the Quidditch pitch. She was there doing what she was usually doing in the equipment shed — assessing the state of things with the expert eye of someone who had strong opinions about the relationship between proper equipment and proper flying, and who found the chronic gap between those two things professionally irritating.
She looked up when he came in.
"Weasley," she said. Then, with the tone of someone placing something they had been thinking about: "The trust."
"I wanted to see them," he said. "If that's alright."
She set down the broom she had been inspecting and looked at him with the golden hawk eyes that were one of the more immediately striking things about her. They had the quality of someone who had been watching people fly long enough to read a flyer's entire relationship with the air from the way they walked toward a broom.
"Come on then," she said.
The new brooms were in the back corner of the shed, racked separately from the school's existing equipment with the specific care of things that were new and that someone intended to keep new for as long as the nature of brooms allowed. Twenty of them.
He stood in front of them and looked.
Cleansweep Eights — the current model, solid and responsive and considerably better than what the school had been using. Not the cutting edge of racing broom technology. But properly, genuinely good equipment: the kind that taught flying correctly, that responded to what you asked of it, that didn't fight you or forgive you but met you exactly where you were and expected you to rise to it.
He reached out and ran a hand along the handle of the nearest one.
"They're good," he said.
"They're very good," Madam Hooch said, and there was something in her voice he recognised as the specific warmth of someone who had wanted something for a long time and had not expected to get it. "The school's existing stock is mostly functional. These are functional and then some." She paused. "The trust administrator sent a letter last week. The investment portfolio is generating enough return that we should be able to maintain the stock and replace it. When these need it — four or five years, with proper care — there'll be funds to do it at the same standard."
He had not known if the investment structure would produce that outcome this quickly. "Good," he said.
"Good," she repeated, with some emphasis. She looked at the brooms and then at him with the hawk-eyed assessment she brought to everything. "May I ask what made you think of it?"
He thought about Ron's memories of first-year flying lessons — the slightly worn out brooms lined up and the Remembrall and a twelve-year-old on a broom that wasn't quite right — and all the students who had never had the experience of learning on equipment that was actually good. "The school brooms have been bad for as long as anyone can remember," he said. "It seemed like something that could be fixed."
She looked at him for a moment. "Most people don't notice," she said. "Or notice and consider it someone else's problem."
"It was a solvable problem," he said. "I had the resources. The logic seemed obvious."
She made a sound that was not quite a laugh but had the warmth of one in it. "Logic," she said. "Right." She looked at the brooms again. "First-years use them starting next week. I've told them nothing about the trust. They'll find that the brooms are good, and fly accordingly."
He took a photograph.
Not a posed one. Madam Hooch was looking at the brooms with unguarded satisfaction — the expression of someone who had the right tools and knew precisely what that meant. The brooms were racked behind her in the late afternoon light that came through the shed's high windows, the Cleansweep Eight livery catching it along the handle.
He looked at the photograph as it developed in his palm.
This was one of the good ones. Not dramatically. Not in a way that would be visible to most people. But he had thought of something that needed doing, and had done it, and the first-years who came next week would learn on brooms that were actually good, and that was a real thing that had not existed before and now did.
He walked back up to the castle in the last of the afternoon light, and filed it under things that have been made right, and felt the specific quiet satisfaction of that category, which was different from pride and more useful.
Flying and the Offer
He flew with Harry on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, when the pitch was free and the light lasted long enough to make it worthwhile.
They had established the rhythm in the first week without discussing it — Harry had his broom and Ron had his, and the first time they had both ended up at the pitch on a Tuesday with no particular plan, they had simply flown, and the following Thursday the same thing had happened, and by the end of the second week it was a fact without either of them having made it one.
Flying with Harry was different from flying alone.
Flying alone was the practice of a skill — the meditative quality of something that required enough of your attention to clear the foreground of everything else. Flying with Harry was something more like a conversation in a language that neither of them was articulating directly. Harry pushed the pace without meaning to because that was simply Harry's relationship with the air — absolute, instinctive, operating without the mental layer of someone who thought about what they were doing before they did it. Ron matched it and pushed back, because he was good enough to push back, and the specific pleasure of flying with someone who was better than you in ways you could learn from was its own category.
On the second Thursday, he hit a sequence of turns he had been working on — three connected direction changes at speed, using the Firebolt's responsiveness to cut a line that wouldn't have been possible on a lesser broom — and came out of it flying level with Harry, who had been doing something of his own and had stopped to watch.
"How did you do that?" Harry said.
"Weight shift on the first turn initiates the second," he said. "You're not fighting the broom. You're using the momentum to set up the next move."
Harry looked at him the way someone did when they had been doing something since they were eleven and had never once been asked to explain how. "Show me again."
He showed him again, slower, narrating the weight shifts. Harry watched with the intent focus he brought to things he actually wanted to understand. On his third attempt Harry produced a version of it that was rougher but had the right bones.
"That's it," Ron said.
Harry looked pleased in the careful way he looked pleased when he'd done something well — briefly, folding it away. "You're really good," he said, with the slightly surprised quality of someone updating an assessment. "I mean, I knew you played Keeper, but this is different."
"I've been working on it," Ron said. "Your turning radius is better than mine at speed. I'm trying to close that gap."
Harry looked at him. Then at the pitch. Then back with the expression of someone who had just realised something. "You're competing with me."
"I'm learning from you," Ron said. "It's not the same thing."
"Isn't it?"
Ron considered this. "Both," he said. "The second is more useful."
Harry laughed, properly and without managing it, and banked away to the far end of the pitch, and Ron followed, and they flew until the light made it impractical.
Oliver Wood found them on the fourth Thursday.
He came across the pitch from the changing rooms with the specific energy of someone who had seen something and was still deciding if what he had seen was what he thought it was. He was in his seventh year — his final year — and had the focused, slightly pressured quality of someone for whom the Quidditch Cup had been a personal commitment since fifth year and who had arrived at his last season with the particular intensity of someone who had decided this was going to be the one.
He stopped at the edge of the pitch and looked at Ron.
"Weasley," he said.
"Wood," Ron said, touching down.
Harry landed beside him. Wood looked at both of them with the assessing eye of someone who had been watching for five minutes before making himself known, which meant he had seen the turns.
"You're good," Wood said, to Ron specifically. "Where did that come from? Last year you were—" He stopped himself. "Different."
"I've been working on it," Ron said.
Wood looked at him for a moment. "We've got a gap in the reserve squad. I'd like you as emergency Chaser cover. Come to try-outs Saturday week — see how you do properly."
Ron looked at him. Reserve squad — not the first team, not a weekly commitment. An emergency role. He turned it over with the same logic he applied to everything.
He was three or four months into what he had calculated as roughly three years of intensive preparation for a war that was going to arrive whether he was ready or not. He had identified, in the Room on the last day of June before leaving Hogwarts, the specific gaps in his preparation — the practical spell work, the advanced theory, the subjects he needed to push through O.W.L. level before fourth year. He had set the targets: third-year top standard by mid-November. Fourth-year by Easter. Fifth-year standard by the end of the following summer before entering fourth year properly.
A reserve role on the Quidditch team was not the problem. The try-outs were not the problem. The problem was the creep — the way a reserve role became practice sessions, became standing availability, became one thing after another that was reasonable individually and collectively displaced the hours he needed for the work.
He thought about the graveyard in the Defence classroom that morning, and about the paper hat.
"I appreciate the offer," he said. "But I'm not going to be on the reserve squad this year." He said it with the directness of someone who had made a decision and wasn't hedging it. "I've got enough on."
Wood looked at him with the incomprehension of someone for whom turning down Quidditch was not a category of thing that happened. "It's reserve," he said. "You'd barely be called on."
"I know," Ron said. "I still can't. Not this year."
Wood appeared to find this genuinely baffling, but he was a pragmatic person and he had enough respect for a clean no to accept it without extended argument. "If that changes," he said, with the specific tone of someone keeping a door open, "I want to know."
"I'll tell you," Ron said.
Wood walked away. Harry looked at Ron with the patient quality he had developed for Ron's decisions — which was to say he filed it under Ron is being deliberate and waited for the outcome.
"You could do it," Harry said.
"I know I could do it," Ron said. "That's not the question."
He looked at the Firebolt in his hand. He had four years. He had a war coming. He had three years of work to do before the Triwizard Tournament arrived and everything accelerated past the point where preparation was the activity and survival was. The flying was for Harry and for himself and for what flying did to his thinking that nothing else did. It was not going to become a time commitment on top of the ones he already had.
"Later," he said. "Different year."
Harry looked at him for a moment with that quality of attention he deployed without appearing to. Then he looked at the pitch. "Alright," he said, and left it there.
They flew for another twenty minutes in the last of the September light.