The Room
The Room of Requirements had been theirs since the previous year.
Harry and Hermione had found about it in second year, when Ron had shown them the door and the wall and the three passes, and the Room had produced for the three of them a study space that was exactly what was needed — which was different for different people and different purposes, and the Room, as always, produced what was actually needed rather than what anyone would have thought to ask for.
In third year it remained essentially what it had been, with the small adjustments that time and changing needs produced. The usual desk for two had become a desk for three, on the evenings when Hermione came — her own timetable had its specific complications, and the evenings when all three of them were in the Room were less common than the evenings when one or two of them were there, but they happened, and the Room accommodated the arrangement each time.
Most evenings it was Ron alone, because Harry had Quidditch practices on the Tuesdays and Thursdays that weren't flying-with-Ron evenings, and Hermione had her own complex timetable of library sessions and Time-Turner-enabled study periods that produced an itinerary Ron had looked at once and had quietly decided was the specific map of how the first month was going to unfold.
He worked in the Room every day after classes, from the end of the last lesson until dinner, and then from after dinner until a reasonable time before curfew. Dobby had established the snacks arrangement by the second week — arriving with the soft pop of someone who had decided something needed doing and was doing it, setting a plate of sandwiches or biscuits or whatever the kitchen had produced, adding tea in cold weather and something cooler in warm, and departing with the quiet self-sufficiency of someone who considered their mission complete.
He had told Dobby on the fourth day: "You don't need to come every time."
Dobby had looked at him with the enormous, solemn eyes. "Harry Potter's friend is working very hard," Dobby had said. "Harry Potter's friend is not stopping for food."
"I eat at meals," Ron said.
"Harry Potter's friend did not eat lunch on Tuesday," Dobby said, with the specific tone of someone citing evidence. "Harry Potter's friend was in the library at lunch on Tuesday."
Ron had thought about this and concluded that the argument was accurate and that the snacks arrangement was going to continue regardless, and had thanked Dobby and left it there.
The work had its own rhythm.
He was working toward the target he had set with the same methodical attention he brought to everything. Third-year top standard by mid-November — that meant not simply knowing the third-year material but knowing it with the depth and confidence that a strong third-year student had, the fluency that came from having worked through a thing enough times that it was no longer an effort and was simply knowledge. He tracked the progress in the notebook, subject by subject: where he was, where the gaps were, what needed more work.
Runes and Arithmancy were significantly ahead of the target. He had accepted this because the academic disciplines operated differently from the practical spell work — you could advance theory faster than you could advance practical fluency, and the risk was in confusing the two. He tracked them separately.
The spell work — Charms, Transfiguration, DADA practical, Potions — was the honest measure, and the honest measure was: ahead of where he had been, not yet where he intended to be, moving in the right direction at a pace he was satisfied with. The pensieve memories were the most efficient tool for the practical work, and he used them systematically, reviewing the expert demonstrations of the specific spells he was working on and then going to the Room's practice space and drilling them until the gap between the demonstration and his own performance was one he could identify and address.
Dobby found him drilling a fourth-year Shield Charm on a Thursday evening in October with the focused persistence of someone who had done it correctly seventeen times and was doing it the eighteenth time because seventeen times was not yet the standard he required.
Dobby watched from the doorway for a moment.
"Harry Potter's friend is practising a big shield," Dobby observed.
"Yes," Ron said.
"Harry Potter's friend is very good at the big shield," Dobby said.
"Getting there," Ron said.
Dobby set the plate down and departed, satisfied, and Ron did it the eighteenth time and then the nineteenth and then the twentieth, because twenty was where he had decided the session ended, and there were four years to go and a great deal of work still to do, and what the work required was showing up for it consistently and not stopping before it was done.
He ate the sandwiches.
He went back to the theory text.