New Year's Eve at the Burrow was not a ceremony. It was what it was: a fire in the garden, the twins with something they had made that produced lights in colors that didn't have names, Percy with a book but outside, which was his version of participation, Ginny and Luna — who had come over from the neighboring farm for the evening — sitting on the garden wall with their coats on and their breath visible in the cold.
His mother brought out tea and his father brought out something stronger for the adults and the twins made their nameless lights go up over the garden and the New Year arrived with the specific quiet of something that did not need announcement.
Ron sat on the back step with his camera and took a photograph of the garden — the fire, the lights, the people arranged around it in the specific way of people who were comfortable enough together that they did not need to face each other to be together. Ginny and Luna on the wall. The twins' lights still drifting above the garden in colors that had no names. His father with his arm around his mother, both of them looking up.
He had been in this world for seven months.
He had arrived in a chamber with a dead basilisk and a diary he destroyed and a couple traumatized pre teens. He had had three gifts and one cover story and twelve years of someone else's memory and thirty-two years of his own. He had built from that: the money, the equipment, the languages, the skills, and the relationships that were not Ron Weasley's by inheritance but were his by choice. He had earned them. He intended to keep earning them.
The fire burned down to coals. The lights drifted. The people around them stayed.
Luna said something to Ginny that he couldn't hear and Ginny laughed — the real laugh, the one that had been recovering since Egypt and was now mostly itself — and the sound of it went up into the cold clear air and disappeared.
He lowered the camera.
He had not taken a photograph of that. Some things were not for keeping. Some things were just for being in.
The New Year had arrived.