May had felt different from the rest of the year. He felt it from the first week — a kind of gathering, the way weather gathered before something significant. Not dread. Just awareness that the ordinary days were numbered and the counting had begun.
He used May the way he had always intended to use it: preparation, but the slow kind. He went to classes. He worked through the fifth-year material he had been running parallel to the third-year curriculum all year. He wrote out his notes on Healing theory and sent the promised owl to Madam Pomfrey asking about practical instruction from the beginning of fourth year. Her reply came in the second week: yes, she would be willing, Tuesday evenings from the first week of term.
He added this to the list for September and filed it.
The Charms fifth-year work he found genuinely interesting in a way that the earlier material had not always been. The advanced theory of spellwork — the question of why a particular incantation produced a particular effect, the relationship between the verbal component and the magical intention — was the kind of problem that rewarded the linguistic background he had been building all year. He spent three evenings in the library working through a comparison of Charms theory and Runes theory that Babbling had suggested, and produced twelve pages of notes.
Hermione found him on the second of those evenings and sat down across from him without asking, which was what she did now, and opened her own work, and they sat in the library until closing time.
At some point she looked up and said: 'You're working ahead.'
'Yes,' he said.
'Fifth year,' she said, reading the spine of the text.
'Some of it,' he said.
'I've been doing the same thing around fourth year,' she said. 'Since I gave back the Time Turner.'
'I know,' he said.
'You don't find it strange?' she said. 'That we're both —'
'No,' he said. 'You have more time now. You're using it. That's not strange, that's you.'
She looked at him for a moment with the expression that had found its name in February. She went back to her work. Under the table her foot was next to his.
He went back to the Charms theory and found the problem waiting for him exactly where he had left it.