The Hogwarts Express left at eleven.
He was in the compartment with Harry and Hermione and Ginny and Neville and Luna, which was the configuration it had been in since third year and which had the quality, this morning, of something returning to its most fundamental form before dispersing for the summer. Harry had the quality he had been developing since waking from the hospital wing — the lighter quality, the absence of the thing that had not been named. He was looking at the countryside resolve into itself through the window with the specific ease of someone who was not bracing for anything.
It was a small thing. It was one of the most significant things Ron had seen across the year.
Hermione had her book open but was not reading. She was sitting beside Ron with her shoulder against his in the specific way of someone who had decided proximity was the correct response to the occasion, and he was aware of the warmth of it and the specific quality of this particular journey — the last one of a year that had been the most consequential year of his life in this body, in this world, and which had produced outcomes he had been building toward since he had opened his eyes in the Chamber of Secrets at the age of twelve and understood what he had been given.
He had been given a great deal.
Neville was talking to Luna about the summer — she was going to Sweden with her father to look for the Crumple-Horned Snorkack, which she described with the quality of someone who was approaching the search as genuine research rather than as a family eccentricity. Neville was asking about the methodology with the quality he brought to questions about species he had not encountered, which was the quality of someone who had decided that Luna's framework was worth understanding on its own terms rather than against the standard one.
Ginny was asleep against Harry's shoulder, which Harry had the quality of not minding, which was the Ginny-and-Harry situation in its current form: entirely natural, entirely there, not performing anything about itself.
He took one photograph.
Not the landscape, not the compartment in the wide shot. The specific small picture: Hermione's shoulder against his, her hand over his on the seat, the book closed in her lap, the summer countryside through the window moving in the way it moved at train speed.
He knew where it was going in the album.
Last page of the fourth year section.
He put the camera away. He looked at the countryside. He thought about the Wulfhall waiting in the Surrey afternoon and about what September would look like and about the ring and the Cup and Nagini and the specific years between this train and the end of it.
He thought about the being in the white void, the wheel, the name Harry Potter landing on the section and his own laugh that was not a dignified laugh but was the laugh of someone who had arrived exactly where some part of them had always expected to end up.
He thought: this is where I am supposed to be.
The train moved south through the summer morning, and Hogwarts was behind them, and what came next was ahead, and for the first time since he had opened his eyes in the Chamber of Secrets he felt not the weight of what needed doing but the specific clean quality of someone who was ready for it.
He held Hermione's hand.
She didn't look up from the closed book. But her hand held his back, and that was sufficient, and the train ran on through the summer, and the year that had changed everything was finally, completely, behind them.