The return journey was the harder part.
Not because the Imperius was weakening — it was not. Forty minutes in, with no significant resistance encountered, the hold was as clean as it had been at the cast. The challenge was the specific accumulated pressure of sustained magic, the way the mental effort of maintaining a long Imperius was different from the effort of maintaining a short one in the way that running a long distance was different from running a short one. Not harder in any individual moment. Harder in the aggregate.
He had prepared for this.
The Occlumency surface, set to the surface he used for long practice sessions — the specific steady quality of someone who had been in demanding mental work for a long time and had found their second gear rather than fighting the effort. He had been practicing this specific transition since third year. He was in it now.
What he had not fully prepared for was the weight.
Not the magical weight — the other kind. The containment box in his expanded pouch, lead-lined and sealed and carrying within it the specific wrongness of a soul fragment, had an ambient quality that even through the containment was perceptible to him at this proximity. Not dangerous — the containment was working, he could confirm this through the mage sight, the runic seal holding the Cup's influence below threshold. But it was present in the way that significant things were present when you were carrying them. He was aware of it the way he was aware of the Occlumency hold — as a second thing running alongside the first, requiring not management but acknowledgment.
He was carrying a piece of Voldemort's soul in an expanded pouch on his belt.
He let himself hold this specific fact for three seconds, which was the appropriate amount of time to hold a specific fact before filing it and returning to the immediate task, and then he filed it and returned to the task.
The cart moved upward through the levels. He watched the vault numbers change on the wall markers — the specific progression of the numbering system that confirmed they were ascending toward the main level. The quality of the air changed back — warmer, less ancient, the specific atmosphere of the upper levels where regular transactions happened and the security was significant but not the deep kind. The Ironbelly was behind them now, in its antechamber, its olfactory processing beginning to return to normal, the gradual reassembly of its threat-awareness proceeding in the slow way that biological processes ran in very large, very old animals. He had calculated approximately eight minutes before it would register the change in the vault's ambient field — the specific absence of the wrongness it had been co-existing with for whatever time the Cup had been here. That was more than sufficient.
He was not going to think about what it had been like for the Ironbelly, chained in the dark for decades beside something that felt like that.
He was not. He filed the thought and put something else in the way of it and returned to the Imperius and the cart.
At the junction where his own vault level branched, he adjusted the Imperius with the fractional precision the moment required: not a new instruction, just a continuation — continue up, go to vault six hundred and eighty-seven.
Griphook steered left without apparent effort.
The cart reached his vault level and stopped. He stepped out, processed the standard vault visit with his own key — he spent three minutes inside his own vault, withdrew a moderate sum of gold, and returned to the cart. The record of the visit was logged in Gringotts's system in the specific way that a legitimate customer's vault visit was logged: time, vault number, contents movement.
The record would show Ron Weasley visiting his own vault on the fourteenth of August. It would not show anything else.
On the cart ride back to the main entrance level, he performed the Obliviate.
Surgical, targeted, the version he had been practicing since June. The specific memories he needed to remove: the deviation to Bellatrix's vault level, the vault number, the door, the interior, and the contents. The return route. He did not touch anything else — not Griphook's memories of the visit to Ron's own vault, not his professional memories, not anything that was not directly connected to the deviation.
The Obliviate settled cleanly. He ran a brief diagnostic — the specific technique Madam Pomfrey had shown him for confirming the integrity of a targeted memory modification, developed originally for healing practice but applicable here. The edit held. The seam between what Griphook remembered and what he did not was smooth in the way of good work — not the abrupt edge of a poor modification but the natural gradient of a gap that presented, from inside the mind it had been made in, as simply a routine vault visit with no remarkable features.
Griphook continued to drive the cart in the specific focused way of someone conducting a routine vault visit, because that was what his memory now contained.
At the main entrance level Ron disembarked.
He thanked the Goblin. Griphook received it with the brisk acknowledgment of someone processing a transaction and moving to the next. There was nothing in his expression — no residue, no unease, no subtle displacement of a mind that had been touched. The edit was clean.
Ron walked through the entrance hall and down the marble steps and into the August morning of Diagon Alley.
He was inside for forty-seven minutes.