The Hogwarts letters arrived on the nineteenth of August, carried by the school owls in the specific purposeful way they always arrived — not the casual post of personal correspondence but the institutional delivery of something official, the Hogwarts seal on the front of each envelope communicating that the contents had weight.
He was in the kitchen garden when his arrived. He opened it standing between the herb beds with the August morning around him, read the Hogwarts letter first — the standard booklist, the equipment list, the term dates — and then the second piece of parchment that had been folded separately inside.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he went inside.
Hermione was at the kitchen table and had clearly already read hers, because she had the quality of someone who had received significant information and was managing the response — the specific contained pleasure she had when things happened that were correct and she had decided not to perform the pleasure.
She looked at him across the table.
'Prefect,' she said.
'Yes,' he said.
'Both of us.'
'Both of us,' he confirmed.
She held his gaze for a moment with the expression she had when something had arrived that was worth receiving without immediately moving past it. Then she went back to her letter, which was her version of letting the moment be what it was.
He noted the booklist. Defence Against the Dark Arts had a new text — Defensive Magical Theory by Wilbert Slinkhard, which was a standard Ministry-approved text that had been in the curriculum in the original timeline under a different educational regime. The booklist confirmed what the text's selection confirmed: there was a Ministry presence in the Hogwarts staff this year.
He thought about Dolores Umbridge — the specific quality of someone who would arrive at Hogwarts in September with the Ministry's full backing, a mandate to control rather than educate, and the specific combination of incompetence and cruelty that made her the most immediately damaging staff member Hogwarts had encountered in his time here.
He thought about what had happened to Harry in the original timeline under her tenure.
He thought the first time she steps out of line she would be taken out. Not before — not pre-emptively, not on the basis of what he knew was coming. He had learned from the Bagman situation and from Crouch Junior that acting pre-emptively on knowledge no one else had produced political complications he couldn't always manage. He would watch. He would document. He would have a fully evidenced case ready to deploy. And the first time she did something that was evidenced and actionable, he would act.
He filed this under active monitoring and put the booklist aside.
His mother found him in the library at eleven.
She closed the door behind her, which she did not always do, and he looked up from the text he had been working through and understood from the specific quality of her expression that this was a conversation she had been waiting to have privately.
She sat down across from him with the quality of someone who had been thinking about what they wanted to say and had arrived at the version that was most honest.
'Prefect,' she said.
'Yes,' he said.
She looked at him. She was managing her expression with the particular discipline she brought to the kitchen and the library both, and neither place was sufficient for the size of it. Her eyes had the quality they had at the train station when she held on slightly longer than usual, at the recipe file morning, at the back step conversation after the Chamber.
'You've been — ' she started, and stopped.
He waited.
'You have been so much,' she said. 'Since — since the Chamber. Since that summer. You have been so much more than I knew how to expect, and I have not always — I have not always said the things that needed saying.'
'Mum,' he said.
'Let me finish,' she said, with the quality of someone who had started a thing and intended to complete it. 'The prefect is the small version of it. It's a letter from a school. But it's — it matters to me. Not because of the badge. Because of what it means about the person who earned it.' She looked at him steadily. 'You have become someone I am enormously proud of. I want you to know that. I am not always good at saying it and I am saying it now.'
He held this.
He thought about the woman across from him — Molly Weasley, who had been the backdrop of an entire childhood that was not his and which was now his completely, who had adjusted and readjusted across three years to a version of her son that was different from the one she had expected and had done it with the specific grace of someone who loved the person rather than the image.
'I know,' he said. 'I've always known.'
She pressed her lips together. Then she stood, which was her way of completing a conversation she had said everything she needed to say in. She paused at the door.
'Your father and I want to give you something,' she said. 'A proper gift. Not for the prefect specifically. For — all of it. We'd like to choose it ourselves but we don't know what to choose.' She looked at him. 'Tell us something small.'
He thought about this. 'A new set of notebooks,' he said. 'Quality ones — the kind that last. I'm going through them faster than I can source them and I keep settling for the next available rather than the right ones. Dark covers. Heavyweight paper.'
She looked at him for a moment. Then she said: 'That's not very much.'
'It's what I need,' he said.
She nodded, once, with the quality of someone who had been expecting to give more and was adjusting to the specific honesty of the request. Then she went back to the kitchen, and he went back to the text, and the library was warm and quiet and full of the morning light that east-facing rooms had at this hour.