He was in the kitchen at half past six when his mother came downstairs.
The Wulfhall was quiet at this hour — the specific quality of a house in the last stillness before the day fully assembled itself, the early light coming through the east-facing windows at the angle that meant September rather than August, the season having turned in the way it always turned without announcement. He had been up since five, which was how he tended to spend the last morning before Hogwarts: not with particular purpose, but with the quality of someone who wanted the hours to be themselves rather than transitional.
He was making tea when she appeared in the doorway.
She had her dressing gown on and her hair not yet done and the expression she wore when she had decided something the night before and had come downstairs early to say it. He had seen this expression before, knew its architecture — the set of the jaw, the quality of someone who had rehearsed a thing and was committing to saying it regardless of whether the rehearsal felt adequate.
He poured a second cup without being asked and set it on the table.
She sat down. She looked at the cup. Then she looked at him.
'You're going back into it,' she said. Not as a question. As a statement about what she had seen in him across the summer — the preparation, the sessions with Dumbledore, the specific quality of someone who was building toward something and was now as built as they were going to get.
'Yes,' he said.
She pressed her lips together once. Then she said, with the careful precision of someone who had decided that this particular morning required the honest version rather than the managed one: 'I'm not going to ask you to stay out of trouble. I can see what kind of year it's going to be and I know what you're going to do in it and asking you to stay out of it would be asking you to be someone you're not.' She paused. 'I tried that once, with a different version of you, and it didn't work then either.'
He looked at her.
'I have one wish,' she said. 'Come home safe. Whatever happens, whatever it costs — come home. The Burrow is home. The Wulfhall is home.' She held his gaze. 'The door is always open. I want you to know that. Whatever year this turns out to be, that doesn't change.'
He held this for a moment. Then he said: 'I know.'
She nodded once, with the quality of someone who had said the thing and was satisfied with having said it. She picked up her tea.
They sat in the kitchen in the early September light, the two of them, while the house was still quiet around them, and he thought about the word home and what it had meant across three years — the Burrow in the winters, the Wulfhall across this summer, his mother at this table in every version of the season — and found that it was not a complicated feeling, only a large one.
His father appeared at twenty to eight, dressed for the Ministry but moving with the ease of someone who had decided that the first hour of the morning was not the Ministry's yet. He looked at the two of them at the table with the quality of someone reading a room correctly and deciding not to alter it.
He poured his own tea. He sat down.
He looked at Ron for a moment — the long measuring look he had been giving him since second year, the one that was still arriving at the full picture and was no longer troubled by the arriving. Then he put his hand on Ron's shoulder once.
'If you're going to do something,' he said, 'do it properly.' A pause. 'The wizarding world needs a wake-up call. I think this is probably the year it gets one.'
'Yes,' Ron said. 'I think it probably is.'
His father nodded, satisfied, and went back to his tea.
They sat at the kitchen table in the Wulfhall in the September morning — the three of them, the tea going warm in their cups, the kitchen doing the specific thing it did when the people in it had said what needed saying and had arrived at the particular quiet that came after — and Ron looked at the east-facing window and thought: I'm ready.
He took a photograph of the kitchen before they left. He already knew where it went in the album.