The first-years arrived on the second morning in the specific configuration that first-years always arrived in: a loose cluster of eleven-year-olds outside the Great Hall who had navigated the staircase from the dormitories without incident and were now standing in the corridor looking at the Hall's doors with the expression of people who had found the destination and were not entirely certain what to do with having found it.
He counted them as he came down. Twelve. All present.
'In you go,' he said. 'Same table as last night. Sit anywhere on the Gryffindor side for today — there's no assigned seating at meals after.'
One of them — a small girl with her robes slightly too long, who had been sorting the hem anxiously — looked up at him. 'What if we sit in someone's spot?'
'Then they'll sit somewhere else,' he said. 'No one owns a seat at meal time. Go in.'
They went. He followed, confirmed they were seated and had found the food, and then took his own seat further down the table. Hermione arrived two minutes later from the girls' dormitory corridor, sat beside him, poured two cups of tea without asking, and slid one across.
He took it.
'All twelve?' she said.
'All twelve,' he said.
She nodded and opened her timetable.
The first-class escort was a Hogwarts tradition that the prefect guide had described in approximately three lines and which he had understood, on reading it, was one of those institutional practices that was either done with genuine attention or done as a formality and forgotten. He did it with genuine attention, which meant he had read the first-years' timetables before they received them and knew that Wednesday morning was Transfiguration followed by Charms — on opposite ends of the second floor — which meant the transition required someone who knew the shortcuts.
He walked them from Transfiguration to Charms himself on the first Wednesday. Not because they couldn't have found it — they would have found it, eventually — but because eventually cost time, and time lost on the first day of a subject established a student's relationship with that subject in ways that had nothing to do with the content.
The shortcut went through the tapestry corridor near the west stairs and saved four minutes. He showed it once and said: 'You didn't learn this from me.'
The girl with the too-long robes — her name was Priya, he had learned by the third day; she asked questions with the specific directness of someone who had decided that not knowing things was more uncomfortable than the risk of asking — said: 'Are there others?'
'Several,' he said.
'Will you show us?'
'Some of them,' he said. 'The ones it's appropriate to show first-years.'
She filed this with the expression of someone noting that more information existed and intending to return to it. He had the specific recognition of someone who had known Hermione at eleven, and thought: she is going to be interesting in four years.
The weekend sessions began in the third week of September, not by design but by accumulation.
The first request came from a fourth-year Hufflepuff named Ellis who found him in the library on a Saturday afternoon and asked, with the careful politeness of someone approaching a prefect rather than a person, whether he had time to look at a Charms essay before it was due. He had time. He looked at it. The essay was not bad but had a structural problem in the third paragraph that Ellis had been working around without identifying. He pointed it out directly. Ellis looked at it for a moment and said: 'Oh. That's been bothering me since Tuesday.'
'It should have been,' Ron said. 'It's the right instinct to be bothered. Fix the foundation first, then rebuild from there.'
Ellis fixed it. The essay improved by approximately one grade band as a result.
The week after there were three students. The week after that, five. By October the Saturday afternoon library had developed, without announcement, the quality of somewhere people came if they had questions and expected answers. He sat at the same table each time — the one near the window on the east side, with enough room for materials to spread out — and students came and went with the specific ease of an arrangement that had established itself without requiring formalization.
Not all of them were Gryffindors. A third-year Ravenclaw came with a question about Arithmancy theory. Two fifth-year Hufflepuffs arrived together one Saturday in early October with their NEWT subject selection forms and a shared look of controlled anxiety, and he spent an hour with them talking through the specific logic of choosing subjects based on what one actually intended to do rather than what seemed impressive or safe. He was direct with them in the way he was direct with everyone: not unkind, but without the softening that would have made the conversation less useful.
They left with a clearer picture than they had arrived with. He returned to his own work.
Not all of them came with essays or subject questions.
A sixth-year Ravenclaw named Patel arrived in the third week of October and sat down across from him with the quality of someone who had been deciding to do this for some time and had finally decided. She did not have an essay. She had a question.
'Is it going to get worse?' she said. 'Before it gets better.'
He looked at her. She held his gaze with the steadiness of someone who wanted a real answer and had calculated, correctly, that Ron Weasley was more likely to give one than most people she could ask.
'Yes,' he said.
She absorbed this. 'How much worse.'
'Enough that it's worth preparing,' he said. 'Which is a different answer than it's un-survivable. It isn't. But it requires people to take it seriously now rather than when it becomes impossible to ignore.' He paused. 'Is there something specific you're concerned about?'
She had a specific concern. He addressed it. The conversation ran forty minutes and covered things that were not in any Hogwarts curriculum, and at the end of it she looked at him with the expression he had seen on Harry in the hospital wing and on Hermione on the cliff path — the specific quality of someone who had received something difficult and had decided to receive it properly rather than manage it away.
'Thank you,' she said, and left.
He sat with the empty table for a moment. Then he went back to his own work.
The patrol schedule ran Monday and Thursday evenings, nine to eleven, the specific circuit of corridors and common room check-ins that the prefect rotation assigned. His paired partner varied — the rotation distributed them across house combinations to reduce the likelihood of prefects spending their patrols exclusively in their own house's territory. He found he did not mind this. The Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw prefects he was paired with were, on the whole, people who took the work seriously, which was the only thing he required of a working arrangement.
Thursdays he was paired with Hermione.
The Thursday patrol had its own quality by the third week — the specific easy rhythm of two people who had been working alongside each other for three years and had no need to fill the silence between checkpoints. They walked the fourth-floor corridor and the library wing and the east staircase in the order the rotation specified, and the castle was quiet around them in the way it was quiet at half past nine on a Thursday, and he had stopped trying to not notice the specific warmth of walking beside her in the low-lit corridor and had simply filed it as a fact, the way he filed facts.
At the junction of the fourth-floor corridor and the east stairs she stopped.
He stopped.
She was looking at the window at the end of the corridor — the one that looked out over the grounds toward the lake, where the October dark had the specific quality of a night with enough moon to show the water. She had the expression she had in the library when something had caught her attention that she hadn't been expecting.
'It's a good view from here,' she said.
'I know,' he said. 'I found it in third year.'
She looked at him sideways. 'You catalogued the views.'
'I catalogued the castle,' he said. 'The views were part of it.'
She turned back to the window. They stood there for a moment — not long, thirty seconds, the specific thirty seconds of two people who had somewhere to be and had chosen, briefly, not to be there yet. Her hand was at her side. His was at his. The distance between them was the distance it always was, which was slightly less than it might have been with anyone else.
'Come on,' she said eventually, and they went back to the circuit.
He didn't take a photograph of it. Some things he kept without a camera.