He packed for Hogwarts on the thirty first of August.
The trunk had its particular organization — the one he had developed since third year and refined annually, the specific logic of someone who knew what they would need and in what order. The dark-covered notebooks — two full shelves of them now, the complete record of years of thinking and preparation and building — packed carefully, in the specific sequence of their subjects. The camera. The photograph album, which had now begun the forth book. The basilisk hide underlayer, which had been cleaned and checked and re-checked after the Ministry.
He put Fawkes's feather in the inside pocket of his school robes, where he carried the things that were not for display but were present.
He stood at the window of the Wulfhall bedroom and looked out at the garden — the flowerbeds, the garden in its late August quality, the light at the angle of the year's end — and thought about September.
He thought about what would most likely happen in the future. Harry would most likely take up the future Defence professorship. Hermione with the specific shape of a Ministry career that would be the Ministry's best chance at being what it was supposed to be. Neville taking up the Herbology professorship. Luna as the Quibbler editor and her particular perceptual gifts would be writing about the various trips she took to find all types of creatures. Ginny would most likely enter professional quidditch.
The war was over.
What came next was not a lesser thing — was not, he thought, a settling into something smaller. What came next was the work of making something. Not maintaining, not defending, but building, which was a different kind of work and one he had been thinking about since the career orientation session and had not yet fully resolved.
He would resolve it.
He closed the trunk.
Next day his mother was at the bottom of the stairs with the specific quality of a September morning — the tea, the early light, the kitchen doing the thing it did when the season was turning and the house was about to empty again into the particular quiet of term time.
He sat down. She poured without asking.
They sat in the kitchen in the early morning light, the way they had sat in the September before, and the September before that, and the September before that, and he thought about the word home and what it had accumulated across five years, and found it was still not a complicated feeling.
Only a large one.
He would come back to it. He always did.
At eleven o'clock he was on the train.