Weasley's composure fractured for a single unguarded instant. Hecat went very still.
"The eavesdropping charm," Hecat said.
"You taught me to use every advantage."
"I taught you to use them in combat."
"This is combat. A different kind." Rowan looked at Weasley. "Professor, you're not wrong. What happened last night was a consequence of decisions I made, with your help and support. The shop, my public profile, and refusal to stay invisible."
Weasley opened her mouth.
"Professor Hecat is right too. Even if I abandon the shop and retreat behind Hogwarts' walls, I'm still the Muggleborn who embarrassed pureblood families at an international tournament and built a business that proved they could compete with anyone. That target doesn't go away. It follows me into the castle and waits."
"You should be worrying about your coursework and your friendships," Weasley said. "Not about whether someone is going to try to murder you."
"I agree. I should be. But I was born into a world that doesn't care what I should be worrying about."
Weasley held his gaze. Behind her eyes, Rowan could see the war still being fought, duty and care and guilt tangled together.
"I have a plan for the wards," Rowan said. "Something stronger than what I built myself."
"What kind of wards?" Hecat asked.
"Goblin-made."
Both professors stared at him.
"The goblins don't ward wizard properties," Weasley said.
"Nicholas has a contact among the goblin craftsmen. He wrote to him before the attack. The answer wasn't encouraging, but it wasn't a flat refusal either." He paused. "If I can secure goblin wards for the shop, will you let me continue?"
Weasley was quiet for a long time.
"If you can secure wards that I'm satisfied will hold," she said at last, placing each word with care, "then I will not exercise my authority to shut down your business." She leaned forward, and the formality dropped entirely. "But if the wards fall through, you sell the property and you come back to Hogwarts. No arguments. No negotiations. Your word."
"You have it. If the goblin wards fall through, I sell."
She searched his face. Whatever she found satisfied her enough that she sat back and the tension in her shoulders released by a fraction.
"Then we'll leave you to rest. The Healers want you for at least two more days before discharge."
Hecat rose as well. She paused beside his bed, and the mask of professional distance slipped.
"You held five of them," she said quietly. "With a dead arm and depleted reserves and Killing Curses in the air." She paused. "We need to talk about your training when you're back at Hogwarts. What you're doing now isn't enough for what's coming."
"I almost didn't make it. If Athena hadn't—" He stopped.
Hecat waited.
"She saved my life. She saw the Killing Curse coming and she flew into his face and bought me the second I needed. And then she died."
"I know. Iris told me." Hecat put her hand on his uninjured shoulder, firm and precise, the way she corrected his wand grip during training. "She was a good owl, Rowan."
Then she followed Weasley out.
Rowan stared at the ceiling. The diagnostic charms shimmered faintly, tracking the dark curse residue in his shoulder and the slow recovery of his reserves. Somewhere down the corridor, he could hear Iris's voice, muffled by distance. She was talking to Lawrence. The cadence had the quality of reassurance.
He picked up the newspaper and read the Beaumont footnote one more time. A missing herbalist and a sister asking questions, tucked into the bottom of a page that most readers would never finish. He didn't know what to make of it yet. He set the paper down, lay back, closed his eyes, and waited.
They came in together, which meant they'd been outside waiting until the professors left.
Iris entered first. Her eyes were red and swollen and her hair was loose around her shoulders, uncombed. Lawrence followed close behind. His face had the grey sunken quality of someone who hadn't slept and had spent the hours crying instead, and his hands kept opening and closing at his sides.
They stopped two steps inside the door. Rowan looked at them from the hospital bed, and whatever composure he'd held together for the Flamels and the professors began to fracture.
"Come here," he said.
They crossed the room and held him, one on each side, careful of the bandages and the dead arm. For a while nobody spoke. Iris pressed her face against the side of his neck and her tears were hot against his skin. Lawrence gripped his good hand with both of his and squeezed hard enough that the bones ached, and the ache was the most grounding thing Rowan had felt since waking.
The Occlumency flexed. He felt it happen, the instinctive tightening, the walls trying to rise between him and the warmth of their bodies against his, because warmth was vulnerability and vulnerability was something the old architecture had been designed to prevent. He let the walls flex. He didn't let them close.
It cost him. His breathing went unsteady for three counts before he brought it back under control. Iris felt it and held him tighter.
When they finally pulled apart, nobody tried to talk about what had happened. They'd all been in the same room. They'd all heard the same spells and the same screaming and the same silence afterward. There was nothing to explain.
"Your mum," Rowan said, looking at Lawrence.
His face tightened. "She's sleeping. The Healers gave her something. Her hands..." He stopped. Tried again. "They shake. Even unconscious, they shake. The Healer thinks the potions will help. He wouldn't promise anything beyond that."
Rowan looked at Lawrence's hands. They were steady. He thought about what the Healers had told Perenelle. Twelve seconds. Lawrence had ended those twelve seconds.
"You saved her, Lawrence. You know that."
Lawrence's jaw worked. "I know."
The way he said it made clear that knowing didn't help as much as it should.
"The Healers said they can't fully reach the nerve damage," Rowan said. "But the Room of Requirement has a manual on ritual magic that describes how magical pathways can be restructured. There might be a way to repair what conventional healing can't."
Lawrence was quiet for a moment. "How long would it take you to find out?"
"I don't know. But I'll start as soon as we're back at Hogwarts."
Silence settled. Rain against the window. Iris's hand found Rowan's, her fingers lacing through his carefully.
"I'm sorry," Rowan said. "Both of you were in that building because of me."
"We were in that building because we chose to be," Iris said. Her voice was quiet and certain. "I came for your birthday. Lawrence was there because he's your partner and your friend. Clara signed on knowing how the wizarding world treats Muggleborns. None of us were tricked into being there. And when the worst happened, none of us hid."
The last three words landed quietly and carried everything.
"My mother wants you to rebuild," Lawrence said. "She told me before the sleeping draught took her. She grabbed my hand and looked at me and said, 'Tell him not to stop.' Those were her exact words."
Something moved in him. Warmer than grief. More dangerous than anger. He'd felt it on his birthday, sitting in the shop watching these people, and hadn't known what to call it.
He knew now. It was faith. Theirs. Iris and Lawrence and Clara, who believed in what he was building because they'd seen it with their own hands and staked their futures on it. Who had proved that belief by walking through a door into a room full of dark wizards.
He thought about Athena. About the way she'd seen danger and acted, because the person she loved was in trouble. That was its own kind of faith.
"All right," Rowan said. "We rebuild."
Lawrence exhaled. The breath left him in a long unsteady rush.
"Good. And we do it before September."
"That's three weeks, Lawrence."
"Then we'd better get started." Something kindled in his expression, a fierceness that looked nothing like the grey exhaustion of five minutes ago. "And when it's done, whoever sent those five is going to see exactly what they accomplished. Because it won't be a shop they burned down. It'll be something they can't touch."
Iris was watching them both with an expression that held pride and worry and love braided together. She squeezed Rowan's hand once more, then let go.
"I should let you rest. Both of you." She stood. "My parents are in the waiting room. They'll want to see me before we go home."
The slight hesitation before go home told Rowan what she wasn't saying. Her parents had been here since the news broke. They had not come into his room.
He understood. Their daughter had been in his shop when dark wizards attacked. Fair or not, her parents would hold him responsible for that.
"Thank them for being here," Rowan said. "For staying."
Iris nodded. She bent and kissed his forehead, quick and light, and then she was gone.
Lawrence stayed. He pulled his chair closer and sat with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands.
"How are you going to keep them out next time?"
Rowan told him about the goblin wards and the gold and what he thought it would take to make it happen. Lawrence listened.
When Rowan finished, Lawrence leaned back and looked at the ceiling. The fierceness had spent itself, leaving behind a tired boy who missed his mother and wanted the world to stop hurting the people he cared about.
"I'm glad you came out," Rowan said. Quieter. "I would have died without you."
Lawrence didn't say anything. He didn't need to.
They sat with it for a while. The rain against the window. The quiet of the corridor.
"We should sleep," Lawrence said. "Long few weeks ahead."
"Yeah." Rowan watched him settle deeper into the chair. "Lawrence."
"Mm."
"Thank you."
Lawrence didn't open his eyes. But the corner of his mouth moved, just slightly, and within minutes his breathing deepened. He slept in the chair beside Rowan's bed, his hands resting in his lap. They were still. They did not shake.
Rowan watched him sleep. The rain continued against the window, steady and grey. In a room down the corridor, Clara's hands trembled against hospital sheets. Somewhere beyond the hospital walls, the remains of the Crucible sat behind sealed wards on Carkitt Market, waiting.
He would rebuild. He would make the wards unbreakable and the walls stronger and the next people who came would find something very different waiting behind the door.
But first he would let Lawrence sleep. And he would lie here in the white room and listen to the rain and hold in his memory the warmth of Iris's hand and Lawrence's fierceness and Clara's message, delivered through her son's shaking voice.
Tell him not to stop.
He wouldn't.
Outside, the rain softened. Inside, the Occlumency held steady, the walls doing what they'd been built to do. And in the room behind the walls, in the open space where he'd promised himself he wouldn't lock things away, Athena's absence sat like a chair left empty at a table set for two.
He would deal with it. Later, when the world gave him room to breathe, he would sit in that open space and feel what needed feeling. But for now the walls held, and the plans formed, and the boy who had learned to feel things let the part of himself that couldn't afford to feel take the wheel.
It was the most dangerous thing about him. The ability to choose when to be human.