Percy was waiting for them at the pickup point in the family flying car — pale blue, older model, with the specific well-worn look of something that has been loved rather than maintained. He climbed out when he saw them coming, looking relieved in the contained way of an eldest son who has been assigned a responsibility and is pleased it's going smoothly.
"You made it," he said, shaking hands with the brisk efficiency of someone who has already practiced adulthood. "Long time, all of you. Ready to go?"
The car was wider inside than outside — a minor Expansion Charm, Kevin noted — and they piled in with the slight chaotic energy of five people negotiating luggage in a confined space.
Percy engaged the invisibility booster from the dashboard. The car shimmered, then vanished from visible light.
"Here we go, then," Percy said.
The ground dropped away.
Kevin had forgotten that flying cars were different from flying broomsticks. A broom responded to a rider who trusted it. A car was a car that happened to be airborne, which meant it moved the way cars moved — the specific floating, swaying imprecision of something not built for three dimensions.
He gripped the door handle.
"Kevin," Hermione said, reading him with the accuracy of someone who has been paying close attention for a year. She put her hand over his on the door handle. "It's all right."
"It moves wrong," he said.
"It does," she agreed. She moved closer. He unclenched his hand from the handle and held hers instead.
Harry and Ron, in the seats ahead, had the decency to look out the window and discuss nothing. They were poor at looking as though they weren't noticing, but the effort was appreciated.
The English countryside rolled below them at altitude, patchwork-green and specific, a summer afternoon happening in miniature.
"How long?" Kevin asked.
"Two hours, roughly," Percy said. "Depending on wind."
Kevin settled back. Hermione's hand was warm and steady. He watched the ground and thought about second year and the curriculum he'd been quietly building.
Harry had turned in his seat and was talking to Ron about something — light, easy, the conversation of people who haven't seen each other for weeks and are working through the backlog. Hermione, beside Kevin, had produced a book from somewhere with the inevitability of a natural law.
Two hours passed. The Burrow appeared below them — a structure that had clearly been built with enthusiasm and then extended repeatedly by people who considered blueprints optional. Stacked, irregular, improbable. Surrounded by gardens and paddocks and the general evidence of a large family that had been living fully in one place for a long time.
Kevin looked at it. Something settled in him that he couldn't quite name.
"Home," Percy said, simply.
The interior of the Burrow was smaller than it looked and larger than it should have been, which Kevin had already catalogued as a theme of wizarding architecture. Every surface held something — objects in various states of usefulness, photographs, projects abandoned and resumed, the accumulated archaeology of a family that kept everything because everything had once mattered.
It was warm. Specifically and genuinely warm, in the way that spaces become when they're loved.
George and Fred came down the stairs before the door was fully open, assessed the arrivals with the experienced eye of people who have been waiting, and made their verdict known immediately and at volume.
Ginny followed. She stopped in the hallway and looked at Harry with the careful, controlled expression of someone who has been preparing for this moment and is not going to let it show.
Kevin filed the expression away. He'd seen it before on different faces — the particular look of someone who cares about a person and is managing the evidence of it with limited success.
Harry, oblivious, smiled at her.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," Harry said.
Kevin let it settle and wandered toward the kitchen.
Mrs. Weasley arrived home to the specific chaos of five additional children and managed it with the efficiency of someone who has been managing chaos professionally for many years. She hugged Harry, Kevin, and Hermione in quick succession — a warm, enveloping hug of the kind that leaves no room for protest — and then organised dinner by directing approximately seven things to happen simultaneously.
The kitchen was extraordinary. Knives chopped, pots stirred, plates arranged themselves, and all of it moved with the rhythm of magic so practised it was indistinguishable from breathing.
Kevin found Mr. Weasley in the sitting room and sat down beside him.
Arthur Weasley was, Kevin had concluded, one of the more straightforwardly good people he had met in this world — genuinely curious, genuinely kind, with the particular enthusiasm of someone who loves their work and also loves the world adjacent to it. He worked at the Ministry containing magical misuse of Muggle artefacts, which meant he spent his days thinking about Muggle things in a professional capacity, which had produced in him a deep affection for Muggle ingenuity that expressed itself as comprehensive and slightly misinformed admiration.
"Mr. Weasley," Kevin said, "what does a typical day at the Ministry actually look like?"
Arthur lit up.
An hour later, Kevin produced a compass from his bag. He'd bought it in a tourist shop — a simple thing, a needle on a pivot in a small brass case — and pressed it into Arthur's hands.
Arthur turned it over with the reverence of someone handling a genuinely significant object. "And this shows direction regardless of weather? No charm required?"
"No charm required," Kevin confirmed. "Magnetic north. The needle responds to the earth's own magnetic field."
"The earth's own —" Arthur looked up at him with the expression of someone who has just had something clarified that had been puzzling him for years. "Kevin," he said warmly, "I think you might be the most sensible person I've met this summer."
Dinner was called.
Arthur put his arm around Kevin's shoulders on the walk to the table and Kevin let it happen and felt, in some quiet way, that the Burrow had already done what it did to everyone who came to it — made itself feel like somewhere that had been waiting for you.
---
---
He said only one in a hundred readers leaves a review. Let's make that number a joke.
Hit Powerstone. Drop a review. Updates are not slowing down and neither are we.
Top 10 by next week. Still proving him wrong together.