The third week of August arrived with the specific quality of all last stretches — the awareness of an ending that hadn't happened yet, the particular texture of time that knew it was running out and was neither rushing nor lingering but simply being what it was.
Harry arrived on the Monday.
He came via the Leaky Cauldron — he'd been staying there since the day before Aunt Marge was due to arrive, which had been his own decision made with the calm practicality of someone who had looked at his options and selected the one that required the least from everyone involved. The Dursleys had been, in his assessment, in a significantly better mood than usual when he'd asked for the Hogsmeade permission form. Marge wasn't coming. The disruption she reliably produced wasn't coming. Vernon Dursley had signed the form with the distracted efficiency of a man whose primary concern had been removed from his immediate future, and Harry had thanked him and packed his trunk and left the following morning before anyone could reconsider.
He arrived at the Burrow with his trunk and Hedwig and the specific quality of someone who had spent two weeks in a room above a pub reading and eating meals alone and was very ready to be somewhere with people in it.
His mother had the door open before he'd reached the gate.
Hermione arrived the following day, by her parents' car, which pulled up the lane with the careful navigation of two Muggle dentists encountering a magical property for the second time and managing it with the thorough preparedness of people who approached unfamiliar situations through research. Her mother helped carry her trunk. Her father shook his father's hand with the slightly formal warmth of someone who found the situation unusual and was being very good about it.
Hermione herself stepped out of the car and looked at the Burrow — the new Burrow, improved but still itself — with the assessing attention she gave everything and then appeared to decide she approved.
She looked at him.
"You're tanned," she said.
"Egypt," he said.
"I know it was Egypt," she said. "I just —" She paused, reassessing. "You look well."
"So do you," he said, which was true. The summer appeared to have treated her better than school terms sometimes did — she had the quality of someone who had slept adequately and eaten properly and spent time outside, which he suspected was partly her parents' doing and partly the absence of a timetable that demanded more than any single person could sustainably give.
This would change, he knew, the moment she saw the pensieve.
For now she looked well, and he was glad to see her, and the summer had two weeks left in it.
He planned it the way he planned things now — quietly, in advance, with the specific attention of someone who understood that the things worth doing were worth doing properly.
He had found the restaurant through a combination of research and the particular advantage of being someone who could navigate both the Muggle and magical worlds with reasonable confidence. It was in Covent Garden, on the sixth floor of a building that most people walked past without looking up, accessible by a lift that required a key the maître d' provided upon reservation. The roof terrace had a retractable glass canopy for unpredictable English weather and a view of London that started at the rooftops and went as far as the eye cared to follow. He had made the reservation by telephone from the village post office, which had required him to be thirteen years old with an adult voice and a very specific manner, and had succeeded because confidence, he had found, covered a remarkable range of logistical gaps.
He told Harry and Hermione on the third day of their stay at the Burrow.
"Dinner," he said. "Tomorrow evening. Just the three of us. London."
Harry looked at him. "London."
"Rooftop restaurant in Covent Garden," he said. "Muggle. Smart casual — do you have something that fits?"
Harry looked down at his new clothes from the Diagon Alley trip, which did fit, and which he was still occasionally surprised to find on his body. "Yes," he said.
Hermione had the expression of someone who had been presented with a plan that was more developed than she'd been expecting and was recalibrating accordingly. "How did you book a restaurant?" she said. "You're thirteen."
"Telephone," he said. "The village post office has one."
"They let you —"
"I was very polite," he said.
She looked at him for a moment. Then: "What should I wear?"
"Whatever you'd like," he said. "It's not formal. Just — nice."
She appeared to find this answer simultaneously adequate and slightly insufficient but accepted it with the grace of someone who had decided to trust the process.
His mother, when informed, gave him the expression she had been developing all summer — the one that was still updating — and then asked what time they would be back and reminded him that they were thirteen years old and London was a city, and he confirmed a time and agreed that London was indeed a city and thanked her for the reminder, and she let them go with the specific expression of a woman choosing her battles.
They took the Knight Bus to London, because Apparition was not yet available to them and because the Knight Bus was the kind of experience that was improved by having people to share it with. Stan Shunpike gave Harry the particular recognition of someone who had encountered Harry Potter before and had opinions about it. Harry endured this with the patient resignation of a person who had accepted that certain things were simply going to happen.
Covent Garden in the early evening had the quality it always had in August — warm and busy, the piazza full of street performers and tourists and the particular energy of a city being itself in the summer. They walked through it with the specific pleasure of three people who had nowhere to be for the next two hours except somewhere good.
The lift took them to the sixth floor.
The roof terrace was exactly what he had hoped it would be — not grand, not intimidating, but right. Tables spaced well apart, each with a candle and a small arrangement of something green that was real rather than decorative. The canopy was open tonight, the August sky above them doing its evening thing, the city spread out below with its particular layered light. London at dusk from a rooftop had a quality that London at street level didn't — the same city, seen from enough distance that its size became legible.
Harry stopped at the terrace edge and looked out at it.
He stood beside him and didn't say anything, because it didn't need anything said.
"I've never seen it from up here," Harry said, after a moment.
"Most people haven't," he said.