The Diagon Alley trip was on today.
His mother had organized it in the practical way she organized things — breakfast early, list checked, Floo powder by the kitchen fireplace, everyone ready by nine. She moved through the preparation with the efficiency of someone who had done this many times and had the additional organization of a woman who now ran a small business and had calibrated her time management accordingly.
"I'll take care of mine and Ginny's things," he said, at breakfast.
His mother looked at him over her tea.
"I've got the list," he said. "I know what she needs. I'll make sure it's all covered."
She studied him for a moment with the careful attention she'd been giving him all summer. Then she looked at Ginny, who was eating toast and appeared to have no strong feelings about the arrangement.
"Alright," his mother said. "But you check in at noon. Leaky Cauldron, the table by the fireplace."
"Noon," he confirmed.
Harry, across the table, was watching this exchange with the expression of someone who had noticed something and was deciding whether to comment on it. He didn't comment on it. He just picked up his own tea and looked at the window.
He had been doing that more this summer — registering things and holding them quietly, in the way of someone who was doing their own recalibrating. The Sirius situation had changed something in Harry's baseline. Not dramatically, not in ways that were easy to describe. But the specific quality of Harry's silences had shifted. They were less the silences of someone carrying things alone and more the silences of someone who was still carrying things but had begun to understand that carrying them alone was a choice rather than a condition.
It was a small shift. He thought it mattered.
They arrived through the Leaky Cauldron into the particular energy of Diagon Alley in the last weeks of August — the annual ritual of a magical community preparing for the new school year, the alley at its most purposeful and most crowded, families moving through it with lists and children and the organized urgency of people who knew what they needed and intended to get it.
His mother and father moved off toward their own errands with the twins in tow — the twins had their own agenda for the day that they had not fully disclosed and that no one had fully pressed them on, because pressing the twins on undisclosed agendas was a commitment of time and energy that rarely produced proportional results.
Percy went to Flourish and Blotts immediately, with the focused efficiency of someone who had been waiting for this specific moment since the booklist arrived.
That left him, Harry, Hermione, and Ginny.
"Ginny," he said, "let's do your list first. Then we can meet up with Harry and Hermione for the rest."
Ginny looked at him with the slightly surprised expression she still sometimes wore when he was organized about things. "Okay," she said.
They moved through Ginny's list with the efficiency of someone who had read it, prioritized it, and knew the alley well enough to route it sensibly. New robes — she'd grown since last year — from Madam Malkin's first, because robes took the longest. Books from Flourish and Blotts while the robes were being fitted. Potions supplies from the apothecary. A new set of quills and ink from the stationer's.
He paid for all of it without discussion, which Ginny accepted without the resistance she might have offered in a different version of this summer, which told him something about what the last few months had built between them.
At Madam Malkin's, while the seamstress was making adjustments to Ginny's new school robes, he caught Ginny looking at a set of dress robes in deep green that she had very carefully not pointed at.
He looked at them. Looked at her.
"Those as well," he said to the seamstress.
Ginny looked at him.
"You'll need them eventually," he said. "Might as well have ones you actually like."
She looked at the robes for a moment. Then at him. Her expression did something brief and real that she converted quickly into the practical focus of someone evaluating fit. "The sizing will need adjusting," she said.
"We'll wait," he said, nodding at the seamstress.
The seamstress confirmed this with professional confidence, and the green dress robes were added to the order, and Ginny looked at them in the mirror with the careful expression of someone who was pleased and was managing the pleased carefully, which was a Ginny thing he'd noticed all summer and found both familiar and quietly heartbreaking in the specific way of someone who recognized the habit from someone else.