The clothes shopping was his idea and Harry's reluctant agreement.
He had thought about how to raise it for several days and had concluded that the most effective approach was simply to raise it — directly, without building up to it, in the tone of someone identifying a practical problem and proposing a practical solution.
"You need clothes," he said, walking back through the passage toward the main alley.
Harry looked at him sideways. "I have clothes."
"You have Dudley's clothes," he said. "Which are four sizes too large and have not improved with age."
Harry was quiet for a moment.
"There's a decent Muggle clothes shop two streets from the Leaky Cauldron," he said. "Nothing complicated. An hour. You leave with things that actually fit."
"You don't have to —"
"I'm not doing it out of obligation," he said. "I'm doing it because you're my best friend and you deserve to own clothes that fit. These are different reasons."
Harry looked at him with the expression he sometimes wore when he'd received something genuine and wasn't sure how to respond to it. He had learned, over the summer, to let that expression be what it was rather than trying to move past it quickly.
After a moment Harry said: "Alright."
The shop was not elaborate. He had been in it once before, on the Muggle errands trip earlier in the summer, and had identified it as the right kind of place — practical, well-stocked, organized by size in the way that made self-directed shopping efficient rather than overwhelming.
He stood slightly back and let Harry move through the relevant sections at his own pace, offering specific assessments when asked and not offering them when not asked. Harry approached the process with the careful attention of someone doing something unfamiliar that they were taking seriously, which was, in fact, Harry's approach to most things and was one of the things he found consistently admirable about him.
An hour and a half later, Harry had three pairs of properly fitting trousers, four shirts that were made for someone with Harry's actual dimensions, a jacket that worked, and a pair of shoes that had not previously belonged to anyone else.
He also had a slightly uncertain expression that he was managing with the specific self-consciousness of someone wearing things that fit for the first time and not being entirely sure how to occupy that.
"You look like yourself," he said, using Ginny's phrase deliberately.
Harry looked at him. Then, briefly, he looked in the shop window at his own reflection — at the absence of the glasses, at the clothes that fit — and something in his expression did a thing that he thought was the beginning of believing it.
"Thanks," Harry said quietly.
"Don't mention it," he said, and meant it in the specific way of someone who wanted the thing to be normal enough that it didn't need to be mentioned, which was its own kind of gift.
They met his mother at the Leaky Cauldron at noon as arranged.
She looked at Harry — at the glasses that weren't there, at the clothes that fit — and her expression did something that she converted quickly and efficiently into the practical business of checking that the noon checklist had been satisfactorily addressed.
"All the school supplies?" she asked.
"Handled," he confirmed.
"Ginny's list?"
"Handled."
"Robes?"
"Handled and collected."
She looked at him for a moment with the expression she'd been wearing all summer — the one that was still building its updated model — and then nodded once and turned to organise lunch, which she did with the organized efficiency of someone who had been feeding large groups for twenty years and found the Leaky Cauldron's lunchtime menu entirely manageable.
Lunch had the warm quality of the summer's end — all of them around a large table, his mother producing conversation with the skill of someone who understood that a good meal was partly logistics and partly the work of making everyone feel included. Harry sat between him and Hermione and ate the kind of meal he ate at the Burrow, which was to say he ate it properly and with the quiet focused appreciation of someone for whom a good meal was not taken for granted.
Hermione, beside him, was in the process of noticing things.
He could see it — the ongoing Hermione calculation, the thing she did in new situations where she assembled available data into a picture that was more complete than the one most people carried away. She was noticing the new clothes. She was noticing the absence of the glasses. She was noticing the way Harry sat and ate and occupied the space around him, which was slightly different from how he had sat and eaten in June, and she was building a model of what had changed and why and what it meant.
She would want to talk about it later.
He would let her talk about it later, and he would answer the questions he could answer, and he thought about Hermione Granger with her teeth straightened and her summer-healthy face and her twelve-page letter about Ministry examination requirements, and he thought about the first Hogsmeade weekend again.
He looked at his food.
He was thirteen years old and had a great deal to do before he could afford to be distracted.
He was also thirteen years old and had been thirty-two before that, and knew from experience that deciding not to be distracted and actually not being distracted were related but distinct achievements.