The last day of term was a Thursday.
The Hogwarts Express arrived at King's Cross at eleven o'clock on the dot, because the Hogwarts Express had been making this journey for long enough that punctuality had become less a policy and more a point of pride. His parents were on the platform. Both of them, which was not unusual for a year that had been what this year had been.
His mother had the specific quality of someone who had been managing anxiety through action for the last several weeks and was converting the relief of seeing her children into a different kind of energy - the warm, slightly overwhelming energy of a woman who needed to confirm with her own eyes that everyone was present and intact.
His father stood slightly behind her with the quiet steadiness that was his particular counterbalance to her particular intensity, and when he saw them coming through the barrier his face did the thing it did when he felt something large and kept it entirely contained.
The platform reunion had the organized chaos of the Weasley family in miniature - his mother moving between them, his father's hand on shoulders, the twins already talking at twice the normal speed about something that would probably require adult supervision. Ginny pressing close to her mother with the particular relief of someone who had needed this specific thing for several months.
He stood slightly back and let the reunion happen and thought that this — this specific warm loud ordinary chaos - was something worth protecting.
Scabbers was in his trunk.
He had put Scabbers in his trunk for the journey home with the same instinct he'd had since arriving in this world - a general low-level discomfort with the rat that he hadn't fully examined and hadn't needed to examine because caging him and keeping him contained felt right and he'd gone with it. That was enough for now.
The journey to the Burrow was by Ministry car - his father had the use of one today, which the twins treated as an event and Percy treated as an opportunity to sit in the front and discuss the car's specifications with his father, who engaged with this with genuine enthusiasm because Arthur Weasley found all Muggle vehicles genuinely interesting.
He sat in the back with Ginny and his mom and watched the countryside transition from the particular density of London outward to the less decided landscape of the West Country, and thought about the summer ahead.
He was not thinking about Scabbers.
This is important.
What happened when the family came home from Hogwarts happened without any preparation on his part, without any foreknowledge, without any of the careful positioning he'd been doing all year. The ward did what the ward did. His surprise, when it came, was entirely genuine.
The Burrow looked different.
The visible changes from the construction work were evident even from the lane — the house was still itself, still the particular lopsided accumulated structure that it had always been, but it was itself with more confidence now, the recent work apparent in the way things that had been slightly wrong were no longer slightly wrong.
His mother made a sound beside him that was not quite words.
His father had stopped the car at the gate and was looking at the house with an expression he'd never seen on his father's face before — the expression of a man who had loved something for a very long time and was seeing it receive care it had always deserved and had never quite managed to get.
They got out of the car.
He lifted his trunk from the boot and levitated it with the hawthorn wand — the new wand, which continued to be exactly right in every way that mattered — and followed his family through the gate and up the path toward the front door.
He was perhaps six steps past the gate when Scabbers, inside the trunk, went absolutely and completely mad.
The trunk shook. The sound from within it was not the normal sound of a rat in a confined space but something more frantic, higher-pitched, the specific sound of something that had recognized a threat and was responding to that recognition with the entirety of its available energy.
He stopped walking.
The trunk shook again, harder.
His mother had turned at the sound. His father had turned. The twins had turned. Everyone had turned and was looking at the trunk with the collective confusion of a family that had been living with Scabbers for years and had never heard him produce anything like this.
Then the trunk stopped shaking.
Then, from within it, came a sound he had not anticipated — the specific crack of a lock being forced from the inside, and the trunk lid lifted three inches, and something was pushing against it from within with a frantic, purposeful energy.
His father's hand went to his wand.
His mother's hand went to her wand.
He stood very still, because something was happening that he didn't understand yet, and the correct response to things he didn't understand was to be still and watch and let the people with more information act first.
His father cast a containment charm on the trunk — a bubble of force that settled around it smoothly, professionally, with the practiced ease of someone who had done this in the field and didn't need to think about it. The trunk stopped moving.
"Everyone back," his father said, with the voice he used when he meant it. "Away from the trunk. Now."
They went back.
His father looked at the trunk for a long moment. Then he said, very quietly, to his mother: "The ward flagged something."
His mother's expression was not surprise. It was the expression of someone whose ward had just told them something that they were in the process of believing. "Animagus detection," she said.
He looked at his parents.
He looked at the trunk.
He looked at his parents again.
"Scabbers," he said. The word came out with the specific quality of someone arriving at a conclusion in real time, the pieces assembling themselves with the horrible clarity of something that had been in front of you for a long time. "Scabbers triggered the ward."
Neither of his parents said anything. His father was already casting the diagnostic spells that confirmed what the ward had registered, his expression moving through the focused calculation of someone processing a significant professional situation while simultaneously being a parent in his own front garden.
His mother was watching the trunk with the cold, still fury of someone who had kept that animal in her house for twelve years.
His father raised his free hand, made a specific gesture, and his Patronus — a weasel, small and bright and absolutely purposeful — shot from his wand and vanished in the direction of the Ministry.
Not the general Ministry.
Direct to Amelia Bones.
He knew this because his father said, to no one in particular, in the tone of someone thinking aloud: "Amelia will want to handle this personally."
The family stood in the garden of the improved Burrow in the warm June afternoon and waited.