The last week of December had a different quality from the third.
The third week had been full — full in the good way, the way of things that were happening and mattering and producing photographs worth keeping. The fourth week was a different kind of full, the kind that did not require a camera, that asked only that you be present in it without directing it.
He was trying to learn how to do this. It was harder than the Patronus.
The Burrow in the last week of December was its most complete self — everyone home, the particular noise of it, the overlapping conversations and the twins occupying the garden with something experimental and Percy at the kitchen table with his school notes organized into the revision structure he had been maintaining since September with the focused efficiency of someone who treated examinations as a professional obligation rather than an academic one, and Ginny on the stairs with her book and his mother moving through all of it with the practiced ease of someone who had been conducting this specific symphony for twenty years and knew exactly when to intervene and when to let the noise be noise.
He helped with the cooking. He had cooked before, in his previous life — not professionally, not systematically, but enough that the kitchen was familiar territory and his hands knew the basic grammar of it. What the two weeks in the beginning of December had added was not a transformation but a refinement: a cleaner sense of temperature, a more deliberate relationship with technique, the specific difference between someone who cooked by habit and someone who had started thinking about why. His mother noticed in the way she noticed things about her children — not announced, just present in the slightly different questions she started asking, the way she occasionally stopped to watch what he was doing with a pan and said nothing, the way the kitchen between them had begun to feel like a conversation rather than parallel activity.
He answered the questions honestly. They cooked together three evenings that week, the kitchen warm and the smell of it the smell of December, and he was in it without it becoming a project or a preparation, simply in it, and this was the thing he had been trying to learn since the first evening with Sable in the castle kitchen and which the Burrow, it turned out, was better at teaching than he was at learning from instructions.
He took photographs of nothing in particular. His father asleep in the armchair after dinner with the Muggle engineering book open on his chest. The twins at the garden table in the cold with their notebooks and their experimental materials and their absolute conviction that whatever they were doing was both important and fine. Percy rereading the same page of his Transfiguration notes four times and eventually giving up and having tea instead, which Percy would never have admitted to and Ron would never tell him had been photographed. His mother at the kitchen window in the morning, just standing there with her tea, looking at the garden in the frost.
He had a good life. He had chosen it — not the circumstances of it, not the body he was in or the world he had arrived in, but the shape of it, the relationships in it, the direction it was moving. He had built most of what he had in this world since the summer, with deliberate attention, and it was good.
He held this for a few days without examining it too closely, because the examination had a tendency to arrive at the timeline and the timeline had a tendency to produce the spinning, and he was, this week, not spinning.
He had been thinking about the locket since Christmas.
Not about destroying it — that part was straightforward, he had the fang and the method. The problem was access. The locket was a Horcrux, and Horcruxes were sealed. The diary had not needed opening; the fang had gone through the cover directly. The diadem was unwrapped and struck. But the locket was different — it had a catch, a mechanism, and in the books it had not opened through any ordinary means. It had opened for Harry. In Parseltongue.
He had been carrying this problem since talking with Kreacher, turning it over in the way he turned over problems that did not yet have solutions, filing it and returning to it, filing it and returning to it.
He tried it alone first. During a late evening in his room, the locket — still in Kreacher's keeping, not yet in his hands — present only as a memory of what he had read. He tried to produce the sounds Harry made when he spoke to snakes: the specific sibilance, the distinctions of pitch and duration. His mouth could approximate the shape of the sounds. It would produce the magic in them. He knew this before he tried as canon had confirmed it by the end of the war .
What he needed was a Parselmouth to learn more words.
He thought about this carefully. He thought about how to ask Harry without explaining why, and whether a partial explanation would be sufficient, and what Harry would and would not accept as a reason. Harry was not a person who required complete information before helping someone he trusted. Harry was also not a person who could be managed without noticing the management. The approach needed to be honest within its limits.
He settled on academic interest — which was true, as far as it went. Parseltongue was genuinely the most documented rare magical ability with a living practitioner. He had been meaning to study it for entirely separate reasons. The locket was the reason he was studying it now rather than later, but the interest was real.
This was the kind of truth that was not a lie and was not the whole truth, and he had become, over the year, reasonably good at offering these when the alternative was a conversation he was not ready to have.
He would ask Harry on the train.
He had candidates. He would test later.