The first thing Hermione produced in class when she tried the Patronus was a silver mist that filled the practice room from wall to wall and then dissipated.
Lupin looked at it.
'You've been practicing,' he said
'Since around October, but it still didn't form,' Hermione replied, with the tone she used for her own failures, which was precise and clinical and considerably less patient than the tone she used for anyone else's.
'It will,' Lupin said. 'The power is clearly there. The memory needs anchoring. What were you thinking of?'
She was quiet for a moment. 'My parents. The night they came to pick me up from King's Cross at the end of first year.'
'Hold that thought but go deeper into it,' Lupin said. 'Not the event. The feeling at the center of the event. What were you certain of, in that moment?'
She thought about this the way she thought about problems she intended to solve, which was with her entire attention.
From the corner Ron watched and did not offer anything, which was the correct approach. Hermione did not need coaching when she was working on a problem. She needed space.
She cast again.
A shape began to form in the silver mist — something small and quick and low to the ground. It lasted approximately four seconds before dissolving, but it had form. There was an animal in it.
Lupin looked at Ron briefly, with the expression of a teacher who had just seen something.
'Again,' he said to Hermione.
She cast a third time.
The silver mist gathered with more intention than the first two attempts, the shape inside it clearer — something low and quick and decisively itself. It ran three full circuits of the room before dissolving, and in those three circuits it had form enough to be unmistakable.
An Otter
Lupin watched it fade. His expression had the quality of someone who had seen something both unexpected and correct.
Ron saw what arrived. He raised his camera and took a photograph, because some things needed to be seen.
Ron did not say what he was thinking, which was that the otter suited her in the specific way that the best Patronus forms suited their casters — not as a symbol of who they were but as an expression of what they were at their most resolved.
He would tell her eventually.
Not tonight.
Harry's Patronus came at the end of February.
Not from Lupin directly — Harry had been sitting in on the Thursday sessions since Hermione joined, because Harry had the specific quality of someone who did not like being left out of things his friends were doing and was too principled to admit this was the reason. He had been watching both of them practice with the focused attention he brought to Defense work, and on the last Thursday of February, when Lupin said to Ron do it again so Hermione can see the full form, Harry had cast without being asked.
The stag came out silver and entirely formed. It moved through the practice room with the quality of something that had been waiting.
Everyone in the room was quiet.
Harry looked at his Patronus with an expression Ron had not seen on him before. It was complicated and had grief in it and something that was not grief, something that was on the other side of grief, and Ron did not photograph it and did not look away.
'Your father's form,' Lupin said, very quietly.
'Yes,' Harry said. He kept his eyes on the stag until it faded. When it was gone he stood in the practice room with the quality of someone who had been given something and was still understanding what they had been given.
Lupin put a hand briefly on Harry's shoulder and then moved away, which was the exactly correct thing to do.
Ron looked at Harry.
Harry looked at him.
'Good,' Ron said. Simply. Meaning it entirely.
Harry nodded. His expression had the quality of someone who needed a moment and knew he was going to get one because the people in the room knew him well enough to give it.
They packed up the session in companionable quiet. Walking back to the tower, Harry said: 'The memory. It was my mum. Not a real memory — I never had one with her. Just — what I imagine it would have felt like.'
'That's real,' Ron said.
Harry was quiet for a moment. 'Yeah,' he said. 'I think it is.'
They walked the rest of the way without talking, and it was the specific good silence of people who did not need to fill the space between them, and Ron thought: this. This is what he had come back for. Not the Horcruxes, not the preparation, not the long work of reducing the cost of what was coming. This specific walk back from a practice room with Harry, in the quiet of a thing well done.
This was the point.