Aegeus came downstairs to find a ridiculously dense mound of parcels stacked beside the tree— far larger than what his parents had put out the night before.
His father was standing by the hearth with a mug of coffee, looking at the mountain of packages with a mixture of amusement and mild disbelief. "They kept coming through the back window until well past two in the morning," he said, nodding toward the pile as Jean poured tea in the kitchen. "I gave up trying to organize them by size and just stacked them."
"Did a post office explode over our chimney?" Hermione asked, coming down the stairs and stopping dead in her tracks as she took in the sheer volume of boxes. "Where did all that come from?"
Aegeus crouched by the tree, pulling a few of the smaller, ribbon-wrapped boxes toward himself to read the tags.
There were names he only vaguely recognized from Gryffindor Tower, alongside a few belonging to Ravenclaws he was reasonably certain he had never spoken a single word to. A third-year girl had sent a tin of Peppermint Toads with a brief, overly polite card wishing him a productive break.
The pile beside him was growing to a ridiculous size. A boy from the Dueling Club had sent a maintenance kit for dragon-hide boots, complete with specialized brushes and tins of polish. By the time he reached the sixth box of Honeydukes, the heavy scent of spun sugar and chocolate had taken over the entire room.
"This one is from a girl called Persimmon Wilkes," Hermione announced, holding up a small, brightly wrapped parcel and reading the tag with the deep suspicion of a jealous girlfriend. "Who is she?"
"She is a second-year Hufflepuff." A pause. "I have barely spoken to her."
"You have barely spoken to her, and yet she sent you—" Hermione tore the paper back to reveal a hand-knitted scarf in Gryffindor colors, slightly uneven at one end. "A hand-made scarf."
"Apparently."
"There's also this." His father held up a small tin, turning the label so Aegeus could read it. "Sugar quills, according to the label. From— " he squinted— "Sally Fawcett"
"Do you know her?"
"No."
"Who do you know?" Hermione muttered, to no one in particular, already reaching for the next parcel in the pile. This one turned out to contain a small, carved wooden bird that, when tapped, chirped a single note before going still— sender unlisted, tag simply reading from an admirer.
His mother, sorting a rapidly growing stack of cards on the side table, held one up with an expression somewhere between amused and faintly alarmed. "There are four more of these. One's addressed to 'The cute Gryffindor First-Year,' which— " she paused, reading further, "— reached you regardless, seeing as the owl found our house just fine.""
"The owl post system is more resourceful than I thought."
His father, who was working through the pile with faint bemusement, held up a final small box. "This one doesn't have a card at all. Just your name."
Aegeus opened it to find a single chess piece, hand-carved, unmistakably meant to represent him— small, with ash-brown hair, holding a wand, wearing an expression the carver had clearly intended as brooding and had landed somewhere closer to constipated.
Hermione took one look at it and burst into laughter she couldn't recover from for nearly a full minute, while Aegeus set the figure carefully on the mantelpiece, already resigned to the fact that this, too, was apparently now simply a feature of his life he would have to get used to.
"I don't understand," he said, mostly to himself, turning the little chess piece slightly so it faced the wall instead of the room. "I didn't do anything to warrant this."
Then there were the expected ones: a thick knitted jumper from his mother, a set of fountain pens from his father, and a surprisingly thoughtful set of colourful notebooks from Hermione. Marcus's gift was an oversized box of Chudley Cannons collectors' cards.
Rosalind's gift had been a brass-bound cipher wheel, complete with a coded message on the back that he had to solve just to read her Christmas greetings.
His own gifts had gone out a while earlier, carried up to the Owlery before the last of the school owls left for the holidays. For Hermione, the leather notebook and phoenix-feather bookmark he had already sent at Halloween had apparently not been enough— she had sent back four more letters demanding a second volume before he had even packed his trunk.
So he had added a slim, secondhand book on basic Arithmancy, judging that it was difficult enough to keep her occupied without giving her anything dangerous to attempt unsupervised.
For Marcus, a Quidditch model he had found in a secondhand shop in Hogsmeade. For Rosalind, a small, precise lock-picking kit— practice-grade, harmless, exactly the kind of thing she would take apart out of curiosity within the first hour of opening it.
Once the last of the stranger parcels had been sorted into a pile of their own, his mother set a stack of parchment in front of him.
"You don't have to send anything back," she said. "But every single one of them took the time to send you something, and you are going to have to thank them for that."
"But that's too many letters..."
"Then you better get started." She set a fresh parchment down beside the pile, entirely unmoved by his expression. "Not one line! Persimmon Wilkes knitted you a scarf by hand, Aegeus. She deserves more than that!"
He worked through the stack over the following two days, between everything else— a short note to each sender, thanking them for the specific gift rather than a form response copied out eleven times, which his mother had made clear would not be enough.
Hermione read over his shoulder more than once, offering opinions on tone he hadn't asked for and, on one occasion, rewriting an entire sentence herself before he had noticed she had taken the quill.
~~~
By the time the last of the letters were sealed and sent, the house had already begun settling into the quieter stretch of the holiday— the wrapping paper cleared away, Hermione off somewhere with her new Arithmancy book.
The festive noise that had filled the house on Christmas morning had thinned to something more ordinary: the radio murmuring in the kitchen, his father's occasional footsteps overhead, the house settling into the unremarkable rhythm of the days between Christmas and the new year.
Aegeus welcomed the quiet. Spread across his desk were his first-year Charms texts, opened alongside a thick, second-hand Latin-to-English dictionary he had pulled from the public library the night before.