Last week of July to mid-August
The Weasley family arrived in Egypt on a Tuesday in the last week of July, via a Portkey that deposited them in a nondescript Ministry liaison office in Cairo with the abruptness characteristic of Portkey travel, which did not believe in gentle introductions and had never seen a reason to start.
Cairo received them the way Cairo received everyone — without ceremony, without accommodation, with the absolute indifference of a city that had been receiving people for five thousand years and had long since stopped being surprised by any of them.
The heat was the first thing. Not the polite warmth of an English summer doing its best, but heat that had opinions about it, that arrived against the skin with the confidence of something that had been here longer than anything else and intended to continue being here regardless of how anyone felt about it. He stepped out of the liaison office into the Cairo afternoon and the heat met him like a physical presence and he thought, with the specific clarity his mind now maintained even in discomfort, that he was going to have to recalibrate every assumption he'd brought about what summer meant.
The second thing was the noise.
He had Ron's memories of the Burrow and his own memories of a life lived in cities that were busy in the English sense of busy, and neither of them had prepared him for Cairo. It was a city of layered sound — car horns and call to prayer and vendors and construction and the particular dense hum of a place where several million people were all engaged in their various businesses simultaneously and had no inclination toward quiet as a concept. Arabic moved through it, rapid and musical and nothing like the careful textbook version that was currently settling into the framework the enchantment had laid down three weeks ago. He found himself picking up fragments — a vendor's call, a child's complaint, a direction given to a driver — with the slightly disorienting pleasure of a skill making itself useful for the first time in the field.
He had taken the French enchantment first, as planned, then German, then Arabic. Each three days apart, each administered at night on an empty stomach, each producing the same experience: sleep, and then waking with a framework in the mind that hadn't been there before, the way a room looks different when someone has installed shelving and you find yourself automatically knowing where things should go. The cultural gaps the shopkeeper had warned him about were real — he spoke Arabic with the functional competency of someone who had the structure without the history, and he knew it, and he compensated by listening more than he spoke and watching the spaces between words for the things the words weren't saying.
Bill was waiting for them in the liaison office.
He was twenty-two, which at this particular moment in his life manifested as someone who had been doing serious work in a serious environment for two years and had the quiet confidence of competence without the self-consciousness of someone who needed you to notice it. The dragon fang earring. The long hair. The Gringotts robes folded over one arm because Cairo in July was not an environment that rewarded unnecessary layers. He looked like Ron's memories said he looked, which was to say he looked like Bill, which was its own specific thing — the oldest Weasley child carrying the particular quality of someone who had left home first and made a life elsewhere and remained, entirely and without effort, part of the family.
He looked at Ron's face the way older siblings looked at younger ones they hadn't seen in several months — taking inventory, checking for changes, noting what was different with the private accounting of someone who had been tracking this person since they were small.
Something in his expression adjusted.
He filed it. Bill Weasley was going to be one of the people who noticed things. It was useful to know that early.
"You've grown," Bill said, which was what people said to thirteen-year-olds in lieu of you look different in ways I haven't categorized yet.
" Couple years will do that," he said.
Bill looked at him for a moment longer and then smiled — the easy, genuine smile that Ron's memories associated with Bill specifically, the one that arrived without effort and made people feel included — and turned to engulf their mother in a hug that she returned with the specific fervency of a woman who had had a difficult year and was very glad to have all her children in one place.
His father shook Bill's hand and then pulled him into a brief, firm embrace with the particular quality of a parent who had missed their child and was expressing it through the handshake-to-hug conversion that fathers sometimes performed when they had feelings they weren't sure how to announce.
The twins had already begun assessing Cairo through the window of the liaison office with the focused energy of people identifying opportunities.
Percy was reading the Ministry liaison's information brochure with the attention of someone who intended to know everything about where they were before stepping outside.
Ginny was standing close to their mother, watching the city through the window with wide eyes and the particular expression of someone encountering something entirely outside their frame of reference and finding it more interesting than frightening.
"Right," Bill said, when the reunion had completed its necessary stages. "Welcome to Cairo. Rules: stay close in the bazaar, don't drink the water without a purification charm, don't buy anything in the tourist district without my assessment, and don't point at things. It's considered rude here and will increase the price of whatever you were pointing at by approximately thirty percent."
Fred raised his hand. "What if we're pointing at something we don't want to buy?"
"Then you're just being rude," Bill said.
"Fair enough," Fred said.
They went outside.
The first two days were Cairo proper.
Bill navigated the city with the ease of someone who had spent considerable time in it and had strong opinions about where to go and, equally importantly, where not to go. He walked them through the Khan el-Khalili in the morning, when the heat was not yet at its full conviction — the great bazaar that had been a bazaar for six hundred years and moved with the organized energy of something that had been doing this long enough to have developed opinions about efficiency. Streets that had been streets for centuries. Stalls selling spices whose smell reached you before you could see them, fabric in colors that had no equivalent in the English palette, metalwork that caught the light and threw it back in directions it hadn't expected, and things he couldn't identify on sight that Bill assessed on request with the brief evaluative attention of someone who had developed strong views on what was genuine and what was performing genuineness for tourists.
He moved through most of it alongside Bill, who turned out to be a natural guide — not in the performed enthusiasm of someone showing off, but in the specific generosity of someone who had genuinely come to love a place and wanted the people they cared about to see why.
"The magical district is through here," Bill said, on the second morning, leading them through a sequence of turnings that required knowing where you were going — not Disillusioned, not hidden, but organized in the way of magical spaces within Muggle cities, present to those who knew the pattern and invisible to those who didn't.