They found Hermione and Harry outside Magical Menagerie with the specific quality of two people who had reached a decision after what appeared to have been a moderately extended discussion about it.
Hermione was holding a cat.
It was not a conventionally attractive cat. It was large and flat-faced and orange in the specific aggressive way of something that had opinions about being orange and had fully committed to them. It looked at him with the yellow-eyed assessment of an animal that had already evaluated everyone in its vicinity and reached verdicts it had no intention of revising.
It looked at Ginny.
Ginny looked back at it.
"That's a very confident cat," Ginny said.
"He's half-Kneazle," Hermione said, with the tone of someone who had already made their decision and was now providing the reasoning. "The intelligence is significantly higher than a normal cat. He can detect suspicious and untrustworthy people." She paused. "The shop assistant said he'd been there for quite a while. Nobody wanted him because of the face."
He looked at the cat. The cat looked at him with the unblinking attention of something running its own assessment.
"Crookshanks," Hermione said. "That's what I'm calling him."
The cat appeared to find this acceptable. It shifted its weight in Hermione's arms with the settled quality of something that had decided and was done deciding.
"He likes you," Harry said to Hermione, with the slight relief of someone who had been present for the entirety of the Magical Menagerie visit and was glad it had resolved.
"Of course he does," Hermione said, in the tone of someone who had not considered the alternative.
He looked at Crookshanks. Crookshanks looked at him. Something moved through the yellow eyes — the specific calculation of a creature with above-average intelligence doing above-average assessment — and then it looked away, apparently satisfied.
He filed that away. A half-Kneazle who could detect suspicious and untrustworthy people and who had just looked at him with that specific quality of attention and found him acceptable was either a very good sign or a very carefully navigated one, and he preferred not to examine which.
"Right," he said. "Before we do the school supplies — there's a healer I want to visit."
Both of them looked at him.
"Restorative work," he said. "Nutrient potions, bone strengthening. The kind of thing that's sensible after a year that involved basilisks and memory charms." He paused. "I think you should both come."
Hermione's expression moved through the rapid calculation she performed when presented with new information. "There's a healer's practice in Diagon Alley?"
"Off the main alley," he said. "Through the passage between Gringotts and the robe shop. Healer Adeyemi. She specializes in general restorative work — the kind that doesn't require St. Mungo's but benefits from professional assessment."
He had found her through research — a small notice in the Daily Prophet's health section that he'd been reading with the specific attention of someone building a list of useful resources. Healer Adeyemi had been practicing in Diagon Alley for fifteen years and had a reputation for the specific kind of thorough, practical medicine that didn't make a fuss about things and got them done correctly.
He led them through the passage.
The practice was small and clean, with the organized atmosphere of a healer who had strong opinions about the relationship between a tidy environment and a tidy mind. Healer Adeyemi herself was a witch of perhaps fifty, with the specific calm of someone who had been assessing people's health for long enough that she could do most of the initial evaluation simply by looking.
She looked at Harry first — at his general presentation, at the wrist where the basilisk fang had gone in, at the glasses, at the specific quality of someone who had grown up in circumstances that left marks — and something in her expression registered and was set aside with the professional discipline of someone who saw what she saw and focused on what she could address.
"Sit," she said.
Harry sat.
The diagnostic work was thorough and not particularly comfortable, in the way of genuine medical assessments. She ran her wand over Harry with the sequential precision of someone working through a checklist, noting results in a chart that updated itself as she moved.
"Nutritional deficiency," she said, matter-of-factly. "Significant, and long-standing. Bone density lower than it should be for your age — consistent with inadequate calcium and vitamin D over an extended period. Vision —" she looked at his glasses with an expression that was not quite disapproval but was adjacent to it "— correctable without the glasses. I can address that today."
Harry looked at her. "You can fix my eyesight?"
"I can correct the refractive error," she said. "It's a standard procedure. Twenty minutes. Painless." She looked at him steadily. "Would you like me to?"
Harry was quiet for a moment. He had the expression of someone receiving something they had stopped expecting to receive and were not quite sure what to do with it.
"Yes," he said. "Please."
The vision correction took precisely twenty minutes, as advertised, and was performed with the focused efficiency of someone who had done it many times. Harry sat very still through the process with the concentrated calm of someone who had decided to trust the thing they'd decided to trust and was implementing that decision thoroughly. When it was done he looked around the room — at the walls, at the window, at the chart on the desk — with the specific expression of someone for whom the world had just sharpened into a clarity they hadn't known was missing.
He reached up and took off his glasses.
He looked at them in his hand for a moment.
Then he put them in his pocket.
"The nutritional work," Healer Adeyemi continued, producing a set of potions from the cabinet behind her desk, "will take approximately six weeks of daily doses to fully address. Nutrient potions, calcium and bone-strengthening compound, a general restorative." She looked at Harry with the directness of someone saying something they intended to be heard. "You should be eating three full meals a day throughout. The potions supplement. They don't substitute."
"I will be," Harry said, with the quiet certainty of someone who had Dobby making that specific commitment happen.
She turned to him next.
His own assessment was less dramatic — the baseline corrections the being had made at the beginning of summer had addressed most of what would otherwise have been there — but she found the specific effects of a year of stress and insufficient sleep and the particular physical demands of having been in a basilisk's vicinity without adequate preparation, and she addressed them with the same practical thoroughness.
Bone strengthening compound for both of them. Nutrient potions. A general restorative that she described as doing what a good week of sleep and proper food would do, compressed into a small dark blue vial.
Hermione, who had been watching all of this with the focused attention of someone taking notes, looked at Healer Adeyemi when she'd finished with Harry and him.
"I'd like a general assessment as well," she said.
Healer Adeyemi looked at her. "Sit down."
Hermione sat.
The assessment was thorough. He watched Hermione submit to it with the slight restlessness of someone who was accustomed to managing their own wellbeing through information and found the passive experience of being assessed physically slightly outside their comfort zone.
"Generally healthy," the healer said, which Hermione received with the expression of someone who had expected this verdict but was glad to have it confirmed. "I'd recommend the nutrient potions as a precaution — you're starting a demanding academic year. Adequate nutrition is not incidental to cognitive function." A pause. "Is there anything else you wanted to address while you're here?"
Hermione was quiet for a moment. Then, in the specific tone of someone who had thought about something for a long time and had decided to do it and was now implementing the decision before she could think about it further: "My teeth," she said. "I'd like them straightened."
He was quiet.
He thought about a girl in a film, years ago, in a previous life — walking down a staircase in a pink dress with her hair done and her teeth straight, and the specific quality of the moment that had made an forteen-year-old sitting in a cinema understand for the first time what it meant when people talked about being struck by something. He had been fourteen. It had been significant.
He thought about Hermione Granger, who was brilliant and brave and ran toward basilisks armed with nothing but a piece of paper, and who had been carrying around a self-consciousness about her teeth that she had never once mentioned but that he had noticed in the small careful way she sometimes managed her smile.
The healer addressed the teeth with the same matter-of-fact competence she brought to everything. The process was brief. The result was — a correction, not a transformation. The same Hermione, with the specific thing she'd been self-conscious about quietly resolved.
Hermione ran her tongue over her teeth. Looked in the mirror the healer offered. Looked at it for a moment.
Then she looked up with the expression of someone who had done something small and right and was folding it away.
He looked away when she looked up, because he'd been looking at her when she was looking at herself in the mirror, and when she met his eyes there was a moment — brief, real, mutually registered — where they were both aware that something had shifted and neither of them had the vocabulary for it yet, and they both looked away at approximately the same time.
He thought about the first Hogsmeade weekend.
He thought about it the way you thought about something you'd decided to do and hadn't done yet — with the specific combination of intention and patience that came from knowing you were going to do it and deciding that the timing mattered.
Not today. Today had enough in it already.
But soon.