Fawkes cried.
He had read this. He had known this was going to happen. Knowing it didn't make watching it less remarkable — the tears fell on the wound and the poison retreated from Harry's system the way darkness retreats from an open window, simply and entirely, and Harry breathed in properly and some color came back to his face, and it was — it was a genuinely extraordinary thing, and he filed that feeling away with everything else because he suspected he was going to have a great many extraordinary things to process before this year was done.
"Ron," Harry said. His voice was rough. He looked up with the slightly unfocused gaze of someone returning from somewhere they hadn't been sure they'd come back from. "You made it through."
"Surprisingly large gap in the cave-in," he said. "I've been told I'm occasionally lucky."
Harry looked at him — really looked, with that particular directness that Harry had even at twelve, the quality of attention that made you feel seen rather than simply viewed — and something shifted in his expression. Not doubt, exactly. More like a question that wasn't ready to be a question yet.
"Are you alright?" Harry asked.
He considered the honest answer to that, which was complicated and multidimensional and not remotely suited to the current setting.
"Better than I have any right to be," he said instead. "You?"
"I was just poisoned by a basilisk fang," Harry said.
"Right, yes, comparatively, I'm having a much better afternoon." He offered Harry a hand up. "Can you walk?"
Harry took the hand and stood, shakily but under his own power. He looked at the diary — the destroyed diary — and at Ginny, who was stirring now, and at the basilisk, and at Fawkes, who had settled on a piece of fallen stone and appeared to be regarding the whole scene with the equanimity of something very old and very fireproof.
"You stabbed it," Harry said.
"The sword was closer than the fang," he said. "And your arm was occupied."
Harry looked at him again. That question, still not quite formed.
"We should get Ginny," he said, before it could arrive. "And the diary. And probably the sword, if you're up to carrying it — it did just kill a basilisk for you, seems like the least you could do."
Harry let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "Yeah," he said. "Okay."
Ginny was awake by the time they reached her, sitting up with the dazed, fragile bewilderment of someone who had lost months and was only beginning to understand how many. She was twelve years old. She was terrified. She looked at Harry and then at him and he could see the shame already starting to collect in her expression, the particular kind of self-recrimination that came from having been used and knowing it.
"Hey," he said, before anything else could happen. "Can you stand?"
She looked at him. Something in his voice or his expression — he wasn't sure which — seemed to surprise her. "I — yes," she said quietly.
He helped her up. She let him, carefully, and he thought about the sister he'd inherited the memories of — bright and brave and not yet sure of herself — and decided that she was going to be fine, eventually, and that the process of eventually could start right now by having the next few minutes focus on getting out of the Chamber rather than on whatever Ginny was already composing in the way of apology.
"Good," he said. "Let's go home."
The walk back through the Chamber, through the long tunnel, past the ruined diary and the enormous body of the basilisk and the destroyed remnants of Tom Riddle's fifty-year plan, took longer than any of them would have preferred. Harry carried the sword. Fawkes flew alongside them, occasionally helpful in ways that felt entirely intentional. Ginny stayed close between them both and didn't speak, which he didn't push.
He thought about Lockhart, still somewhere behind the cave-in, and directed Fawkes with a gesture that felt presumptuous but turned out to be perfectly accepted, and Lockhart — blank-faced, happy, blessedly emptied of Gilderoy Lockhart — was retrieved without fanfare and transported with a care that the man probably didn't deserve and received anyway, because leaving him there seemed like the kind of decision that would require paperwork.
By the time they squeezed back through the gap in the cave-in and started up the long pipe toward the girls' bathroom, he had run the next twelve hours in his head twice and identified the three things that were going to require the most careful management. One was Dumbledore, who was perceptive enough that sudden changes in Ron Weasley would not go entirely unnoticed. Two was his parents, who knew their son and would know something was different. Three was Hermione, who would eventually notice everything that everyone else had missed and ask about it with the particular directness of someone who considered ignorance a personal failing.
He had an answer ready for all three of them.
Must be a side effect of the memory charm.
It was not a perfect answer. It would not satisfy Hermione indefinitely. But it was internally consistent, medically plausible given the circumstances, and had the significant advantage of being entirely unverifiable by anyone in a world that had not done systematic research on what happened when a memory charm misfired at the specific frequency Lockhart's had managed.
The pipe was cold and undignified and made a truly unpleasant noise when navigated with any haste. He thought about all of this as he climbed, methodically, while Ginny said nothing above him and Harry said nothing below, and Fawkes circled overhead like a living coal, and somewhere above them, through the castle, the school was waiting with all its particular complications and its particular possibilities and its particular cast of people who were going to become, for better or worse, his people now.
He reached the top of the pipe. Pulled himself up through the drain. Stood in the cold, slightly flooded girls' bathroom on the second floor of Hogwarts and looked at the water on the stone floor and the scratched mirrors and the closed doors of the stalls.
He was here.
He was alive.
He was Ron Weasley — entirely, completely, with no argument from within and no conflict from any remnant of the boy who had been here before — and there was an enormous amount of work to do and he was, despite everything, completely ready to do it.
"Well," he said aloud, to no one in particular.
The myrtle who haunted these pipes made a despondent sound from somewhere in the pipes. He thought about saying something to her and decided that was a relationship he could develop another time.
The door to the bathroom was unlocked.
He opened it and walked out into the corridor, and Hogwarts received him with the particular silence of a very old building that had seen a great many things and considered this, all things considered, relatively moderate.