The Hospital Wing at Hogwarts had the particular atmosphere of a place that had seen everything and remained resolutely unimpressed by any of it. The beds were starched and white and precisely arranged. The shelves of potions were organized with a severity that suggested Madam Pomfrey had strong opinions about alphabetical order and stronger opinions about people who didn't share them. The smell was antiseptic and herbal and faintly underlying all of it, the specific scent of magical medicine, which was not quite like any other kind of clean.
He had been here before. Ron had been here before. The memories overlapped tidily.
What was less tidy was the journey getting here.
They had made it approximately halfway up the main staircase — him, Harry, Ginny, and Lockhart, who was being guided with the patient assistance of someone who was used to working with people whose relationship with reality had become temporarily flexible — when the sound of rapid footsteps from above resolved itself into Professor McGonagall and Dumbledore descending toward them with the combined energy of two people who had spent the last several hours in varying states of controlled panic.
McGonagall's expression when she saw them went through approximately four distinct phases in the space of two seconds. Relief. Horror at their collective state. The specific brand of exasperated disbelief that was her default response to anything involving Harry Potter. And then something that, on a face less disciplined than hers, might have been the beginning of tears, which she converted immediately into brisk efficiency.
"You're walking," she said, as though she intended to dispute this.
"Technically," Harry agreed.
"You will not be walking for much longer," she said, and conjured a stretchers for Harry and Ginny from her wand before any of them could argue about it.
He opened his mouth.
"Mr Weasley," Dumbledore said, and his voice was the kind of quiet that carried further than loud voices do. "I think perhaps, on this occasion, you might allow Poppy to make that determination."
He closed his mouth.
Dumbledore's eyes were on him with an attention that was not intrusive but was very thorough, the way a very experienced person looks at something that is familiar and has nonetheless changed in some way they haven't yet identified. He met it steadily and filed the observation away.
The stretchers were conjured. The four of them were levitated with the smooth efficiency of experienced magical medicine, and Lockhart — who appeared to be attempting to introduce himself to the enchanted stretcher with every indication that he found it delightful — was managed separately with a patience that spoke well of everyone involved.
The Hospital Wing received them.
He heard his parents before he saw them.
His mother's voice — Molly Weasley's voice, which Ron's memory held in every register from warm to terrifying and which he was now discovering he knew with the specificity of something that had been the backdrop to an entire childhood — came through the Hospital Wing doors at a volume that suggested she had been in the castle for some time and had spent most of it in a state of barely contained terror that was now converting itself to relief at a rate that produced considerable noise.
The doors opened.
She was across the room in the time it took him to sit up, and she was reaching for him — arms open, the specific kind of Molly Weasley embrace that was both comfort and minor structural hazard — and he stopped her.
Not unkindly. He caught her hands before she could make contact, gently but firmly, and held them.
She froze.
"Basilisk venom," he said, before the hurt could fully form in her expression. "I was in the Chamber. I handled the basilisk's body. I don't know how much of the venom transferred to my clothes and skin and I don't want it anywhere near you or Ginny before Madam Pomfrey has a look."
A beat of absolute silence.
Then Madam Pomfrey was there with the energy of someone who had just been handed a genuinely interesting problem, her wand already moving in the preliminary diagnostic gestures of someone who did not need to think about the first steps because the first steps were automatic.
"Sensible," she said briskly, which from Madam Pomfrey was equivalent to a standing ovation. "Everyone stand back, please, I need to — Mr. Potter, sit down, you are not as recovered as you think you are — stand back —"
The diagnostic process was thorough and not especially comfortable. Basilisk venom, it turned out, left traces even when it hadn't actually contacted skin, and the process of confirming the absence of those traces involved a sequence of spells that made his arm hair stand up and produced a faint luminescent green glow that he could have done without. His mother watched from a precise distance of three feet, her hands clasped together with a grip that was doing significant structural work.
His father stood slightly behind her, quieter, his expression doing the specific thing that Arthur Weasley's expression did when he was feeling something very large and keeping it entirely internal. Ron's memory had this catalogued in considerable detail. His dad, who was enthusiastic about Muggle artifacts and gentle with everyone and had never once in Ron's memory raised his voice in anger, only ever showed the depth of what he felt in the particular stillness he went to when words weren't adequate.
He was very still right now.
"No venom contact," Madam Pomfrey announced, with the satisfaction of someone delivering a good verdict. "Trace residue on the outer robe only. The robe comes off and goes directly to disposal." She fixed him with a look. "You are, however, going to tell me everything you were exposed to, in order, starting from when you entered the tunnel."
"He was bitten," he said, and pointed at Harry.
The room's attention pivoted to Harry with an efficiency that Harry visibly found uncomfortable.
"It was healed," Harry said immediately, with the practiced pre-emptive defensiveness of someone who had spent considerable time in this wing. "Fawkes — Professor Dumbledore's phoenix — cried on it. It's fine."
"I will be the authority on what is and is not fine," Madam Pomfrey said, in a tone that closed all debate on the matter, and redirected her full professional attention to Harry's arm with an expression that suggested she was going to find something to treat if it took her all night.
He used the moment to look at Ginny.
She was in the bed on his other side, his father sitting beside her now, holding her hand with both of his. She was clean — someone had managed a basic cleaning charm at some point — and the color had come fully back to her face, but she had the particular quality of stillness that came not from calm but from someone holding themselves very carefully together because they weren't sure what would happen if they stopped.
She caught him looking.
He didn't offer sympathy or reassurance or any of the things that would have required her to respond to them. He just held her gaze for a moment and then looked away, which was its own kind of acknowledgment — you're here, you're safe, no one is going to make you talk about it right now — and he thought he saw some of the careful stillness ease, very slightly.
"Ronald."
His mother's voice, closer now, the immediate emergency of the venom concern having been resolved. She was standing at the side of his bed, and her expression had completed its journey from terror through relief and arrived somewhere in the complicated territory of a mother who had almost lost two of her children in one afternoon and was now required to process that while also being functional.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
Something moved through her expression. The same thing that had moved through Dumbledore's, upstairs — the sense of something familiar that had nonetheless shifted in a way that wasn't immediately identifiable. Molly Weasley was perceptive about her children in the way that mothers who had many of them had to be perceptive, out of pure necessity.
"Are you alright?" she asked. Not the general question. The specific one.
"Better than I should be, probably," he said. "There was a — when Lockhart's spell backfired, it hit me too. Madam Pomfrey is going to want to check for side effects."