The conversation happened three days after the Chamber, in the hospital wing garden where Madam Pomfrey allowed ambulatory patients to sit when the weather was adequate and she'd run out of medically justifiable reasons to keep them indoors.
The weather was adequate. Just.
He and Harry were on a stone bench with their backs to the castle wall, the late afternoon light doing its best against a sky that couldn't quite commit to being properly clear. Fawkes was somewhere inside — he could occasionally hear the low, resonant sound the phoenix made when it was content, filtering through the open window above them. The grounds were quiet in the way they got toward end of term, that particular combination of exhaustion and relief that settled over a school when the worst was definitively over.
Harry was throwing small pebbles at a larger rock approximately four feet away, with the focused inexactness of someone whose hands needed something to do while their mind was elsewhere.
He'd been thinking about how to have this conversation since the hospital wing. Not the mechanics of it — the mechanics were straightforward enough — but the angle. The way in. Harry at twelve was not someone you pushed. He was someone you opened a door for and then stood back from while he decided whether to walk through it.
"I've been thinking," he said, "about next year."
Harry glanced at him sideways. "Yeah?"
"I can't do what I did this year," he said. "Coast through. Show up and do the minimum and let everyone else carry the weight." He picked up a pebble of his own and turned it over in his fingers. "The thing with the memory charm — whatever it did to how I process things — it means I don't have the excuse of not being able to keep up anymore. If I'm not working to my actual ability, it's a choice. And I don't want to make that choice."
Harry was quiet for a moment, throwing his pebble. It hit the rock solidly. He picked up another.
"I was wondering," he said, "if you'd want to start taking it more seriously as well. Actually working. Not just surviving each year."
Harry threw the next pebble. It missed.
"I'd try," Harry said, which was not an immediate yes and was therefore more honest than an immediate yes would have been.
He nodded. That was fine. That was actually the right answer from someone who meant it. He let the silence sit for a moment, unhurried, while the late light moved across the grass and Fawkes made his quiet sound somewhere above them.
Then Harry said, without particular emphasis, as though it had been waiting to come out: "You know it's not just about trying, right. For me."
He looked at him.
Harry was still looking at the rock he'd been throwing at, his expression arranged into the particular careful neutrality of someone who had learned to keep things flat because flat was safer than the alternative.
"At the Dursleys'," Harry said, "If I get better marks than Dudley —" He stopped. Started again. "They don't like it. When I do better than him at things."
He already knew this. Ron's memories included Harry's occasional vague references to summers that he never described in detail, and his own prior knowledge filled in the rest with a comprehensiveness that made something sit quietly and heavily in his chest.
He asked anyway, because Harry needed to say it rather than have it assumed.
"Why would they care about your marks?" he said. Not dismissively. Genuinely, as though the answer wasn't self-evident, as though he was asking Harry to explain something that required an explanation. "What does it matter to them what grades you get?"
Harry looked at him.
Something shifted in his expression — the smallest loosening, the kind that happened when someone was surprised by a question that had never been asked before and found the surprise itself disorienting.
"Because Dudley doesn't," Harry said slowly. "Do well. At school. And they —" He stopped again. His jaw moved slightly, the way it did when he was organizing something he hadn't previously organized. "They don't like me being better at things than him. At anything. It makes them — they think I'm doing it on purpose. To show him up. And then I have to —" He set down the pebble he'd been holding. "I learned how to get the answers wrong. On tests. In primary school. Just enough wrong that I wasn't first. Because first meant coming home and having them —"
He didn't finish that sentence.
He didn't need to.
The garden was very quiet. Somewhere on the grounds a bird was making a sound it was entirely unaware was the only sound in the world at this specific moment.
He thought about what he wanted to say and discarded several versions of it because they were either too much or not enough. He thought about the kind of twelve-year-old you had to be to teach yourself to fail deliberately because succeeding was dangerous. He thought about a boy in a cupboard under some stairs and the very particular shape of what it did to a person to be unwanted by the people who were supposed to want you most.
"That's not going to happen here," he said finally. Not loudly. Just steadily, with the specific weight of something that was true and intended to function as an anchor. "You understand that. Whatever you learn, whatever marks you get, whatever you're capable of — that's not going to be a problem. Not with me, not in this world."
Harry looked at him.
"I know that," Harry said. "Mostly."
"Mostly is where we start," he said. "And we work toward the rest."
Harry picked up another pebble. Threw it. It hit the rock dead center.
"Okay," Harry said quietly. "Yeah. Let's work."
He nodded and didn't make a thing of it, because making a thing of it would have required Harry to respond to it and Harry wasn't ready for that yet. Instead he moved on in the practical way that was sometimes the kindest way.
"Electives next year," he said. "I've been thinking about switching."
Harry blinked, the shift in gear appearing to be welcome. "From what to what?"
"Divination is going to be useless," he said. "Not just for me — I think Trelawney is going to spend the year predicting our deaths and calling it curriculum." He paused. "Arithmancy, Ancient Runes, and Care of Magical Creatures. All three."
Harry was quiet for a moment. "That's a heavy course load."
"McGonagall will say the same thing," he said. "I'll deal with it. The question is whether you want in."
"All three?"
"All three," he confirmed. "Arithmancy because understanding the mathematical structure of magic is useful in ways that most people don't bother to understand. Runes because the same logic applies and because half the magical protections and enchantments in the world are written in them. Care of Magical Creatures because —" he paused "— because Hagrid is going to be teaching it, and the year is going to be chaotic, and you should probably be there."
Harry was looking at him with the expression of someone who had just processed several things simultaneously. "How do you know Hagrid is going to be teaching it?"
He thought about that for a quarter of a second.
"I don't know for certain," he said. "I'm guessing based on how much he talks about creatures. It would make sense."
Harry appeared to accept this with the reasonable standard of evidence that sufficed at thirteen. "Okay. Yeah. I'll take all three."
"Good." He turned the hawthorn wand over in his fingers, thinking. "I also want to ask McGonagall something."
"About what?"
"Whether you can sit O.W.L.s for subjects you haven't taken as classes," he said. "Privately. Through the Ministry."
Harry looked at him with the expression of someone encountering a concept for the first time. "Can you do that?"
"I don't know yet," he said. "I'm going to find out."