"We tried," Ron said.
"Unless he's got it hidden in his pockets, he's got nothing with him." George explained.
"Apparently he sleeps starkers," Fred said with a glance to his sister as she turned to try to bury herself into the folds of the couch.
"I needed to talk to you about that, Mrs. Weasley," an embarrassed Harry said. "I've actually got a lot stuff that's going to be delivered. I hope you don't mind."
"Delivered? Oh, not to worry, dear," the cheerful woman said with a wave. "Ron's got plenty of room. We'll make do."
"Thanks, Mrs. Weasley," Harry said, "but this is a lot of stuff."
"What'd you do, buy out Madam Malkin's?" Fred asked with a look at Harry's robes.
"Not exactly."
"He could always use one of Bill or Charlie's old rooms," Ron said.
"Absolutely not," his mother replied. "They might decide to pop by for the weekend and then where would we be?"
"If they planned to pop by-," George said.
"-They wouldn't have moved so far away," Fred finished.
Harry was trying to think of a way to get the magnitude of the problem across when a clock chimed and Mrs. Weasley scurried over to take a look.
"That'll be Arthur," she said as she moved. "I wonder what's going on, he's never home this early."
Harry followed her, eager to get a look at a magical home. From somewhere behind him, Harry heard a door close. Glancing back to the couch, it seemed like the girl had disappeared up to her room.
What Mrs. Weasley was so interested in turned out to be a very unusual clock, it had a multitude of hands and no numbers at all, written around the edge were things like 'Time to make tea,' 'Time to feed the chickens,' and 'You're late.' The hand labeled Arthur was pointed directly at Work, it was another hand that was moving.
"It's Bill!" Mrs. Weasley exclaimed, heading for the door to the garden.
"What's he doing here?" George asked.
"He's hardly ever in range," Fred commented.
Bill, who Harry knew to be the oldest of the Weasley brothers, had bounced on the clock from Traveling to Work, back to Traveling, before finally landing at Home.
"Hey Weasleys!" a voice called from outside.
Harry arrived in the garden just in time to see Mrs. Weasley almost knock a young man over in her rush to hug him while the man himself came as a bit of a shock. 'This is the Weasley from Gringotts?' Harry wondered. He had heard Bill had been Head Boy during his time at Hogwarts and had imagined him to be an older version of Percy: fussy about rule-breaking and fond of bossing everyone around.
While Harry would never classify the man as "dreamy," as the secretaries had, Bill was nonetheless cool - at least he would have been if he wasn't being hugged around the neck by his mother. He was tall, with long hair he had tied back in a ponytail, and was wearing an earring with what looked like a fang dangling from it - a new addition if his mother's expression was anything to go by. Bill's clothes would not have looked out of place at a rock concert, except Harry recognized his boots weren't made of leather, but of dragon hide. He wondered if Cadogan had made them.
"Did you buy new furniture from someone dodgy?" Bill asked once he was free of his mother's clutches.
"Now where would we get the money for new furniture, let alone meet someone dodgy?" a confused Mrs. Weasley asked.
Now the spectacle of Bill had faded, Harry noticed the young man wasn't alone, he had brought a small horde of goblins with him. Two of them had his trunk between them, another had Hedwig's cage, four had his wardrobe, eight were carrying his bed, and in a blur of movement one went flying off randomly upwards - only to fall back down to earth again ten feet away from where he had started. It seemed as if Harry's broom had been a bit too eager to be off.
"Mr. Potter?" the goblin in charge said as it marched up to the only non-redhead in sight and Bill launched into the story of his strange journey to muggle land. "Retrieval Specialist Dirtclaw, I've got something for you from Overseer Barchoke."
From the inside of the goblin's scarlet coat came a small hard-backed eyeglass case; inside was his very own Blood Quill.
"The Overseer said to keep it on you at all times. Litigator Lichfield said for you to hide it until you need it and to clean it regularly," the goblin recited. "I'll leave it to you to decide how to match those up. You also get this," he said, taking out a small leather-bound book full of tiny forms.
"And these are?" Harry asked.
.....
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