Fred and George were getting chased and smacked around by Mrs Weasley again.
"Pretty normal, really."
Ron walked over and handed Sean an apple.
Right then, Sean was watching the sink like it was a lab experiment, where the used knives were scrubbing themselves clean.
"I mean, Sean—it's the holidays,"
Ron said around a bite of his own apple.
…
Mr Weasley came home.
He seemed to have known for a while that Sean would be visiting. What the twins had told him was:
"He's the great—well, okay, he's a wizard with alchemy talent like us… he wants to see how the Burrow's built, and the flying car…"
The moment Arthur stepped in the door he shut it behind him and let out a long breath. He'd just opened his mouth to say something when he spotted Sean staring fixedly at the sink where plates and cutlery were washing themselves.
A very quiet-looking little wizard, he thought.
"Mr Green?"
He greeted.
"Mr Weasley,"
Sean answered. When Arthur slumped into one of the kitchen chairs, took off his glasses and shut his eyes, Sean simply went back to watching the dishes.
He had a faint sense he was close to understanding some of the trick behind the spellwork, and was just waiting to test it…
The kitchen was filled with a delicious smell. The long table was practically groaning under heavy ceramic platters. In pride of place was a golden roast chicken, surrounded by mounds of roast potatoes dripping with gravy. Buttered peas and carrots gleamed in the firelight.
With a flick of her wand, Molly sent a huge bowl of stew drifting gently down onto the tablecloth.
"Children, eat while it's hot!"
Her cheeks were flushed pink as she brought over a stack of fluffy puddings.
George speared a drumstick first; Fred pretended to complain as his hand darted in to swipe a wing.
Ron's plate was already heaped high; he was doing his best not to drip gravy on his shirt. Percy, of course, was still solemnly rating each dish like a food critic.
"Mum, this—"
Percy frowned, then caught his mother's eye and immediately shifted tone.
"—is acceptable."
"These peas are excellent,"
Arthur said, taking a bite. His eyes crinkled nearly shut behind his glasses.
A small, very pretty witch at the table said nothing at all, just ate quietly.
Molly watched every child's reaction. This was one of her favourite moments of the day.
"But today was a rough one. The Ministry's gone on some random raid again."
Mr Weasley added.
"Find anything, Dad?"
Fred asked.
"Only a few shrinking door keys,"
Arthur sighed, stifling a yawn.
"Why would anyone make keys that shrink?"
George asked.
"To mess with Muggles,"
Arthur said with another sigh.
"You sell a Muggle a key, and then the key keeps shrinking until it disappears, so when they need it, it's gone. Of course you'll never convince anyone that's what happened—they'll insist they've lost the key, not that it got smaller and smaller…
Those Muggles, they manage to ignore magic even when it's right under their noses…"
He was about to continue when both twins jabbed him furiously in the ribs, and even Molly—Mrs Weasley—was glaring daggers at him.
Then he remembered there was a Muggle-born in the house.
They all turned to look at Sean and found him locked in mortal combat with his pudding.
"Watch what you say. Little Green is Muggle-born,"
Molly exhaled, then went on,
"But you really do need to think about this—Fred and George ran off to the shop again without a word! And they took little Green with them. What do you have to say for yourselves, hmm?"
"Really?"
Mr Weasley perked up.
"You and Mr Green's odd shop is about to open? I mean," he corrected himself hastily under his wife's glare, "That's very wrong of you, children. Very, very wrong…"
Molly puffed up like an angry toad.
"They'll be at this for a while,"
Ron murmured to Sean after waiting a bit,
"Have you finished? Want to go de-gnome the garden?"
Gnomes?
The word caught Sean's attention.
"Hope your parents aren't as loud as mine,"
Ron added, telling Sean where the gnome holes were as he slipped outside.
He had a funny feeling the gnomes were about to move house. There was really nothing Sean couldn't sort out—they'd proved that enough times this year.
Sean didn't reply. Instead, for some reason, he thought of the quiet Professor McGonagall, and Professor Snape.
He nodded slightly.
Clearing gnomes wasn't exactly difficult: you grabbed a gnome, spun it in circles until it was dizzy, then flung it over the garden wall. That way it lost track of where its hole was and stayed away for a bit.
"It makes them so dizzy they can't find their way back to their burrow,"
Ron explained.
Then they watched a ragged line of gnomes toddling back in, some of them actually flying and then landing, tiny shoulders hunched, a few even leaning against Sean's legs and sniffling.
Sean peered down at them, intrigued. Was his magical creature affinity that effective?
The bizarre sight made Ginny, who'd just run out the door, stare wide-eyed.
"Well, we can't really get rid of them anyway. They always come back in the end.
They like it here… Dad's too soft on them. He thinks they're funny…"
Ron said helplessly.
"No wonder you can keep the Forbidden Forest so orderly."
…
Life at the Burrow was wonderfully steady.
Mrs Weasley was home most of the time, which meant Sean often stuck to her side, learning household magic.
They might be called "household spells", but they were anything but simple.
Molly really gave him everything she knew, and Sean began to understand a few things.
"When you use different magical forces at once, a witch has to instinctively split them into several streams. Like when you're knitting—you divide your magic between moving the needles and moving the yarn…
Or when you're washing dishes, you need to assign primary and secondary force: most of your focus goes to the rag, which does the scrubbing, while the plates only need a bit to keep them floating…
Basically, wizards use lots of small, differently sized, divided streams of magic to complete complex work…"
Sean explained his thought, and Molly listened quietly, her short, rounded figure haloed in warm sunlight, looking very kind.
"That's wonderful—little Green. It's not easy to understand that,"
she said.
Carefully, she went to the sitting room, where old books were piled everywhere, and pulled out a clean notebook.
Inside were the bits and pieces of insight she'd jotted down over the years.
"I never thought anyone would want to study this… oh, don't turn your nose up at it."
"This—"
Sean looked at the notebook as if it were a secret manual. Very few wizards ever studied magic at this level of fine control.
For most, being able to use eighty percent of their power was more than enough.
But now, Sean thought, he might just have found a way to go further.