He sent the invitations on Tuesday.
For the students: Harry, Hermione, Ginny, Luna. Neville, Seamus, Dean, and Parvati and Lavender from the girls' dormitory. He thought about this carefully — the principle was people he had been in genuine contact with this year, people whose company at a table he could account for.
Neville he had worked alongside in Herbology and in the Room on three occasions.
Seamus and Dean were the specific warm chaos of shared dormitory life, people he had never known well in the canon but who, in this year, he had come to find genuinely good company in small doses.
Parvati and Lavender were Hermione's dormitory, which meant they were adjacent to his daily life without being quite in it, and both of them had shown qualities over the term that he had found worth attention.
The invitations were cards — not the Witness's cream cards, just cards, his own handwriting. He wrote each one individually. The principle was the same as the gifts at Christmas: specificity was the point. Each card said something particular about why that person specifically was invited.
Neville's said: 'You identified the Mandrake problem before the textbook chapter got to it. I noticed. Please come.'
Luna's said: 'I have been meaning to cook for you since the thing with the shoes. Saturday the twenty-eighth.'
The staff invitations were delivered in person. Lupin received his with the easy warmth of someone who was genuinely pleased and did not perform being pleased.
Babbling received hers with a smile that was more personal than professional.
'A dinner,' she said. 'You've been busy in directions I didn't know about.'
'Runes is only one of the interesting things,' he said.
'Apparently,' she said, with the the slight brightness of someone who had identified a student who surprised her and was still in the process of being surprised.
Dumbledore received his with the benign attention he gave most things, which was the kind of attention that appeared mild and was not. He read the card. He looked at Ron over his spectacles.
'How thoughtful,' Dumbledore said. 'I shall be delighted to attend.' A pause, the quality of a beat that was choosing what to do with itself. 'You are a very unusual young man, Mr Weasley.'
It was said with warmth and with something underneath the warmth that was assessment, and Ron received it accordingly.
'Thank you, Professor,' he said.
'I look forward to Saturday,' Dumbledore said, and returned to whatever he had been doing, and that was all.
Ron walked back down the corridor from Dumbledore's office and thought about what had been in that pause, and decided he had handled it correctly, and moved on.
The invitation cards had taken an evening to write. Not because the writing itself was difficult — he had learned, over the autumn, how to say specific true things about specific people in a small number of words — but because each one required him to decide what was true about that person and worth saying, which required him to actually know the person well enough to choose.
He had been more attentive this year than he had planned to be. He had planned to be focused — on the work, on Harry, on the long preparation for what was coming. He had not planned to end up knowing Neville well enough to know about the Mandrake problem, or to have noticed what Lavender was like, or to have had sufficient conversations with Parvati to understand the kind of intelligence she had.
The attention had happened anyway. This was, he thought, something about living in a place rather than occupying it.
Hermione's invitation card had been the hardest to write, not because he did not know what to say but because there was too much to say and it needed to be contained to the space of a card without losing the meaning. He had written three drafts and kept the third, which said: 'You have been very good company this year. I should have said this more directly. Saturday the twenty-eighth.'
She had read it, held it for a moment, and looked at him with the expression that was Hermione processing something that had landed in an unexpected way.
'That's — thank you,' she said.
'You're welcome,' he said.
She had put the card in her bag with the careful quality she used for things she intended to keep, and he had noted this and filed it and had not mentioned it.
Harry's card had been simpler: 'I want to cook for you properly. Come on the twenty-eighth.' Harry had read it, looked at him, and said 'yes' with the quality he had for things he was simply glad about.
Ginny's had said: 'Because you have been right about nearly everything since September and this is one way of saying so.' She had laughed when she read it — the real one — and said, 'Only nearly?' He had said, 'Accuracy matters,' and she had said, 'Fair,' and that had been the end of it.
The process of writing the invitations had told him something. He had not expected it to, but it had — the act of deciding what was true about each person and worth acknowledging had produced a picture of the year that was more complete than his ordinary internal accounting of it. He had been building relationships in the way he built everything: with attention and intention and the specific patience of someone who understood that the useful versions of things took time.
The relationships had been building in both directions, which was less in his control than the single-direction version and therefore more interesting.
He had not planned to become someone Neville looked to when he was uncertain about a Herbology reading. He had not planned to become someone Seamus told stories to as though he had always been in the audience. He had not planned to be known well enough by Parvati that she could predict, with some accuracy, what he would find funny.
He had done these things by being present and paying attention, which were the same things he had always done, and the result had been that people knew him — not Ron Weasley the background friend, not the foreign soul navigating a foreign life, but the person he actually was in this specific year, which was something he had not had before.
He thought about this while he walked back to the common room.
It was, he decided, good. It was not uncomplicated — being known was never uncomplicated — but the complications were the good kind, the kind that indicated something real was happening rather than something managed. He had been managing his exterior very carefully for months. The relationships had happened in the gaps between the management, in the unplanned moments, in the places where he had forgotten to be strategic and had simply been himself.
He was, he thought, going to be alright here.