The dinners with Gabrielle had been happening since March.
He was not entirely sure how they had begun. Fleur had brought her sister to the Great Hall one Thursday evening in the third week of March, and Gabrielle had looked at Ron across the table with the specific quality of an eight-year-old who had made a decision that the adults around her had not been consulted on, and had sat down beside him and said, in careful English that she had clearly been practicing: 'I want to sit with you.'
He had looked at Fleur. Fleur had looked back with the expression she had when things were happening that she had not arranged but was not going to prevent.
'Alright,' he had said.
Gabrielle had talked for the duration of dinner with the specific quality of someone who had been waiting for an audience that would receive her properly. She was eight and a half and she had strong opinions about the horses that pulled the Beauxbatons carriage — she had named all twelve of them, she said, which the handlers allowed but the headmistress did not know about — and she had a theory about why the Black Lake had that particular quality of darkness that she presented with the earnest precision of someone who had been thinking about it and had arrived at a conclusion she considered sound.
He had listened with the full attention he gave things he found genuinely interesting, which this was.
The dinners had continued. Thursday evenings, when Gabrielle could find him, which was not always — he was gone most evenings for training or the Room or the ward construction work, and Gabrielle had understood quickly that Thursday was the available day and had claimed it with the straightforward proprietary quality of a child who had found something she liked and intended to keep it.
Fleur came to some of them. Not all — she had her own schedule and her own obligations — but enough that the three of them had arrived, by June, at the specific easy quality of people who had been eating together regularly enough to have stopped performing dinner-table politeness and were simply having dinner.
He had learned, across the Thursday evenings, the specific texture of Gabrielle Delacour's life. She lived outside Lyon, in a house with a garden that her mother took very seriously and that she took seriously too, though in a different register — her mother cared about the aesthetics of it, Gabrielle cared about the specific creatures she had found in it, which she catalogued with the focused attention that Ron associated with people who paid genuine attention to the natural world. She wanted to be a Healer when she grew up, which she said with the quality of someone who had decided this and would not be deterred. She had a best friend named Celeste who was afraid of heights, which Gabrielle found puzzling because she herself had no fear of heights at all. She liked mathematics and disliked the kind of literature that had no people in it.
He had given her, in May, a small book from a Diagon Alley shop that translated itself into whatever language the reader was most comfortable in — a collection of natural history with illustrations that moved. She had looked at it for a long moment and then looked at him with the specific quality of an eight-year-old who had not expected something and was not sure what to do with the not-expecting.
'Thank you,' she had said, in French, which meant the gratitude was real enough to come out in her first language.
On the last Thursday of term, with the leaving feast the following evening and the carriages booked for the morning after, Gabrielle arrived at the Great Hall with the specific quality of someone who had been thinking about something for several days and had decided to say it.
She sat down. She looked at him.
'You saved me,' she said. 'In the lake.' She had clearly been preparing this, which was visible in the quality of the English — more careful than her usual, the words chosen with the specific precision of someone saying something they wanted to get right.
'You would have been fine even if I didn't. But go on,' he said.
'Why did you wait? For Krum to come back?'
'The task was still running,' he said. 'If I had gone in while it was still live I would have compromised Harry's result. And the Tournament was his — not mine to interfere with before it was finished.'
She considered this. 'You waited because of the rules.'
'I waited because the rules existed for a reason,' he said. 'And because the task wasn't my task. The champions needed to be the ones who completed it.'
She looked at him with the quality children sometimes had when they received an answer that was more complicated than they expected and were deciding whether to accept the complication. Then she nodded, once, with the quality of someone who had decided the answer was correct even if it required thought.
'I am going to be a Healer,' she said, 'and I am going to be very good at it.'
'Yes,' he said. 'I think you will be.'
'Will you write?' she asked. The question had the quality of an eight-year-old managing the specific feeling of liking a place and not wanting to leave it, which was a feeling he recognised from his own experience in more forms than she would have expected.
'Yes,' he said.
She nodded, satisfied, and ate her dinner.
Fleur, across the table, looked at Ron with the expression she had used at the medic tent, at the bank after the second task, at the yearmate feast — the one that was not the allure-adjacent assessment but the real assessment, the one that had been updating since October and had arrived, by June, at a picture she apparently found accurate and worth acknowledging.
'She talks about you,' Fleur said. 'When she writes to our parents.' A pause. 'She calls you le grand roux sérieux.' She paused again. 'The serious red one.'
Ron looked at Gabrielle, who was eating her dinner with complete absorption.
'That is an accurate description,' he said.
Fleur pressed her lips together in the way that was not quite a smile. 'Yes,' she said. 'It is.'