Harry found him at half past ten, when the party had moved into its later phase — quieter, the people who had needed to make noise having made it, the room settling into the specific warm remainder of a celebration that had done its work.
He sat down beside Ron on the hearthrug with the quality of someone who had something and was deciding how to give it.
'I got you something,' Harry said.
Ron looked at him.
Harry reached into his pocket and produced a small box — the kind a jeweler used, which Ron noted. He held it out.
Ron took it and opened it.
Inside, on a square of dark velvet, was a miniature dragon. The Hungarian Horntail — black-scaled, the spiked tail curled, wings folded in the specific at-rest configuration he had seen that morning in the enclosure. It was perhaps three inches long and had the quality of something made with care rather than produced — the scales individually rendered, the yellow eyes with their vertical pupils, the weight of it in his hand heavier than three inches of anything should be.
It moved.
Very slightly — the tail shifting, the head turning a fraction toward the warmth of his hand — not mechanical, not the performance of life, but life itself rendered miniature and adjusted for a palm. He looked at it for a moment.
'I got it at the Champions tent,' Harry said. 'After you told me about the dragons. I wanted — ' He stopped. Then: 'You spent three weeks. You spent all of third year. You've been preparing for this since second year and you never — you've never asked for anything. I wanted to give you something that was specifically because of today.'
Ron looked at the miniature Horntail in his hand.
He was aware that his face was doing something he had not instructed it to do, which was the second time today that had happened and which he was choosing not to manage. The miniature dragon looked up at him with its yellow eyes and shifted its tail again in the specific unhurried way of something that had decided the hand it was in was acceptable.
'Harry,' he said.
'You don't have to say anything,' Harry said.
'I know,' Ron said. 'I want to.' He looked at the dragon. 'Thank you.'
Harry looked at him with the expression he had when he was receiving someone else's gratitude and had decided, for once, not to deflect it. 'You're welcome,' he said.
The miniature Horntail made a sound. Very small, very quiet — not the roar of the enclosure but the specific private sound of something that had been awake for a while and had decided the current situation was satisfactory. Ron felt the warmth of it against his palm.
He sat there for a while with Harry beside him and the dragon in his hand and the common room doing its warm and ordinary work around them, and he did not try to be less moved than he was, because he had learned across two and a half years that some things were worth being moved by and this was one of them.
Hermione, coming to sit on his other side, looked at the miniature dragon with the expression she had when she encountered something she found genuinely delightful.
'It's well enchanted,' she said.
'Evidently,' Ron said.
She reached over and offered her finger. The miniature Horntail examined it with the specific cautious assessment of something that had decided to take its time. Then it butted its head against her fingertip, very gently, with the quality of something that had made up its mind.
Hermione made a sound that was not words.
Harry was smiling.
Ron looked at the two of them and the dragon between them and thought about all the things that had led to this specific moment — the Room of Requirements, the train, the Chamber, the white void before all of it — and felt the weight of it settle in the way that good things settled when you let them.
He put the dragon carefully in his breast pocket, where it curled against the warmth and was still.
He would find a proper place for it later.
For now, here was enough.