The cards were the first thing.
He came down to the common room at eight to find three Gryffindors already there — two fourth-years and a sixth-year he didn't know well — sitting in the chairs by the fire with their Witness cards open, talking about it with the quality of people who had woken at three in the morning to something they had not forgotten and were now adding the card to the picture.
The sixth-year looked at him when he came down.
'Good morning,' Ron said, pleasantly, and went to get his own card from the mantelpiece where Sable had placed it along with the others.
He opened it.
The handwriting inside was his own, which was its own specific experience — the thing he had written three hundred and eighteen times to other people, received now as the thing it had always been: a genuine wish. * Wherever you are from, I hope you enjoy the festivities at Hogwarts. Merry Christmas. — The Witness.*
He put it in his pocket.
The Great Hall at breakfast had the quality of a place that had been the site of something and was still in the aftermath of it. The three schools occupied the space with the ease that a month and a half of proximity had built — the adjacencies more natural now, the specific early awkwardness of institutions encountering each other having given way to the ordinary adjacency of people who had been eating in the same room for long enough that the room had simply become the room.
Every table had cards. Every face had the expression of someone who had been given something and was working out what it was.
Viktor Krum was at the Gryffindor table.
This had been happening with increasing frequency since the medic tent — Krum gravitating toward Harry at meals, a proximity that had started as assessment and had become, Ron thought, something more like genuine interest in the person rather than the champion. He was reading his Witness card when Ron sat down, turning it over with the same quality he had brought to the arrival night note — careful, thorough, a man who did not receive things superficially.
He looked up when Ron sat across from him.
'The singing,' Krum said.
'Yes,' Ron said.
'The middle song,' Krum said. 'I did not know it. Dragonov — ' he indicated a Durmstrang student three seats down who was still looking slightly displaced — 'did not know it. Petrov knew it. He was — ' Krum paused, selecting the word. 'Unsettled. He said it was from a Muggle film.'
'Music video,' Ron said. 'Originally.'
Krum looked at him with the quality he had when he was assembling a picture of a person and had found a piece that was not where he had expected to find it. 'You know Muggle music.'
'I know a great many things that aren't in the standard curriculum,' Ron said.
Krum was quiet for a moment. Then, with the directness that was simply how he communicated: 'The last song. Silent Night. My grandmother sang it for me.' He looked at the card in his hand. 'It was — unexpected. To hear it here.'
'That was the point,' Ron said.
Krum looked at him. Something in his expression had the quality of the cracked eggs and the expression after the retrieval — the specific register of a person who had encountered something that had cost something to produce and was reckoning with what that said about the person who had produced it.
He said nothing further. He went back to his breakfast. But the card stayed beside his plate for the rest of the meal, which was its own form of response.
Hermione arrived at half past eight with her card already open, reading it in the way she read things she intended to understand properly. She sat beside him and looked at it for a moment and then at him.
'The handwriting,' she said.
'Is mine,' he confirmed.
She folded the card closed and put it in her pocket with the deliberate quality of someone placing something where it would not be lost. She picked up her tea.
'Merry Christmas, Ron,' she said.
'Merry Christmas,' he said.