Fleur found him at the bank twenty minutes later.
Her arm had been seen to — Madam Pomfrey had dealt with the Grindylow damage with the brisk efficiency she brought to all injuries that were not life-threatening, and Fleur had the bearing of someone who had been treated and was now operating on the other side of the worst of it. She was composed in the way she was always composed — not the performed version, but the real one, the composure that was simply her baseline rather than something she was maintaining against the pressure.
She looked at Gabrielle, who was wrapped in a blanket fifty feet away, sitting with a marshal and being examined by one of the Beauxbatons staff, and then she looked at Ron.
'You knew where she was,' Fleur said.
'Roughly,' he said.
'How.'
He considered how much to say. 'I had reason to think Harry's hostage would be someone specific,' he said. 'I placed a passive charm on that person the night before. The hostage positions were tethered together at the anchor point. Knowing roughly where one was gave me a rough bearing on where the other was.'
Fleur absorbed this. She had the quality of someone who found this information interesting rather than surprising, which was the quality of someone who had been thinking about what she had just watched and had arrived at a framework for it.
'The platform,' she said. 'And the displacement.'
'Yes.'
'Simultaneously.'
'Yes.'
She looked at him for a moment with the expression she had at the medic tent after the first task — the one that was not the allure-adjacent assessment but the real assessment, the specific focused attention of someone who was looking at a thing and deciding what it actually was.
'You waited,' she said. 'You waited for Krum to surface before you acted.'
'The task was still live,' he said. 'Interfering while it was live would have compromised Harry's result.'
She was quiet for a moment. Her expression was not quite what he'd expected. Not gratitude — something that came before gratitude. The recognition of care that had been taken, and the registering of what that cost.
'Thank you,' she said. In the specific register of someone for whom those two words were not a formality.
'She's your sister,' he said. 'There wasn't another option.'
Fleur looked at Gabrielle across the bank. Her face didn't manage it away. She had almost lost Gabrielle and she was only now, standing on this bank, understanding that she hadn't.
She turned back to Ron. 'You are not what I expected,' she said. 'When I arrived at Hogwarts.' She paused. 'You are not what most people expect.'
'No,' he agreed.
'This is useful,' she said, with the specific dry quality she brought to observations she considered accurate and worth making. Then she went to Gabrielle, and Ron watched her go, and thought about the task and the lake and the bearing and the two-construct conjuration and the conversation with Dumbledore, and thought: this is what the preparation was for. Not the impressive part. The part where the girl comes home.
He took out his camera.
He took one photograph: Fleur and Gabrielle at the bank, the lake behind them, the February morning. Not the conjuration — that was not what the photograph was for. The sisters. Fleur crouching to Gabrielle's height, her hands on Gabrielle's face, the blanket around them both, the specific quality of a reunion that had almost been something else.
He lowered the camera.
Hermione was beside him. He did not need to look to know this.
'The scores,' she said.
He had not been paying attention to the scores. He looked at the judges' table.
Harry had the highest marks. First in the second task. First overall, going into the third.
He put the camera away and let Hermione take his arm properly, and they stood at the bank of the Black Lake in February and watched the morning resolve itself into whatever came next.