They sat halfway down the stairs, enfolded in each other, Hermione sobbing and Ron stroking her back and her hair. A minute, two minutes, in the darkness, and Ron suddenly stood up.
"What if he's wrong?"
Hermione looked at Ron. "What?"
"About the Horcrux. What if…what if it doesn't have to be like that? What if he's wrong? We need to…"
"He's not wrong."
"How…how do you know? How long did you know?"
"He said it. Awhile. It was too horrible to think about, so..I didn't. But then, when he said he'd know where the cup was, in Gringotts, I thought it again, but…I didn't want to. I still don't want to. But he's not wrong."
"I'm going anyway."
"Ron. Stop."
Her hand restrained him softly. He looked at her.
"We…can't save Harry. Not this time. He said, let him go."
She continued. "We're still in this with him. Still fighting. We have to do what he told us to do. The snake, and then him. We have to…save us."
"The hell with us, Hermione."
She nodded. "I know. But. Your family. His friends. You…you know how he is. How he's always been. We have to do what he would want us to do, or…it's worse than it is, and Ron, I can't have that."
Ron's eyes searched hers and he used his free hand to wipe some of her tears. He then looked away, down the steps and into the forest, before shifting his gaze left and to the battered castle. "Let's go back, then."
She swept her own fingers through the tears on his face and pressed her lips to his forehead. "Let's go back."
(Reviews as always welcome. I realize that as I write, I am thinking of Rowling's way of representing things and how the actors in the films deliver the dialogue: she doesn't do pauses, which I do with the ... , but I feel like it's important when the actors do. I feel like when the characters pause and repeat bits of a sentence (like when Harry asks Sirius if dying hurts, repeating the word "does" in the script but not the book), it shows that they're struggling, and I don't know how else to show that. Am I being excessive with them?
Also, I'm not sure if I've said enough with Ron's "The hell with us", but he doesn't seem like a guy who would explicitly and calmly say, "Hermione, we just utterly failed my best friend and he's dying alone right now without us stopping him, so, yeah, we deserve whatever happens to us next, as long as it is not a happy ending.")