Long goodbyes, chapter four- Ron Weasley
It seemed nobody was sleeping in the Weasley house that night.
Ron had heard Fleur's delicate steps on one particularly creaky set of stairs. He hadn't even gotten out of bed. Snogging, he decided, was not all it had cracked up to be. Not to mention that Hermione had blown his cover to a very irritated Bill.
"Heh," he chuckled out loud. "Hermione…."
His latest snogging partner was the last person he would have expected when they had met. Hermione, with all her bookworm tendencies and obvious superiority, always trying to show him up… never would he have guessed that she would have had such an attraction to him… or him to her!
Well, he decided, maybe snogging Hermione isn't so bad….
It was funny how things happened. It had come out at a time when nothing seemed right to Ron. It was as if the world were a snow globe, being picked up and shaken and set back down for everyone to adjust to and settle down from. He still couldn't believe it. Dumbledore was…dead.
For the first time since it happened Ron was forced to confront the horrible truth of it: the most powerful wizard in the world, Order of Merlin First Class, five times requested Minister of Magic, Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-wise Professor Albus Dumbledore was dead and gone.
And death, Ron knew, was permanent.
Powerful as Dumbledore was, Ron knew that he couldn't come back. Somehow he just knew that he was gone for good, and that there was no getting around that. For Ron it was as if he had been struck deaf, dumb, and blind all at once, so overwhelming was the loss. Dumbledore was there! He was never gone, at least not for long! Maybe a few months at the most, but he was always coming back! He couldn't just go like that, within a second's worth of anticlimactic spellcasting and leave him all alone with no protection from the darkness that was inevitably coming.
Bloody hell, he thought, he was beginning to sound cryptic.
Dumbledore…gone… Dumbledore…gone… Never coming back… dead… forever….
Ron had always hated Snape and Malfoy. And now he only hated them more. Feeling the house beneath him it was almost as if he could feel his family and he knew more than anything else, he had to take care of them.
"For you, Professor," he said aloud to no one, "I swear, I swear to you that I'll do whatever it takes to protect them! I'll stand between them and Voldemort to keep them alive!"
Finding some small measure of peace in this, he lay his head back down on his bright orange Chudley Cannons pillow and fell asleep.