Ron knew better than to voice his complaints about the food, or lack thereof. He glanced up at her as she walked by, trying to decide if that was an actual question - the kind he was supposed to answer, and not simply take as a very thinly veiled order to be quiet. - Well, it didn't really matter; there wasn't much of an answer to give, anyway. "Nothing new," he said, looking sourly back down at the open page. "Well. Fred's having a grand old time about something. Otherwise, nothing." He didn't know what he had expected, though. Hints? "Did you see anything useful?"
"I saw that Rita Skeeter can expect to spend the rest of her life in a very small jar," Hermione answered curtly, frowning and glaring at the fire, poking it again and then sitting the stick down and rubbing at her arms to warm them again. "And that there was some type of fireworks show at Hogwarts, and that Dumbledore..." Her voice trailed off here, thankfully not cracking. Dumbledore's funeral treated like an advert for a cauldron? It was sickening.
"There's an awful lot about Dumbledore," Ron continued for her, after a few moments of silence had made it clear she was finished. "Too bad about the funeral." He would have liked to have gone, of course. It didn't feel like something the three of them, especially, should miss. But they had to, because they were out here doing … whatever the hell it was they were meant to be doing. He wasn't convinced any of them really knew. "Hope they make sure no one from the Prophet comes along and mucks it up. They've done enough."
"Harry mentioned something about sending his wand to McGonagall..." Hermione sounded distant when she finally answered, like she was caught still thinking about something and not really paying attention to what Ron had said. "I told him I don't know how safe that would be right now, sending owls at all. I managed it once, and I was ...." She'd been terrified, really, but there was no reason to admit that.
"Did he?" First he'd heard of it. Of course, they'd all been avoiding each other by turns, depending on how the locket was being passed around, and he was sure - had spent a good chunk of time thinking about it, actually, the last time he'd been lying around with that miserable thing hanging off his neck - that there were plenty of conversations he wasn't privy to. "We could use all the protection we can get, anyway," he said with a shrug. "Whatever one more wand'll do for us, we need it more than she does." And there was something a little comforting about having Dumbledore's wand within reach, even if none of them could hope to use it as well as he had.
"Except it should be buried with Dumbledore, shouldn't it?" Hermione pursed her lips rubbing at her arms again, and if he was a gentleman he'd find some way to keep her warm, but of course he wasn't. "And that isn't the point, anyway. It's that Harry doesn't really need the reminder around all the time of what happened." She was sure he'd been having nightmares about it, though he wouldn't tell any of them about it.
Ron looked at her a little strangely. Harry didn't need the reminder, did he? They'd all stood there and watched him die, and he, personally, felt the wand was less a reminder of something horrible than a way to hold onto something that had slipped away. "I don't think Harry's going to up and forget if we ship it back off to school," he said, trying not to sound irritated. "I know I wouldn't," he added, pointedly. He picked up the stick that was standing in for a poker, and jabbed at the fire again, perfectly oblivious to her discomfort.
"Well, it's not our place to say," Hermione didn't even think about how she sounded as she said it, but the tone was bitter and more than a little bossy. She'd had the same sort of argument with Harry, though, so it wasn't as if it was only Ron that she was having problems with here. They were just going to all have to learn to deal with one another in these close quarters. They couldn't let the locket turn them against each other when things were a thousand times more stressful here than they had been at school.