He had warned Dumbledore in June.
The conversation had been specific — he had described the Gaunt shack, the ring, the Resurrection Stone, the curse, the mechanism of the curse, and had said plainly: do not touch it with your bare hand under any circumstances. He had described the curse as a withering variant bound to the ring that activated on skin contact. He had recommended gloves at minimum, a full containment spell before physical contact, and Flamel consulted before anything was touched.
Dumbledore had said he understood
The three of them — Dumbledore, Moody, Snape — went to Little Hangleton on the twenty-second of July.
He knew they had gone because Snape's owl arrived at the Wulfhall at eleven fifteen that evening with a note that said:
'Dumbledore has been cursed. The ring is destroyed. Come to Hogwarts. — S.S.'
He Apparated to Hogwarts without telling anyone where he was going.
Dumbledore was in the headmaster's office. His right hand had the blackened quality of the curse Ron had described in the letter — the specific color and texture of a body part that had been touched by the Resurrection Stone's binding without containment. Snape was there, in the posture of a man who had done what he could and was not satisfied with what he could.
'The gloves,' Ron said, before he could stop himself.
Dumbledore looked at his hand. 'I was examining it,' he said. 'The stone. I forgot — for a moment, I simply forgot.'
Ron looked at him. He understood what *forgot* meant — the Resurrection Stone was one of the three Deathly Hallows, and the specific property of the Stone was not what most people thought it was. It did not raise the dead. It did not reunite. It showed them — the specific terrible gift of showing you the people you had lost, present enough to speak, not present enough to touch. For a man who had lost what Dumbledore had lost, a moment of forgetting was entirely comprehensible.
He did not say this.
'Professor Snape,' he said. 'The curse — where is it?'
'Contained to the hand,' Snape said, with the quality of a man who had performed a very demanding piece of counter-curse work and was not going to be modest about it. 'For now. It will progress. I have slowed it to approximately one year's movement rather than immediate spread.'
'One year,' Ron said.
'One year,' Snape confirmed. 'With continued treatment.'
Ron looked at Dumbledore's hand and thought about the original timeline where this had proceeded to Dumbledore's death by the end of sixth year, and thought about the year he had and what it needed to contain.
'The ring is destroyed?' he said.
'Yes,' Dumbledore said. 'The Horcrux is gone. The Stone is separated from the ring — the curse was in the metal, not the Stone itself. The Stone is here.' He indicated the desk where a small dark stone sat, unremarkable.
Ron looked at it. The Resurrection Stone. He thought about its property and about the original timeline and about his parents in the white void and about things he was not going to think about right now.
'Keep it somewhere secure,' he said. 'Somewhere not accessible.'
'Yes,' Dumbledore said. He had the quality of a man who had made an error he had been warned about and was not going to minimize that. 'I apologize, Mr. Weasley. You were clear in your warning.'
'You forgot for a moment,' Ron said. 'It's the nature of what it shows. No one is immune to that.' He looked at the blackened hand. 'Let Professor Snape treat it. Follow whatever he tells you. Don't let the treatment lapse.'
Dumbledore looked at him with the expression he had shown in the night-of-the-third-task conversation — the older thing, present without the benign mild surface. 'The Grindelwald memories,' he said. 'I have been thinking about your request.'
'Not tonight,' Ron said. 'Tonight you rest and Professor Snape manages the curse.' He looked at Snape. 'Thank you for the counter-work.'
Snape looked at him with the specific quality of Severus Snape receiving gratitude he had not decided how to manage. 'The ring Horcrux is destroyed,' he said. 'The outcome was correct. The method was not.' He picked up his travelling cloak. 'Your warning in June was more specific than anything Dumbledore told me before we went.' He paused. 'Next time, copy the full briefing to everyone involved.'
'Yes,' Ron said. 'Noted.'
He Apparated home.
He sat in the kitchen at midnight with the lights low and the specific quality of a person processing the gap between the warning and the outcome and deciding what to do with it. Two rings destroyed. One ring's curse stalled for a year. One year. The same year he had.
He made tea. He sat with it. He let the night do what nights did when they had been difficult.
Then he went to bed.