HP:Rise

The silence in the infirmary was a clean, sharp thing, broken only by the rhythmic drip of a potion into a vial and the soft, shallow sound of Hermione's breathing. Ron sat hunched in the visitor's chair beside her bed, the wood digging into his back. He'd been here for hours, watching the pale afternoon light crawl across the white sheets, feeling utterly, miserably useless.

She looked so small in the hospital bed, her face pale against the starched pillowcase, the usual spark of life in her eyes extinguished by a deep, unnatural sleep. Madam Pomfrey had found her late last night, collapsed in a secluded alcove of the library, surrounded by a fortress of books. The diagnosis had been swift and severe: magical, mental, and physical exhaustion. A complete system burnout.

"The girl has been running on fumes for months," the mediwitch had said, her voice tight with a mixture of concern and disapproval. "She'll need at least two weeks of absolute bed rest. No books. No homework. No exceptions."

Two weeks. Ron knew that for Hermione, a sentence of two weeks without books was a fate worse than death. The thought brought a fresh, bitter wave of guilt that coiled in his stomach.

He should have seen it. He had seen it, hadn't he? The dark circles under her eyes that even magic couldn't quite hide. The way she'd started skipping meals, her hand trembling slightly when she reached for her goblet of pumpkin juice. The cold sandwiches he'd started leaving by her books, a clumsy, unspoken admission that he knew she was forgetting to eat. He'd seen all the pieces, but he'd never put them together. He'd just watched, helpless, as she ran herself into the ground.

His gaze drifted to the window, to the distant silhouette of the Quidditch pitch. This whole year had felt wrong. Off-kilter. It had started as a slow, creeping unease, but now it was a chasm, a great, silent canyon that had opened up right in the middle of their friendship.

And at the center of it all was Harry.

Ron scrubbed a hand over his face, the rough stubble on his chin scratching his palm. He remembered the start of the year, the easy camaraderie on the Hogwarts Express. It felt like a lifetime ago. Now, Harry was a stranger. A polite, focused, incredibly powerful stranger who happened to live in his dormitory.

Ron had tried. Merlin, he had tried. When he saw Harry's grades shooting up, his spellwork becoming something sharp and deadly, he'd felt that old, familiar sting of inadequacy. The youngest brother, the one who was never the best at anything. But this time, he hadn't just sulked. He'd fought back. He'd forced himself to spend more time in the library, his brain aching as he tried to decipher the dense, looping text of his Transfiguration textbook. He'd stayed up late, practicing wand movements until his wrist throbbed.

But it was like trying to outrun a Firebolt on a school broom. The harder he tried, the further away Harry seemed to get. The chasm just kept getting wider.

The final, brutal proof had come that rainy afternoon in the common room. The chessboard. It had been more than just a game; it had been their thing. A piece of the old, easy friendship that Ron had desperately hoped was still there. Harry's polite, distant refusal hadn't been an insult. It had been a verdict. An acknowledgment that whatever they had been before, they weren't anymore.

And Hermione… she had been caught in the middle of it all. Worried sick about Harry, and pushing herself to the breaking point trying to keep up with an impossible standard he had set without even realizing it. Ron's guilt curdled into a hot, simmering anger. An anger directed at Harry's silence, at his secrets, at the wall he had built around himself brick by painstaking brick.

The infirmary doors creaked open, and Ron's head snapped up.

Harry stood there, his green eyes filled with a genuine, immediate concern. He looked from Hermione's sleeping form to Ron's grim face, his expression softening with a quiet worry.

"I just heard," Harry said, his voice low as he walked closer. "Is she… what happened?"

That was it. The simple, innocent question was the spark that lit the fuse. All the frustration, the inadequacy, the grief for a friendship he felt was already dead, erupted in a single, searing wave.

Ron stood up, his chair scraping harshly against the stone floor. He didn't shout. He didn't have to. His voice was a low, shaking thing, thick with a year's worth of unspoken resentment.

"What happened?" he repeated, the words tasting like poison. "You happened, Harry. That's what happened."

Harry blinked, taken aback. "What are you talking about?"

"You don't see it, do you?" Ron took a step forward, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. "You're so caught up in your training and your secrets that you don't even see what's right in front of you. Look at her, Harry. She's been running herself into the ground for months. For you."

The words tumbled out, raw and unfiltered. "She was trying to keep up with you. Trying to figure out what was wrong with you, why you were pulling away. She's been using a bloody Time-Turner just to make enough hours in the day to worry about you on top of everything else! Did you even notice?"

Harry's face, which had been etched with concern, began to harden. "Ron, that's not fair…"

"Fair?" Ron's voice cracked, a bitter laugh escaping his lips. "You want to talk about fair? Is it fair that you shut us out? We're supposed to be in this together! That's what we've always done. But you're not with us anymore. You're somewhere else, in your own world, and you didn't even bother to tell us you were leaving. Do you even care that she's lying here because she was worried sick about you?"

The accusation hung in the air, heavy and ugly. Ron's chest was heaving, the last of his anger spent, leaving behind a cold, hollow ache. He had finally said it. The unspoken thing that had been poisoning them for a year.

He expected Harry to yell back, to defend himself, to argue. He was prepared for a fight.

He was not prepared for the silence.

Harry didn't get angry. He didn't make excuses. All the emotion drained from his face as if a mask had been lowered into place. The concern, the confusion, the hurt—it all vanished, replaced by a cold, unreadable stillness. His eyes, which had been so full of life just moments before, became flat, green stones.

He looked at Ron, his expression utterly blank. Then his gaze shifted to Hermione's sleeping form, and for a moment, a flicker of something unreadable passed through his eyes. Then it was gone.

Without a single word, Harry turned and walked out of the infirmary, his back ramrod straight, his footsteps echoing in the sudden, crushing silence.

Ron stood alone by Hermione's bed, the silence in the room now heavier and more broken than before. The heat of his anger had faded, leaving behind a chilling certainty. He had finally torn down the wall between them. And in doing so, he might have just destroyed everything.