Chapter Text
Thomas, a fifth-year Gryffindor, found him near the Great Hall, breathless and tight-faced.
"It's Pat", he said. Nothing else. Just that.
Ryujin followed, his mind struggling to catch up. He didn't feel panicked yet, just confused. A dull, uncomprehending confusion, like being woken in the middle of the night by a sound you can't place. He had seen Patji a couple hours ago in Charms, hadn't he? He'd been sitting two rows ahead, not looking back.
That was normal now. That had become normal.
Ryujin tried not to think about it.
When they burst through the heavy oak doors, the Hospital Wing was quiet, smelling of sharp herbs and old stone. Keng, the Ravenclaw prefect, was standing by a bed at the far end, looking down at Patji with a lost expression.
"I found him collapsed by his bed, pale and unresponsive", Keng said, noticing their arrival. "The dormitory was empty, everyone else had already gone to class."
Ryujin stepped closer and stopped.
Patji looked like he was asleep. But something felt wrong. His face was too still. His breathing was light, almost too light. He looked peaceful, but not in a normal way.
He stood at the edge of the bed and looked at Patji for a long moment, and something cold began to move beneath his ribs.
A week ago, Patji had stood before him by the Black Lake and said he liked him, more than just a friend. The words had come out careful and even, as if Patji had arranged them in advance and was delivering them precisely as rehearsed.
Ryujin, caught off guard and genuinely uncertain of his own feelings, gave the worst possible answer,
I only see you as a younger brother.
He had meant it kindly. That was what he kept telling himself afterward. That it had been kind, clean, honest. That kindness meant saying what was true rather than leaving someone in the fog of uncertainty. He had believed that, genuinely. He had walked back toward the castle afterward with the low, tired feeling of someone who has done a difficult thing well.
But looking back now, from this side of it, he could see the shape of what he'd missed. Patji had stopped coming to the Gryffindor table in the mornings. He'd stopped sitting beside Ryujin in their shared classes, stopped appearing at the library door with a stack of books and a poorly concealed excuse. Even in their shared group of friends, he'd drifted to the edges of conversations, answering when spoken to, never reaching across the space between them first. His laughter, when it came, had a half-second delay that hadn't been there before.
Ryujin had noticed. He just hadn't asked.
He had told himself it was distance, a reasonable kind of distance, the kind anyone might need after that sort of conversation. He had told himself that Patji would come back in his own time. That it wasn't his place to push. That giving someone space was also a form of care.
He understood, now, standing here, that he had been letting himself believe whatever made it easiest not to look.
The thought hit him sideways, the way the worst realizations do, not all at once, but in increments, each one worse than the last.
What if the silence hadn't been healing? What if the two rows of distance in Charms, the empty chair at breakfast, the careful way Patji had stopped needing anything from him, what if all of it had been a door closing, slowly, inch by inch, and Ryujin had seen it happening and thought good, that's good, that's probably what he needs?
He felt sick.
Not dramatically, just a quiet, settling nausea, the kind that has nothing to do with the body.
He didn't know yet how to name what he was feeling. It wasn't guilt exactly, or at least he wasn't ready to call it that. It was something more formless, the creeping awareness that he had been careless in a way that had mattered, that his certainty, his comfortable, well-intentioned certainty had perhaps cost something he hadn't thought to value until now.
He looked at Patji's hand, resting still against the white sheet. It looked smaller than he remembered. Patji always seemed to be taking up a bit too much space when he was awake, gesturing broadly, leaning in too close when he was explaining something he found interesting, bumping into doorframes when he was distracted. Ryujin used to find it mildly exhausting.
Now the stillness of him felt wrong in a way that was difficult to look at directly.
Madam Pomfrey moved around the bed, her wand flickering with diagnostic light.
"No hexes, no physical injuries", she muttered, more to herself than anyone else. "But his magic is exhausted. It's a coma, though I've never seen one quite like this. It's as if his mind has simply pulled the curtains shut."
"Is he going to stay like this?" Thomas asked, his voice low.
Ryujin found he couldn't make himself ask the same question. He wasn't sure he wanted the answer yet, or rather, he wasn't sure he deserved to be the one asking it.
"A heavy sleep for a heavy heart."
The voice came from the doorway calm, unhurried, deep in the particular way of someone who had learned long ago that there was rarely any need to speak loudly. Professor Dumbledore stepped into the ward, his eyes moving first to Patji, then slowly across the worried faces gathered around the bed.
Then, slowly, his gaze settled on Ryujin.
It wasn't a glance. It was a lingering, quiet weight. Dumbledore didn't frown, and he didn't offer a sympathetic smile. He simply looked, his blue eyes piercing and unnervingly clear. In that prolonged silence, Ryujin felt the air in his lungs turn to lead. Every logical excuse he had built over the past week, I was just being honest, I was giving him space, I did the right thing, suddenly felt like fragile glass shards under a searchlight.
It was as if Dumbledore wasn't just looking at him, but reading the footnotes of his conscience, seeing the exact moment Ryujin had noticed the door closing and decided to let it happen.
"Do not lose heart", Dumbledore said softly. "Hogwarts has seen many tired souls find their way back to the light. I believe young Chirachart will be no different." A small nod, his half-moon spectacles catching the glow of the floating candles, and then he turned and left the ward as quietly as he had entered.
The room felt slightly larger in his absence.
Ryujin stayed where he was, staring at Patji. The words were meant to be comforting. They weren't, particularly. Or perhaps they were, for the others. But Ryujin kept turning over that phrase, a heavy sleep for a heavy heart, and finding it press on something he didn't want pressed on.
He had been so certain, after the Black Lake, that he had handled things well. That he had been honest without being cruel, firm without being cold.
He had been sure he did the right thing. He had been sure he had not hurt Patji.
But now he wasn't so sure anymore.
He looked at Patji's hand, resting still against the white sheet, and felt something he couldn't name settle into his chest, low and quiet, like a stone dropping through water. The kind of feeling that doesn't announce itself. The kind that simply arrives and stays.
He didn't know yet that he was the one who had dropped it.