The stress in Hermione had been visible since mid-October.
He had been watching for it since the train, and it had arrived on schedule — the specific accumulation of five simultaneous electives and seven core subjects and the Time-Turner making the hours available without making the hours any longer, and Hermione's response to more available time being, inevitably, to fill it completely and then slightly beyond completely, because that was how Hermione operated when left to her own devices.
He watched it in the small signs: the quality of her handwriting in the evenings, which was less controlled than it usually was. The way she sometimes read the same page twice without catching it. The particular quality of silence she had when she was managing her own anxiety through concentration and finding the concentration slightly harder to maintain than it should have been.
Harry's version was different. Harry's was less about overwork and more about the specific compression of someone who had taken on more than he'd expected. He had signed up for Arithmancy at Ron's suggestion, which Ron had been carefully noncommittal about — not pushing Harry toward it, just mentioning that he was taking it and that Vector was a good teacher, and Harry had signed up with the particular willingness of someone who had decided to try things this year and was implementing that decision. The Arithmancy had been genuinely engaging in September and the first half of October. By November Harry was carrying Quidditch practices and the increased workload of third-year core subjects and the Arithmancy theory and the specific weight of Dementor exposure that Lupin was helping him work through, and the balance was beginning to show.
Ron said nothing about the Arithmancy. He waited.
What he did instead was adjust the Room sessions.
Not the content — he didn't redirect what they were working on or make the sessions lighter. But the shape of the evenings changed slightly: the work first, always, because the work mattered and they were there to do it, but a different quality in the hour after the formal work was done. He had started, in the second week of November, watching the elves cooking in the evenings.He had started bringing things up from the kitchen in the evenings, things he had watched made in the Saturday morning sessions that kept for a day or two, and the after-curfew sessions acquired a different texture: work and then food and then the specific quality of people who had worked hard sitting with something warm in their hands.
Harry ate whatever he was given with the uncomplicated appreciation of someone for whom a good meal was never routine.
Hermione ate more slowly and talked more when there was food in front of her, which he had noticed in the summer at the Burrow and which appeared to be consistent — the presence of food at a table produced a different Hermione than the presence of books at a desk, not a less focused one, but a more present one. He used this.
"The Divination homework," she said one evening in the second week of November, with the tone of something being said that had been not-said for a while.
He waited.
"It's not real," she said. "None of it is. The methods Trelawney uses — they're not internally consistent and they're not connected to any actual mechanism and I've been doing the homework to the standard she requires and it's— I can't—" She stopped. "I can't spend two hours a week producing convincing-sounding nonsense and feel good about it."
"You don't have to," he said.
She looked at him. "I'm taking the subject."
"You're taking five subjects and seven core curriculum and you're running on a time device that makes the hours available without making you any less tired and you are doing all of it very well," he said. "Divination is not the subject you need to be doing it with."
She was quiet for a moment. "Trelawney predicted this week that I have the Grim."
"She predicted Harry has it too and he doesn't even attend her class," he said. "And Neville. She predicted the Grim for everyone with dark hair this term."
Hermione looked at him. Then, despite herself, the corner of her mouth moved. "She did, didn't she."
"She's very consistent," he said.
Hermione looked at her tea. She was quiet for a moment with the specific quality of someone who had been carrying a decision for a while and was very close to making it. "Percy dropped two subjects," she said.
"He did," Ron confirmed.
"Bill dropped two."
"He did."
She looked at the ceiling of the Room, which was doing the specific thing it did when someone in it needed to think and the ceiling appeared to accommodate this by being exactly the right height and texture for thinking at. "Not Arithmancy," she said. "Not Runes. Not Care of Magical Creatures." She paused. "Muggle Studies is redundant. I grew up with Muggles." Another pause. "And Divination is—"
"Not real," he said.
"Not real," she agreed, in the tone of someone giving themselves permission for something.
She walked out of Divination the following Tuesday, with the specific quality of someone who had made a decision and was implementing it with complete conviction. She told Trelawney it was not a subject she could continue in good conscience, which was more than most people would have said. She told McGonagall it was a considered decision, which McGonagall received with the expression of someone who had been expecting this particular student to make this particular decision since approximately the third week of term.
She came to the Room that evening looking lighter than she had in six weeks.
"Better?" he said.
"Better," she said, and sat down, and they worked for two hours, and Dobby brought hot chocolate, and she drank it without looking at a textbook for the full ten minutes it took to drink it, which was new.
Harry told him in the last week of November.
They were flying — Tuesday evening, the last session before the weather made it genuinely inadvisable, the Nimbus handling competently in the cold air, Mira watching from the top of the equipment shed with the attentiveness she brought to anything that involved Ron being somewhere other than where she considered him to be. He could see Harry deciding something from across the pitch, the specific quality of it: not a problem being worked on, but a conclusion having been reached and waiting for the right moment.
They landed at the same time, by the unspoken synchronicity they had developed, and Harry said, without preamble: "I'm going to drop Arithmancy."
Ron put his broom over his shoulder and walked toward the shed. "Alright," he said.
Harry caught up with him. "That's it? Just alright?"
"It's your subject," Ron said. "It's your timetable."
Harry looked at him sideways. "You recommended it."
"I recommended Vector," Ron said. "Who is a good teacher. Which she is." He opened the shed and put the broom on the rack. "Why?"
Harry leaned against the doorframe with the quality of someone who had thought about this and was now saying the thing he had concluded. "Quidditch practices are five days a week until the season ends. The new curriculum is— it's a lot, properly. The Arithmancy theory is real work, and I can do it, but I'm doing it at the expense of sleeping and the Patronus work and—" He stopped. "I'm not built the way you and Hermione are built," he said. "I can't have that many things going at once and do them all properly. If I keep Arithmancy I'll do it badly. I'd rather drop it and do the things I keep well."
Ron looked at him. Harry was not making an excuse. He was making an accurate self-assessment, which was something else entirely and something that Ron had been watching Harry develop since September — the specific capacity to know himself accurately rather than through the lens of other people's expectations.
"That's a good reason," Ron said.
"You're not— you don't think I should push through it?"
"No," Ron said. "I think you've identified the correct thing and you're doing it." He picked up his bag. "Tell Vector before the end of term. She'll be decent about it."
Harry walked beside him back toward the castle with the lighter quality of someone who had confirmed a decision they had already made. "You knew," he said, after a while.
"I thought it was possible," Ron said.
"But you didn't say anything."
"It wasn't mine to say," he said. "You had to work it out yourself." He looked at the castle, the warm windows against the dark sky. "You worked it out yourself."
Harry was quiet for a moment. Then: "Is that how you handle everything? Just wait for the person to get there?"
"Usually," Ron said.
"Doesn't that take forever?"
"Sometimes," Ron said. "But the answer they arrive at is better than the answer you give them. Because it's theirs."
Harry thought about this for the length of the path back to the castle entrance. Then he said: "That's quite wise for someone our age."
"The memory charm," Ron said, and Harry laughed, and they went inside.