Chapter 1
Ron Weasley prided himself on many things: his prowess at chess, his uncanny ability to eat twice his body weight in one sitting, and his natural talent for making Hermione Granger roll her eyes. But one thing he had never prided himself on? Being sick.
Unfortunately, that decision wasn’t up to him.
It had started as a dull ache in his stomach the night before, something he blamed on the leftover shepherd’s pie they’d had for dinner. He had even joked about it—“Blimey, Hermione, did you use one of those weird Muggle ingredients? What was it again? Coriander?”—before going to bed feeling slightly uneasy but mostly fine.
Now, barely past sunrise, Ron was curled in on himself on the bed in Hermione’s room, clammy with sweat, groaning as the cramping in his gut twisted sharply. His stomach made an ominous gurgling noise, and before he could even properly process what was happening, he was scrambling out of bed and hurtling toward the bathroom, barely making it before he fell to his knees and retched into the toilet.
“Ron?” Hermione’s groggy voice drifted from the hallway. A moment later, she appeared in the doorway, hair mussed from sleep and face still creased from the pillow. She blinked at him blearily, then her expression softened with concern. “Oh, Ron.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, already exhausted and miserable. “I think I’m dying.”
Hermione sighed, kneeling beside him and rubbing soothing circles on his back. “You’re not dying, Ron. You’ve got a stomach bug.”
“Easy for you to say,” he muttered, leaning against the cool porcelain of the toilet bowl. “You’re not the one whose guts are trying to escape.”
“I’ve had a stomach bug before, you know,” she reminded him, her fingers threading through his damp hair in a way that was unfairly comforting.
“Yeah, but you grew up dealing with this nonsense the Muggle way,” Ron grumbled. He shut his eyes, pressing his forehead against the seat of the toilet. “I need Mum. She’d have me sorted in ten minutes.”
Hermione stiffened beside him. “Well, we’re on break, and we can’t use magic outside of Hogwarts. So you’ll have to survive the old-fashioned way.”
Ron groaned dramatically. “Kill me now.”
Hermione ignored him, standing up and flushing the toilet before moving to the sink to wet a washcloth. She pressed the cool fabric to the back of his neck. It felt heavenly.
“I’m going to make you some tea,” she said. “Try to sip some water in the meantime.”
Ron grumbled something unintelligible but didn’t resist when she handed him a glass. He took a weak sip before slumping back against the bathtub, eyelids fluttering closed. His reprieve was short-lived, though, because less than five minutes later, he was lunging for the toilet again, emptying whatever was left in his stomach.
Hermione returned with a mug in her hands, wincing sympathetically at the sound of retching. “Still awful?”
He heaved a sigh, forehead resting on his arm. “What does it look like?”
“Like you should listen to me and take small sips instead of gulping everything down at once,” she quipped, setting the tea aside and kneeling beside him again.
Ron groaned in protest, but he let her help him up, her arm strong around his waist as she guided him back to bed. He barely made it under the covers before curling in on himself again, shivering despite the sweat clinging to his skin.
“Ugh,” he moaned. “This is worse than the time Fred and George tricked me into eating one of their experimental puking pastilles.”
Hermione smiled fondly, brushing his damp hair from his forehead. “I don’t think you need any help throwing up this time.”
“Yeah, well, could’ve fooled me,” Ron muttered, swallowing thickly against another wave of nausea.
The next few hours passed in a miserable blur. Ron vacillated between huddling in bed, shivering under the blankets, and making frantic, undignified sprints to the bathroom. Hermione was there through all of it—holding his hair back, wiping his face with cool cloths, whispering quiet reassurances even when he was too queasy to properly acknowledge them.
At some point, the nausea was joined by a sharp cramping in his lower stomach, and Ron barely had the presence of mind to scramble off the bed before another, much more humiliating wave of illness hit him.
“Oh, bloody hell,” he croaked from the bathroom, his face burning with embarrassment even as his body betrayed him yet again. “Hermione, don’t come in here.”
“Ron—”
“I mean it! This is not something I want you to witness.”
There was a pause. Then, with a sigh, Hermione called from the other side of the door, “I’ll leave some fresh clothes outside for you.”
He groaned in gratitude, resting his forehead against his knees as another wave of cramps seized him. He had never, in all his life, been this sick. Not even that time he’d eaten those dodgy cauldron cakes in fourth year. His body was truly betraying him.
By the time he dragged himself back to bed, he was utterly spent, limbs trembling, skin slick with sweat. Hermione was waiting for him with a fresh shirt and a cold glass of water.
“I hate this,” he muttered as she helped him change, his arms too weak to properly move on their own. “I hate not having magic.”
“I know,” Hermione said softly, smoothing the blanket over him. “But you’ll be okay. It just takes time.”
Ron let out a long, weary breath, already half-asleep as she tucked the covers around him. He felt like absolute rubbish, but there was something strangely reassuring about the gentle way Hermione cared for him, even without magic. His mother would’ve healed him in an instant, but Hermione was sitting through the worst of it with him, and in some ways, that felt even better.
He cracked one eye open as she pressed a kiss to his clammy forehead. “Love you,” he murmured, barely audible.
Hermione smiled. “I love you, too. Now get some rest.”
And, for once, Ron actually listened.