Phineas is injured by the fall, and the students handle the situation fairly well. Brinker takes charge, standing over Phineas so he doesn't move from where he landed on the marble floor. Devon School's wrestling coach Phil Latham helps until Dr. Stanhope gets there. A blanket is wrapped around Finny as he is placed into a chair and is carried out of the First Academy Building. Gene keeps a distance from his fallen friend, knowing that he is upset after realizing Gene had knocked him out of the tree deliberately. Stanhope announces that Finny's leg has been broken again and he is taken away to the infirmary, just as he had been the first time he was injured. Gene follows behind and looks at Stanhope's car with the engine running. While waiting outside in the dark, he ponders the personalities of the people inside the infirmary and what they must be talking about, especially Dr. Stanhope and Phil Latham, and he imagines what Finny would say to them.
Gene has come a long way since the paranoia he had felt during the Summer Session. It was then that he began to stop enjoying the innocent games Finny had dragged him into and fabricated a motive behind Finny's freeness: to ruin his academics. Now he is collected and thinks logically about all that has happened. Stanhope's car drives away as Gene describes, "I heard the engine laboriously recede into the distance, and I continued to listen until not only had it ceased but my memory of how it sounded had also ceased. The light had gone out in the room and there was no sound coming from it. The only noise was the peculiarly bleak whistling of the wind through the upper branches." Chapter 12, pp. 175-76 Gene's act of war against Finny was described by Leper as like an engine; now the engine he hears fades away from his memory and all is peaceful. In this way, Gene's old envy and personal war against Finny has disappeared, just like the roar of the car's engine.
Gene walks to the dark window of the room where Finny is resting his leg in a larger cast and calls out to him. Frightened, he angrily yells out that Gene only wants to hurt him again. Gene apologizes many times, overcome by emotion, and forces himself to leave. As he walks throughout the night across campus, the land is beginning to melt and spring at last makes its first move across the landscape. However, due to this conflict with Finny, Gene feels isolated and lonely, "like a roaming ghost," while everything else is just beginning to come to life again. Arriving at Devon's stadium, he falls asleep among the bleachers. The next day Stanhope asks him to bring Finny's clothes to the infirmary by Stanhope. He moves mechanically since he had already done all of that after Finny's first fall out of the tree during the summer. Once there, Finny is civil towards Gene and declares that he wishes there wasn't a war, since he cannot enlist because of his crippled leg. He admits that he had known there was a war all along; he was pretending there wasn't a war only because it was something he was left out of.
Gene tells Finny not to feel badly and uses deep words to say that he wouldn't be any use in the war at all,
"I knew what I said was important and right, and my voice found that full tone voices have when they are expressing something long-felt and long-understood and released at last.... 'You'd get things so scrambled up nobody would know who to fight any more. You'd make a mess, a terrible mess, Finny, out of the war.'"Chapter 12, pg. 182
Gene appears so much older than he had been before and Finny listens closely to his words. All jokes are laid aside and the two at last reconcile themselves about the accident. Finny forgives Gene for shaking the tree's limb since he knew that people did things sometimes without thinking, just because they're angry or upset. Finny lets go of the hatred he had felt earlier and forgives his friend, despite all that Gene had cost him, since athletics are what he had lived for. Earlier he had refused to believe that Gene had done this to him, but now he has grown enough to accept the truth and deal with it.
Gene leaves the infirmary and continues with his school day and then goes to wrestling practice with Phil Latham. He has acquired the confidence to carry himself around campus without any paranoia or fears. Finny has saved him from all of this and made him grow. Later that afternoon Gene returns to ask Dr. Stanhope how Phineas' operation went since he had to set the broken bone again. Stanhope is solemn, declaring that Finny has died due to a bit of bone marrow that escaped into his bloodstream and stopped his heart. Gene is shocked. After all that he has gained from Finny, and right after he and Finny had reconciled their differences, Finny has died. Gene remains shocked and describes how he did not cry then, or ever, because his friend had died. Even at the funeral he later attended near Boston, he didn't cry because, "I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case." Chapter 12, pg. 186 Gene feels so connected to Phineas that he regards Finny's death as his own death.
