January continued to be dreary, with gray skies and an absent sun, but there was a certain feeling of tension Hermione felt resonating through her at all times, a constant low level of stress she was aware of as classes continued.

The residents of Slytherin third-year girls' dorm had not reacted favorably to Hermione returning from her ritual with a rat. Daphne had shrieked, frightened; Tracey had gagged and demanded she get rid of it; and Pansy had started laughing hysterically, before calming down enough to mock Hermione for doing a ritual to find a rat and getting a literal rat instead. Hermione had rolled her eyes and put Scabbers' cage up on top of her wardrobe, warding the top of it, and primly informed Pansy that she was looking into the matter, who only snickered further.

Millie, upon returning from the Hospital Wing the next morning, was horrified that the others had just let Hermione do a ritual that could have summoned Sirius Black. She ignored Hermione, arguing with the others fiercely until Pansy challenged her, asking how, exactly, they were expected to stop Hermione once her mind was made up on something. Millie faltered at that, before conceding and glaring at Hermione, angry and annoyed. Hermione avoided Millie for a while to let her calm down; in her opinion, she was making a big deal out of nothing, but she wasn't about to tell her that.

The most irritated resident of the dorm, however, was not Millie, but Crookshanks.

Crookshanks seemed to take Scabbers' presence as a personal affront and insult. He prowled around the wardrobe constantly, and he had taken to climbing up the poles of Hermione's four-poster bed and leaping at the top of the wardrobe, hissing viciously. Each time, he'd bounce off of her protective wards and land on the floor, snarling, and Scabbers would squeak madly and run around his cage. After attempting to discipline Crookshanks and make him stop it, getting several deep gashes in the process for her troubles, Hermione gave up and left him to it. She couldn't make him stop, and it did no harm, really, save raise Scabbers' blood pressure, so she just made sure to strengthen the wards every day before she left.

But between Millie's lingering anger and Crookshanks' hissing, the dorm room was decidedly… tense.

The coven hadn't been about to just accept their apparent failure with their ritual, of course. Together, Hermione and her friends searched the library. They indeed found curses to turn traitors into literal rats, but none of the counter-curses they tried on Scabbers worked so far. Hermione didn't know enough about cursing to know if you could layer curses, and if they'd need to undo a different curse before undoing the original turn-into-a-rat curse. None of the others knew that much about Dark curses either, and none of them much fancied doing lots of research into Dark curses – it was research Madam Pince was sure to notice. But if Scabbers was a person who'd been trapped as a rat for at least twelve years... it must have been a very Dark curse.

Hermione didn't want to go to Snape for help, either. The embarrassment at having a rat result from a blood debt ritual would be too much of a blow to her pride. And she suspected Snape would not be pleased with learning she'd been intending to catch Sirius Black, either.

So the matter continued to plague her.

There was also an odd sort of tension in the hallways at times. When Hermione passed Cedric in the hallways, the looks he would give her… his eyes were pained, filled with so many emotions Hermione couldn't even begin to parse them all, and Tracey and Daphne would hurry her away from him. They'd advised her not to talk to him at all for at least three months, and despite her initial reluctance, Hermione followed their advice. A clean cut was less painful, she thought, than a ragged, tortured wound.

The Hufflepuffs, however, seemed to take Cedric's loss as a personal affront and an attack on their house. There were whispers around her in the hallways, with glares and scorn as she passed by. All of her Hufflepuff classmates save Susan were decidedly cold toward her, as if it had been her fault Cedric had accepted Draco's stupid challenge. It was decidedly unfair that she be blamed for their duel, but somehow, she was. As if she had tempted them both into a daring duel through her seductive feminine wiles, the Hufflepuffs were making her out to be the villain who had led Cedric to his tragic heroic downfall, and Hermione was frustrated and upset by it, though she did her best to hide it and ignore their dark looks.

Draco's preening and smug smirks whenever he witnessed such an encounter were getting more and more irritating to endure. On one hand, Hermione was kind of happy her courtship had ended without her looking like the 'bad guy' and dumping Cedric, but on the other hand, Draco was positively gloating about his victory in the honor duel. He'd retold the story to the first and second years at least three times so far (and that was only as many iterations that Hermione had overheard), and it'd resulted in some enamored younger students viewing him as a wizarding role model or a romantic pureblood prince.

Either way, it was tacky and obnoxious, and Hermione did her best to ignore it all.

Classes became an outlet for all her frustration and stress, and Hermione threw herself into her studies. Arithmancy had picked up to be more challenging this term, giving her something new to learn and obsess over. Professor Vector had begun teaching them how to string multiple statements together in order to make prediction trees. It was essential that they get the form of their trees correct first, though, so she had them practice with letters or meaningless symbols, not even using glyphs.

"If the structure of your tree is unsound, any results you get will be invalid," Professor Vector emphasized. "Remember: the trunk of your tree and its branches must be strong and sound."

It got confusing somewhat quickly. She had them leave gaps for where they would need to apply Arithmantic queries, leaving Hermione with examples in her notes like:

Either A or B
If A then C
If B then D
(A?)
(B?)
If D, then E or F
If E, then not G or H
If F, I
(E?)
(F?)

It was also a lot harder to get values for Arithmancy than she'd originally anticipated. When she and Harry had copied an equation from their book, they'd been querying something that already had a specific value assigned to it – mainly, a person's net worth in galleons. Querying the number of Dumbledore's cloaks was also seeking out a value that was already a number. But with most Arithmancy equations, the values you needed were not already numbers, but probabilities that had to be divined in other ways first.

The upcoming Quidditch game was the example used: Gryffindor would play Ravenclaw. A question of probability that seemed fairly simple at first glance (either Gryffindors wins, or Ravenclaw wins) quickly became very complicated as Professor Vector diagrammed out all the relationships necessary to divine and reduce to numbers to plug accurate values into the prediction tree. Hermione suspected the point of the exercise was to show them how complicated Arithmancy could be, but Hermione came away with rather a different impression: Professor Vector was an Arithmancy genius, with how she could dissect a question and determine all of the influencing factors there were so quickly.

There were a lot of values, though, and most of them qualitative judgements, not quantitative numbers. It began to make more sense as Vector explained in greater depth.

"Take for example, the Ravenclaw seeker's skill," Vector said, pointing to a variable on the board. "How do we determine what number is her 'skill'?"

She looked out over them expectantly, but no one answered.

"There are a few ways," Vector continued. "We could create a skill ranking based on how many times she has caught the snitch versus not caught the snitch. We could rank all of the players involved in the equation on their flying ability. Or we could assign her an arbitrary value, such as how good she is out of 10."

Hermione immediately saw the vulnerability in this, raising her hand.

"That's just another judgement call, though, isn't it?" she asked. "I might think someone is a 9 out of 10, but someone else who knows more about Quidditch might think they're a 6 out of 10, and the equation would balance differently."

"Exactly," Vector said, nodding. "Arithmancy is very powerful, but to do very powerful things, it is very complicated." She glanced out over them all, adjusting her hat. "I do not want any of you going away with the expectation that you could know anything. Regardless of what Arithmantic Queries you develop, for many of them you will still need a number, and a lot of things in life are not subject to flat numerical values by nature."

As an activity, they constructed their first Arithmancy Equations to determine what grade would they get on the final exam. Hermione was careful with hers, leaving variables to represent other grades she would get leading up to the final, as well as including a variable for time studied, hours of sleep gotten, and degree of other distractions. Harry's had been simpler, only leaving variables for time studied and previous grades. Harry teased her that hers should have been even simpler.

"You should have just put 'equal to or greater than 100%'," he said, grinning. "You'd never accept doing anything less than perfect."

"That's not the point," Hermione argued, but Harry laughed.

Patronus lessons with Lupin continued. To Harry's dismay, he was having the least luck with conjuring and maintaining a corporeal Patronus out of all of them in the coven. Hermione couldn't blame him – he alone fainted when the dementor came near – but his frustration was palpable, and she felt bad for him.

Luna had managed to manifest a hare as her Patronus. Susan had gotten a dapple-gray mare as hers, a ghostly horse that galloped around the classroom. Blaise had ended up with a panther, which Hermione envied the grace and elegance of.

Professor Lupin had been obviously surprised and taken aback at their success.

"Many full-grown wizards never get the hang of this charm," he explained, almost apologetic. "It's not that I thought you all couldn't do it… just that it seemed unlikely."

Hermione suspected it had a lot to do with them all practicing together and sharing magical power and reserves freely amongst their five. If conjuring a Patronus required immense personal power, which seemed likely, she and the coven were able to effectively cheat to get their own.

Hermione's Patronus own seemed to evade her, coming out incomplete, incorporeal, or vanishing before she could tell what it was. At first, she'd thought she had a cat, then a snake, then a lizard, but now it seemed to be some sort of dinosaur – like a giant lizard blown up to massive size and crossed with an alligator. Hermione wasn't sure if it was the size of it that seemed to make it harder for her to cast and manifest than the others, or if it was her difficulty with emotion-based magic.

She was getting better at it, but it still frustrated her. She missed the precision of Transfiguration and Charms.

Each lesson with Lupin seemed to have a direct effect on her progress with her other emotion-based casting lessons, though. Each time she went to the Chamber of Secrets and dragged Tom out of the diary to teach her Fiendfyre, she could tell she was getting closer to succeeding. There was a feeling she felt as she cast, and she'd begun to manage wisps of unearthly hot flame that vanished into the air, or spurts of sparks with the smell of sulfur as well.

Tom was pleased and encouraging, telling her she was doing better. He seemed to think she would suddenly have an emotional breakthrough that would propel her from spurts of flame into sudden full-on Fiendfyre, but whatever revelation he was anticipating, it had yet to come. His pride in her was unnerving, but she couldn't help but feel encouraged by it nonetheless.

Hermione had her suspicions, though. Each time she was learning with Lupin, she encountered the mock dementor, and each time, her resolve hardened further still.

Sick of the weather and the dreariness of classes, the Slytherin House decided to hold a Wizard's Chess tournament one weekend. A couple of sixth years arranged it – you paid 5 galleons to enter, and it was double elimination, with different age brackets – 1st through 3rd years, 4th and 5th, and 6th and 7th. The prize money would be divided up between those who placed at the top.

Excitement buzzed throughout the house as the tournament approached – Slytherins always liked an opportunity to flaunt their skills without crudely showing off – and nearly everyone signed up, regardless of their chess skill, just to be part of the excitement.

Hermione was having none of it.

Hermione loathed chess. Seeing chessboards all over the common room in preparation just reminded her constantly of her lack of skill in that arena. So when the weekend came, Hermione stayed in her dorm room all day, laid out on her bed, researching fertility rituals and taking notes, letting her mind plot and theorize, and ignoring the tournament altogether.

Hermione didn't pay much attention to Pansy when she came in. Pansy had only paused to glance at her before going into the bathroom, and Hermione was busy contemplating how best to cause two witches to ovulate at the same time – would they need to do multiple separate rituals? Or was there a way for one ritual to encompass the two?

She was gnawing on her quill for a while, thinking, and it took her a while to realize there were frantic noises coming from the bathroom. She paused, listening, and the sounds became clearer.

"No… no… no…"

Hermione blinked.

That was not a normal sound.

The bathroom was almost empty when Hermione went in, save one toilet cubicle. Pansy's words were low, pleading, but the anguish in her tone was palpable.

"No, not now, please. I don't want this…"

Hermione bit her lip, considered, and knocked on the stall door. Immediately the sounds stopped from inside the stall.

"What?" Pansy's voice was sharp and suspicious. Hermione supposed she couldn't really blame her.

"I heard you in here," Hermione said, her tone carefully neutral. "Do you need help?"

"No, Granger," Pansy snapped through the door. "Get your nose out of my business."

Hermione paused.

"Would you prefer I get Daphne for help?" she asked.

"No!" Pansy's voice was high and panicked this time. "No, no! That's—that's really not necessary!"

Hermione frowned.

"Do you need Madame Pomfrey?" she asked, insistent. "I know you don't like me, but it's not normal for someone to be moaning and having a panic attack in a toilet. I'm not just going to leave you like this."

"I'm—"

Pansy's voice broke off, and abruptly, the stall door flew open.

Pansy stood there, her face paler than Hermione had ever seen. She still wore her robes, but she held a crumpled scrap of fabric in her hands.

Unable to find the words, Pansy spread out the fabric between her hands. Hermione was confused at first – why was Pansy showing her her knickers? – until she saw the blood stain.

She blinked. "Oh…"

"Exactly." Pansy's voice was bleak. "'Oh'."

"I take it… this is not a welcome development?" Hermione asked delicately.

Pansy snorted. "I was hoping I'd never get it, Granger."

"Can you just… not tell anyone?" Hermione suggested. She went to the mirror and knocked twice, and a door appeared, swinging open to reveal a secret stash of menstrual supplies. "If no one knows, can you just pretend it hasn't happened?"

"No," Pansy snapped. "There are spells, Granger. Butterfly trinkets and other ways to know what's happened. You can't just hide becoming a woman."

Hermione privately disagreed, silently handing Pansy a pad. Muggles did so all the time. As she watched, though, Pansy's defiance seemed to fade, and Hermione watched as the other girl visibly wilted in front of her.

"My mother will find out." Pansy's voice was bleak, a hoarse whisper. "She'll start trying for betrothal agreements immediately."

"You can't get married until seventeen, though," Hermione said, trying to comfort her. "That's still a long way off, Pansy…"

"Yes, but I'd have to be courted, wouldn't I?" Pansy's face twisted in revulsion. "I'd have to… entice boys, and whatnot, to win them over."

Hermione blinked.

"Do you not think you could do that?" she asked carefully.

"Oh no, I could do it," Pansy said, sniffing. "I just… I don't want to do it."

Hermione began to understand.

"So it's not so much the thought of not getting a betrothal agreement that bothers you," she said slowly, "but the thought of being forced to have sex for money?"

Pansy flinched.

"We agreed never to talk about that," she hissed. "To never mention the boggart."

"Do you not want to have sex? Ever?" Hermione asked, keeping her voice neutral. "Professor Sprout talked to us about this. She said some people have a lot of drive, while some people have none…"

There was a war going on across Pansy's face, emotions flitting through her eyes as she fought with herself. Finally, she seemed to settle on something, and when her eyes met Hermione's, Hermione was startled by how stark and vulnerable they were.

"It all seemed so simple," Pansy whispered. "Get a boy to like me. Grow up lady of the house. Birth a few children. It all sounded so easy, as a child. I never knew what I'd feel when it came time to be a woman."

Hermione watched as Pansy summoned a new pair of knickers, keeping her face neutral.

"And when the time came to grow up, you realized you didn't want to do those adult things?" Hermione guessed. "Love, sex, marriage, childbirth?"

The other girl sighed.

"Not really," Pansy admitted. She made a face. "It just all seems so crude and pointless, you know? Sure, it might feel good, but so does eating an éclair. It just seems so unnecessary. And boys… with their… parts…"

She shuddered, and Hermione bit her lip, trying not to laugh.

"And girls?" she prompted.

Pansy's look was sharp. "What about girls?"

"You don't like boys and their 'parts'," Hermione said mildly, raising her eyebrows. "What about girls and their parts?"

Pansy hesitated.

"I… I don't know?" she said, faltering. "I—honestly, Granger, if you breathe a word of this to anyone, I will murder you—but the only thing I think I've really wanted was the embracing and kissing bit." Pansy's face slowly turned red. "I know that sounds juvenile, but…"

"Embracing and kissing another girl?" Hermione kept all emotion off her face. "Not a boy?"

"Maybe?" Pansy's eyes darted up to hers, flashing. "…yes."

Hermione bit her lip, considering.

"Go back in and take care of yourself," she said, gently. "I'll wait here."

"Why?" Pansy snapped, but she went back into the stall obediently with the pad. "I don't need your sympathy, Granger."

"No," Hermione said. "But you need my resources."

Pansy fell silent at that, and when she emerged from the stall once more to wash her hands, she was giving Hermione a suspicious look.

"What 'resources'?" she demanded.

"Just… follow me," Hermione said, wincing. "It's easier to show you than to explain."

Pansy still looked suspicious, but she followed Hermione out of the dorm room. She was surprised when Hermione turned to go down the hallway further instead of out toward the common room, and her face turned to one of alarm as Hermione knocked on the door at the end of the hall.

"Granger—what—"

The door swung open, revealing the Head Girl, Jade Rince.

"Oh, it's you," Jade said. She rolled her eyes. "What do you want, Granger?"

Hermione took a step to the side.

"Jade, may I present Pansy Parkinson, my dormmate and classmate?" she said, gesturing. Startled, Pansy hurriedly bobbed the appropriate curtsy while Hermione continued. "Pansy, this is Jade Rince, the Head Girl."

"I know Pansy." Jade's voice was curt. "What do you need?"

Hermione took a deep breath, then looked Jade square in the eye.

"Pansy needs you to teach her how to bow," she said.

There was a silence, Jade's eyes widening, then searching hers.

"Well." Her word was a weighty exhale, and she looked Pansy over, examining. Her manner was no longer defensive or combative. "You'd best be coming in, then, Parkinson."

Pansy shot Hermione a confused look, but Hermione nodded urging her.

"You can trust Jade," she assured her. "She can teach you how to bow. And—whatever other secret things there are—"

Jade's lips twitched. "You make it sound like there's tons of secret signals, Granger."

"There might be," Hermione shot back. "I don't know if there's a magical equivalent of the hanky code."

Jade looked confused. "'Hanky code'?"

"Just—ask Milan or something." Hermione shook her head. "Just—teach her how to bow and anything else she'll need, alright?" She bit her lip. "She's going to end up in a similar situation to you."

Jade paused, before nodding once, gravely. "I'll help her."

With a sigh of relief, Hermione turned to go.

"So—do you know what bowing means?" she heard Jade ask, as the door closed behind her. Pansy's "no" was faint as it shut, and Hermione felt reassured, bolstered.

She didn't much care for Pansy, but there was an uplifting, satisfying feeling of having done the right thing to help her – even if Pany's situation didn't really have a good way out.