Millicent Bulstrode was a friend of Hermione's. A good friend, in her opinion – someone she'd trust with her life and probably kill for. She wasn't particularly loud or chatty; she was more the type for snide commentary or funny observations instead of loud gossip, but that was fine – not everyone was an extrovert, and if Millie was quieter and more introspective than the rest of them, that was just her being her. Hermione had always tried to give Millie her space and not overwhelm her, which Millie seemed to appreciate.
Now, though… Hermione was more than just mildly concerned.
She knew for a fact that Millicent had gotten her cycle around Halloween of their second year. And she'd been fine since then – all the rest of second year, and the first term of their third. It was only recently she was having such trouble with cramping all the time, and from what Hermione gathered, her menses never seemed to actually end.
It was a good thing the wizarding world had Blood Replenishing potions, Hermione thought, though an iron supplement probably wouldn't go amiss either.
Millie wasn't being open about her difficulties. Given the subject matter, whenever it came up, Daphne or Tracey generally politely changed the topic, but Hermione was starting to get suspicious that something more was going on. People generally didn't just bleed and not stop, she knew. She didn't want to approach Millie until she had a better idea of what the core issue was, but it was hard to pick up on more details, with Millie kept things to herself.
When Millie was gone all day again in the Hospital Wing, Hermione decided she had had enough, and she began poking around, determining how she could figure out just what was going on.
Jade and Milan weren't getting N.E.W.T.s in Arithmancy, but they were able to identify Tomoko Kajiwara, a 7th year Ravenclaw, as the best person in their year for Arithmancy. Jade hadn't looked well – nauseated and clearly exhausted, rubbing her eyes over her books as she tried to focus, but Milan had been able to help.
"Tomoko is legendary at it," Milan told Hermione, amused. "Practically a prodigy. Nobody ever bets against her for anything. If she can't help you, no one can."
Tomoko was found in the library, a lithe girl with long, shiny, straight black hair. She was surprised when Hermione disturbed her, but after Hermione introduced herself and explained her problem, Tomoko looked thoughtful.
"So you're trying to figure out what's really going on with your friend and her cycle," she said. "Does she know you're snooping around?"
"No," Hermione admitted. "I'm worried for her, but she's not going to admit anything unless I have cold hard facts I can use to confront her."
Tomoko laughed.
"You're a good friend to her," she said. "Though, snooping behind her back… is this how friendship works in Slytherin House?"
"Something like that," Hermione said, lips quirking. "Will you help me out?"
Tomoko grinned, pulling out a new sheet of parchment and inking her quill.
"What's your friend's name again?" she asked. "How old is she?"
Watching Tomoko do Arithmancy was very odd, and very different from everything Hermione had done in class with Professor Vector so far. Tomoko asked Hermione what seemed to be a million questions, every detail she knew about Millie both relevant and irrelevant, before the older girl started rapidly writing short equations, tapping them and sending them off.
"What are those?" Hermione asked, watching them turn gold and fly away.
"Informative queries," Tomoko explained, still writing. "We don't have enough information about the situation at hand, so I'm asking about aspects around it to learn more. It takes a lot of magic to power these types of broad queries, but I've gotten pretty good at it by now."
"And you're good enough to interpret the runes as they come back?" Hermione said, astonished. "That's mad."
Tomoko glanced around, before giving her a devious grin.
"Do you want to know my secret?" she asked.
Hermione nodded rapidly. "Please."
"My secret is…" Tomoko's eyes glinted. "…I don't use runes at all."
Hermione's mouth fell open as the 7th year began to explain.
It'd come to her in 4th year, when Vector had taught them about incorporating numbers and numerals into equations for various functions, and she'd asked them to use tally marks for an exercise.
"I did the exercise, and it worked, but when Vector went over it on the board, hers looked different than mine," Tomoko said. "Her tally marks were different, and what I discovered blew my mind."
She illustrated on the side of the parchment.
"Vector's tallies went one, two, three, four, five," she said, drawing quick lines and leaving 卌 on the parchment. "But my tallies, they went one, two, three, four, five."
This time, the symbol left behind was 正, and understanding began to dawn on Hermione.
"You're not using Ancient Runes in your equations, you're using Chinese," she accused. "The little pictograms from Chinese that the Japanese use too – those count as symbols?"
"Kanji," Tomoko told her, grinning. "And yes – they do."
Kanji were logographic Chinese characters used in Japanese writing that held different meanings, Tomoko explained. They'd been adapted from Chinese to suit the Japanese language more, but they remained highly symbolic, and not like a traditional alphabet.
"Like this, hito, this means person," Tomoko said, drawing 人 on the page. "See? It looks like a little person."
"I can kind of see that," Hermione said. "It doesn't have a head, though."
Tomoko laughed.
"Okay, what about this one?" she said, drawing 山 with her quill. "This means 'mountain'. And this one—" she drew 川 on the page "—means 'river'."
"Those make sense," Hermione admitted. "They're like little pictures of what they represent. How is that not an alphabet, though?"
"They're pronounced differently and mean different things in different words and contexts," Tomoko said. "Like this one, this is ta. The symbol is from a rice paddy, and by itself, it means that."
Hermione wasn't 100% sure what a rice paddy looked like, but 田 probably wasn't far off.
"But it can mean different things as well. If you put it with sha, 'building', together they become a new word, inaka, which means either a rural area like the countryside, or a hometown."
Hermione scrunched her face up, looking at the parchment with 田舎 looking back up at her.
"So it's not literally 'rice paddy building'? You have to interpret from it?" she asked. "So instead of 'rice paddy building', it's more 'buildings near rice paddies', and that gives you the countryside?"
"Exactly," Tomoko said, beaming.
"That seems exhausting," Hermione said, incredulous. "And you have to figure this out whenever you read?"
Tomoko laughed.
"No, no! When you learn to read, you learn to recognize certain couplings of kanji as specific words," she explained, laughing. "You use them with the Japanese alphabet – hiragana - to make sentences. But the symbols themselves still hold meaning, and they've been used for that meaning long enough that they work really well in Arithmancy equations."
Hermione was immediately intensely jealous of Tomoko and her upbringing, of how she'd learned Japanese from such a young age to be able to instinctively use it in Arithmancy to become an Arithmancy genius. Even if Hermione learned Japanese now, she'd never have the same level of intuitive fluency with the symbols that Tomoko did.
Envy was a new emotion for Hermione, and one she didn't like. She shoved the feeling down, ignoring the odd burning in her chest and pressure on the bridge of her nose. If she ever had Advanced Arithmancy questions, she'd just hunt down and hire Tomoko, she decided – she had the gold, after all, and it'd be much more efficient than trying to learn an entire language herself.
Tomoko had started writing equations again while Hermione was wrestling with herself, and she was frowning at some of the silver results that had returned from her original queries.
"Your friend," she said slowly. "Is she engaged?"
Hermione's eyes widened.
"Err, kind of, I think?" she said. "Her dad made some kind of marriage contract over the break."
Tomoko's voice was grim. "I see."
Now that she knew how it worked, Hermione watched Tomoko write, trying to guess at the little symbols. She guessed 女 was representative of Millie, but she had no idea what 何 or 子宮 was. The equation with them all turned gold and flew off, and when it came back, there were new symbols for Hermione to guess at: 切除 and 火.
Tomoko's expression was bleak, and Hermione became alarmed.
"What?" she demanded. "What's it mean?"
Tomoko looked down at the parchment, shaking her head.
"Your friend," she told her. "You must get her help. You must."
"I will," Hermione promised. "Tell me. What's it mean?"
As Tomoko explained what the Arithmancy had figured out, and what was most likely for Millie to have done, Hermione's mouth slowly opened in horror, her eyes growing wide.
"You're sure?" she asked, hushed.
"It's an 86% chance," Tomoko told her grimly. "Either this, or she has endometriosis. But Madame Pomfrey would have probably been able to recognize that."
Hermione swallowed hard.
"Okay," she said. "Thanks."
The next night, when Millie crept out of her bed and into the Slytherin common room at 3am, Hermione was waiting for her. She watched Millie look around carefully before creeping to the door, at which point Hermione cleared her throat, making Millie jump and whirl around.
"Hermione!" Millie exclaimed, her hand on her heart. "Circe, you scared me. What are you doing up so late?"
"Waiting for you," Hermione said, raising her eyebrows. "What are you doing up so late?"
An expression flickered over Millie's face.
"I was going to go to the Hospital Wing," she told her. "Cramps, again, you know."
"Ah, yes. Cramps," Hermione said, her eyes narrowing. "I suppose that's to be expected from a self-attempted endometrial ablation."
Millie stood stock-still, looking at her. "What?"
"You're trying to burn out your womb," Hermione accused, pointing at her. "You know your marriage contract will be broken if you can't have children, so you're trying to render yourself infertile."
Millie's eyes widened, a wild expression on her face. For a second, Hermione thought she would deny it, before her panic changed to rage, her face twisting up in loathing.
"So?" she spat. "So what if I am? It's my womb. If I want to burn it to ashes, that's my choice!"
"Millie!" Hermione exclaimed. "You can't just—"
"I'm not being stupid about it," Millie sneered. "I've been researching medical charms and spells. I've gone too hot a couple times, but there's still fertile tissue that hasn't been destroyed. There are a couple potions I've got brewing too, to try with. If I can dilate my cervix—"
"Jesus Christ, Millie, why don't you just get the damn thing removed?!" Hermione demanded. "You're going to kill yourself, douching yourself with caustic potions and letting fire rage inside your uterus!"
Millie gave her a dirty look, but her eyes were sharp.
"What do you mean, just 'remove' it?" she asked, suspicious.
"Just get it taken out!" Hermione said, throwing her hands up. "Muggles do it all the time! They cut you open, take out your uterus, then they sew you back up. Boom – no more womb."
"They cut you open?" Millie recoiled, horrified. "What, like a dissection?"
"That's muggle medicine for you," Hermione told her. "They cut you open, fix what's broken, then put you back together. They don't have magic – sometimes they can't heal what they can't reach."
Millie looked very suspicious for a long moment.
"And muggles – they just do this?" she said. "You just ask them, and then it is done?"
"Err – it's generally done for women who have cancer, I think," Hermione said. "I imagine it could be an elective procedure, but Millie – we don't have to do this the muggle way."
Millie's eyes narrowed. "We don't?"
"No! We could do a ritual – there's got to be grisly ones made up to make women barren that we could use. Or we could just go to Madame Pomfrey – she might just be able to spell your womb out of you."
Millie looked torn.
"I can do this myself," she insisted. "I can. I researched it – enough heat will—"
"You're hurting yourself," Hermione said, shaking her head. "Millie, I have no doubt that you can do it. But you're hurting yourself, damaging your organs. Who knows what state your health will be in when you're done?"
This gave Millie pause. She looked frustrated, rage warring with alarm fighting on her face, and Hermione sensed she was gaining ground.
"Let's at least try, okay?" she pressed. "We'll go to Madame Pomfrey and talk about your options. And if she says there's nothing to be done and you don't want to do a ritual, I'll help you burn out the inside of your uterus myself."
"You would?" Millie looked incredulous, then suspicious. "You can do that?"
"Sure," Hermione said. It wasn't the intended use she'd gotten her fire elemental for, but she figured it would work all the same. "Mind, it would be burning flesh and incredibly painful, but if that's the way you want to go…"
Millie bit her lip hard. Hermione sighed, approaching her.
"Come on," she told her. "Let's go to the Hospital Wing, and let's see what can be done."
Millie looked at her sideways. Hermione stayed still next to her, holding herself back from pressing the point too hard.
"Both of us?" Millie said quietly.
Hermione smiled, nearly wilting in relief.
"Both of us," she confirmed.
Millie gave her a small, rare smile, and she took Hermione's hand and squeezed it.
"Alright then," she said with a sigh. "Let's go."
