CW: Cancer, terminal illness
Double Arithmancy that afternoon, too, managed to catch Hermione off-guard, as they were greeted by a Professor Vector with red-rimmed eyes. She looked very much like she hadn't been sleeping.
"Today we are going to talk about the curse of Arithmancy," she announced, standing up. "Pay attention."
The curse of Arithmancy wasn't actually a curse at all, technically speaking; it was the burden of knowing the chances of something terrible happening no matter what you did to try and help. Hermione noted the expression – using magical terms in muggle phrases was usually indicative of someone who was at least a halfblood, if not a Muggle-born, which surprised her about Professor Vector – but she paid attention as Professor Vector drew out a prediction tree on the board.
"My friend has cancer," she announced. "This is a muggle disease that is sometimes treatable, sometimes not, but is always taken very seriously. No matter what course of treatment he takes, there is a 99.45% chance he will die within a year."
Hermione felt a pit of horror open up in her chest as her teacher explained the odds of each path of potentiality. The cancer had begun to metastasize; chemotherapy was unlikely to work. Radiation therapy had a chance of working, but there was an oddly high chance of the friend receiving an overdose of radiation from cobalt-60 from a defective machine if they went for radiotherapy. Hermione had no idea what Arithmantic queries Professor Vector had used to figure something so obscure as that out, but she didn't doubt her professor for a second.
"And so I am here. Trapped. Unable to help my friend," Vector said, looking around at them all, "who is a muggle, newly-diagnosed, and hopeful that his treatment plan will work. There is very little chance anything I do will help, and it is very, very likely that he will die."
That statement hung in the air for a long moment, heavy.
"I cannot tell him," Professor Vector said. "I can't explain to him Arithmancy. But he is my friend. No matter how he dies, I cannot abandon him, even though I know how it will end. And I must be there to support him, even as his hope dwindles, until the inevitable end."
She threw the chalk against the board, where it broke into two and fell onto the tray.
"Arithmancy is powerful," she snarled at them, her eyes red-rimmed and wet. "But never doubt – there is a cost to that power. There is a cost to that knowledge. And there are times when you will wish that you didn't know the odds. There are times where you will regret making a table, where ignorance would have been bliss, but where you cannot forget the cursed knowledge you have learned."
The bell rang, and Professor Vector collapsed into her chair, hanging her head in her hands as her students gathered their things and left, shooting each other uncertain looks. Hermione, Harry, and Blaise hung back, uneasy. Harry went up to trace the prediction tree with his hand, following the logic, while Hermione tentatively approached her teacher, feeling compelled to offer some sort of comfort but knowing nothing she could say would help. Professor Vector seemed to be able to sense she was standing there.
"I appreciate your sympathy, Miss Granger," Professor Vector said, her voice muffled from her head buried in her arms, "but you need not offer it. I have lived long enough to learn to bear the curse of my profession."
"What is this?" Harry asked, tracing a thin line of the prediction tree. "This… the 0.54% chance of your friend surviving… it depends on you teaching us this lesson today?" Harry was puzzled. "Why?"
Professor Vector pushed herself up from her chair with a sigh.
"Hell if I know," she said, her voice very tired. "I don't even know the right query to ask. But the only influence I have on the situation right now, somehow, is teaching your class this lesson. That opens up this path here, down the line, for an intersection after the radiation accident – but I don't know what factor is the key influence here."
Hermione bit her lip very hard. "Radiation… that dissolves DNA, doesn't it? I read about the demon core deaths – it's one of the most painful ways to die, isn't it?"
Blaise gave Hermione a sharp look, his eyes narrowing while Vector sighed.
"Well-read as always, Miss Granger," she said. "Yes, it does."
"Hermione..." Blaise said warningly.
But Hermione had moved forward to the board, picking up the chalk. She weighed it in her hand for a moment, before adding a branch to the probability tree, intersecting with the point Harry had pointed out.
She didn't know what runes to put – how could she? The Philosopher's Stone was a legend – so she found herself closing her eyes, taking a deep breath, and immersing herself in magic, remembering back to that sense of floating in nothingness, surrounded by stars, and the way the Stone had communicated to her. She felt her hand writing, but she kept her eyes closed until the chalk fell from her fingers, before she opened her eyes.
Hermione took her wand, only cursorily taking in the nonsense she'd written on the board – ₰⅌৳Ⓐ⅌ↂↈ◉⦾, whatever that was – and tapped the equation, the lines turning gold as the prediction tree began to move, equations rebalancing.
Professor Vector looked deeply disturbed but unbearably curious.
"I would ask where you learned to write Enochian, Hermione," she said slowly, "but I'm not sure I want to know the answer."
"Is that what it's called?" Hermione asked. "I didn't know."
The equations finished shifting on the board, and Vector sucked in a gasp as she looked at the new outcome.
"I… how…?" she said, her voice hoarse. "What is this…?"
The chances of Professor Vector's friend surviving, if Hermione decided to interfere, went from 0.54% to 65%. It was an incredible jump.
"Hermione, please think before you do this," Blaise said quietly, his voice deadly serious. "Professor Vector is not some blind Healer. If you do this, she will know."
Hermione took a deep breath.
"Then we'll take precautions," she told him. "Blaise, I can't just not help when there's a chance that I could help save someone's life."
"65% isn't much more than a coin flip," Blaise warned her, keeping his voice low. His eyes were intense on hers. "Even if you do this, her friend is still likely to die."
Hermione looked up at her friend, her gaze pleading. She felt like she was professor Vector, now; she was tearing up at the thought of the loss of this unknown muggle, someone she had no reason to be so suddenly emotional over, but the thought of losing him made her want to cry.
"I have to try, Blaise," Hermione whispered. "Blaise, I have to try."
Blaise sighed. It was a long, resigned sigh, but it was the sigh of someone who would support her goal, no matter how foolish he thought it was himself.
"I'll get Tracey and Malfoy," he said, resigned. "Maybe Snape as well. If we're going to do this, we're going to do it right. Professor Vector's an adult, and she can make an Unbreakable Vow to be obliviated on the other end once her friend survives."
Hermione had not intended to get involved in something else this year. She had quite enough on her plate – purifying the goblins' caverns, planting groves on her land, helping Harry survive the tournament – and the last thing she needed was to interfere with some random muggle who was dying.
But Professor Vector had told them about her friend, and she had been crying, and Hermione had never been one able to not try and help where she could.
She sketched out the skeleton of an Unbreakable Vow during the Wizengamot the next day, ignoring the older purebloods as they argued with the Ministry and Dumbledore about the cost of a study into Hogwarts' curriculum. Crouch was adamant, challenging Fudge and Dumbledore at every turn with determination in his eyes, but very little of it applied to the Youth of Britain, so Hermione was content to tune them out as she figured out a plan. If she was going to do this, she was going to do it properly, and that involved her secrets not getting out.
The next day saw a small success with one of her projects – the goblin caverns were becoming safer, the goblins reported. At the current rate, they would be safe to live in within three years. The goblins seemed bolstered by this figure, but Hermione winced.
"Three years is a long time," she said. "Let's see if we can't do anything to help speed that along, yeah?"
Throwing herself headfirst into the goblin issue was a blessing in disguise – it pushed the guilt and angst she felt about Professor Vector, the Philosopher's Stone, and the bloody Tournament to the back of her mind, instead giving her something immediate to focus on that she could actively work to fix. The goblins agreed to bring up samples of the glowing moss that lined their cave, Neville agreed to increase his frequency of collecting toxic mushrooms and grinding them into substrate, and Tolly and the House Elves agreed to help air out the caves.
"We is not getting sick from breathing things," Tolly scoffed. "Elveses is stronger than that. We is happy to be helping the goblins get their houses back."
It was agreed that the elves would meet the goblins at Exmoor on Imbolc, in just under a month's time, and they would go together and enter the caves to air out harmful poison left behind. Hermione offered to reach out to the dwarves to ask for permission for the goblins to bathe in their healing springs if necessary, but the goblin council had stopped her.
"If we would need such healing, we would reach out to the dwarves ourselves," the councilman goblin told her, his silver-beaded wig wobbling as he sneered. "I would not have you cause a diplomatic disaster because you would go too far to help."
That, Hermione figured, was probably as close to a 'thank you' as she was likely to get.
"We did a new tree for the Second Task," Draco said, unrolling a large scroll of parchment. "We tried to account for absolutely everything, but we got some weird results."
"If Professor Vector owes you a favor," Harry said, looking at Hermione with an apologetic wince, "this might be a good time to call it in."
Hermione sighed.
"Let's all take a look at this first," she said. "Then we'll decide what to do."
The prediction tree was enormous, and tracked not just Harry, but the other champions as well. The coven was also tracked, and Draco pointed to the first big intersection.
"This is the thing that improves Harry's odds the most," he said. "So long as you lot do something on the full moon this month, Harry's highly likely to survive."
Hermione glanced at Blaise, and as one, they both relaxed. They were planning the Water Elemental ritual for the full moon. Given the Second Task would be in the water, that made perfect sense.
"The next critical point is on Imbolc," Harry said, pointing to it. "Something happens here. Or could happen, somehow. But if this thing happens, I stand a very strong chance of winning the challenge – I think."
"You think?" Blaise said, quirking an eyebrow.
"That's where we got the rune bind," Draco said, scowling. He dragged the paper over, centering the ending area of the scroll where the challenge itself had been charted out. "Here's the best path of success. There's something about the coven involved here, but we get two sets of contradictory runes back for the results. The biggest factor is Potter giving you a cloak earlier in the month? But the rune bind still doesn't make any sense."
Hermione bit her lip, looking over the tree. She pointed to another intersection much earlier in the sprawling diagram.
"What's this?" she asked. "This intersection with the coven and Cedric?"
Draco's eyes gleamed.
"That," he said, with no little amount of satisfaction, "is the day where the year and a day from my duel is up."
Hermione's jaw dropped.
"No," she said, aghast, and Draco smirked.
"Oh, yes," he said, smirking. "Depending on the outcome of this day, Harry's chances of winning the Second task go up by a lot. No idea what that outcome is, though." He leered at her. "It's the most likely outcome, though. So however you'd normally react to whatever kneazley-nonsense Diggory tries to pull should be fine to set the right path in place."
Hermione groaned, holding her head.
"I don't want to deal with Cedric," she said, exasperated. "I thought I was free of him."
"Want me to duel him again?" Draco offered, smirking.
"Don't be ridiculous," Blaise said, chidingly. His eyes glinted. "If we get someone to duel him for Hermione's honor again, it won't be you."
"What, your turn?" Draco snarked, and Blaise laughed.
"Me? No. No, of course not," he said with good humor. His eyes sharpened. "We'd get Krum."
There was a pregnant pause.
"Viktor?" Hermione said, mouth agape. "You think Viktor would duel for my honor?"
"Do you think he wouldn't?" Blaise asked reasonably, and Hermione faltered.
"I—"
She had no idea, actually. If Cedric called her a Dark witch in front of Viktor, Viktor was likely to just be confused. She was at least partially a Dark witch, after all – she'd literally studied Dark magic with Viktor at her side. He would probably figure out that it was an insult, but Hermione doubted Viktor would be willing to duel another tournament champion just for stating the truth.
"Can you imagine the scandal?" Draco said delightedly. "We'd have to make sure Krum would win, of course—"
"Is there any doubt? Durmstrang teaches the Dark Arts – Krum would wipe the floor with him—"
"Let's wait and see what happens," Hermione said hastily, cutting the boys off before they got too excited over something that might never happen. "Cedric might just approach me and apologize. Stranger things have been known to happen. There might not be a confrontation at all."
Both Blaise and Draco looked rather disappointed at this possibility, clearly preferring the more violent option, but Harry looked thoughtful.
"No matter what the outcome here, Cedric stays fairly entwined with the coven," he remarked, tracing the line. "I presumed that would be with you, Hermione, but maybe it's not. Maybe we should chart everyone separately to see."
Draco groaned loudly. "Potter, that means we'd have to redo the entire chart."
"I didn't say we had to do it right now," Harry said defensively. "Just that it might be a good idea."
"We'll find out in about a week anyway," Blaise pointed out, eyes sparkling. "Let's wait and see what happens then first, and if it's still confusing, maybe then you can redo the chart."
All three boys seemed to think that was a good idea, and they looked to Hermione for confirmation. Hermione threw her hands up in an exasperated sigh.
"Fine," she grumbled. "We'll wait and see what Cedric says to me first, and then we'll start stressing out over the tournament again."