Fic: A Simple Equation (May 4.0 Saturday Special)
Title: A Simple Equation
Summary: Hermione has returned to Hogwarts after the Second Wizarding War, and receives some strange letters.
Characters/Pairings: Hermione/Ron, Luna, Ginny
Genre: Romance/Fluff
Beta: None
Rating/Warnings: PG
Medium: Fic
Word Count: 2335
Can the Order post to Tumblr?: Sure
Hermione did not recognize the owl that landed before her in the Great Hall during breakfast, holding out its leg to her expectantly. She took the rolled piece of parchment that was tied to its leg and offered the owl a piece of her toast before it took off.
The letter bore her name on the front, but there it was not signed, nor did she recognize the scrawled handwriting. Intrigued, she opened it, but found herself even more puzzled.
1+1 =?
That was all the letter said. No signature, no words, just a simple mathematics equation. What a silly letter, she thought, scanning every inch of the parchment for some clue as to who had sent this and why. One plus one equals two, of course. Everyone knows that.
Was this meant to be some sort of joke, a snide comment about the fact that she had chosen to return to Hogwarts to complete her final year? No doubt some of the other students and teachers thought it frivolous to waste an entire year back here when her adventures the previous year had more than proven her knowledge of the magical art.
For Hermione, though, returning to Hogwarts had been a necessity, to finish what she had begun eight years earlier. Even though it meant leaving Ron behind just when their relationship was starting to blossom, she knew she would have never forgiven herself if she had not returned. She needed to prove to herself that she deserved whatever opportunities were presented to her, prove that she was not simply receiving preferential treatment just because she had spent all of those months hunting Horcruxes with Harry and Ron. She wanted to fail or succeed on her own terms, no one else’s.
It had been hard convincing Ron that this had been the best thing for her to do, but in the end he had understood. Besides, they had spent all of her Christmas break together at the Burrow, and she promised she would return during Easter break as well. Though, with Valentine’s Day only three days away, Hermione had to admit she was feeling a little saddened, especially as all of the other Gryffindor girls talked excitedly about their plans for the day. She knew Ron would send her a gift (even though she had told him not to waste money on such a silly holiday) and she would send one to him as well; still, it was not the same as having him here with her.
Hermione showed the letter to Ginny as they made their way to Transfiguration. “Who do you think sent it?” Ginny asked as her eyes scanned the letter.
“No clue. I was thinking perhaps someone is making fun of me,” she said with a frown. “As though I’m wasting my time learning things I already know.”
“Oh, Hermione, I doubt anyone thinks that. Even if they did, I doubt they’d send you a note about it. Everyone knows you’re easily the most advanced student here. You’d probably turn them into a toad if they mocked you.”
“I would not!” Hermione exclaimed indignantly. “You know I’d never do anything that might get me expelled.”
“Well, maybe not, but I’ve been telling people that you might,” Ginny said with a smirk. “You’ve got to instill fear in them somehow.”
“I don’t know that I really care to be feared,” Hermione said, looking at the parchment again with a frown. It bugged her that she could not figure out a logical explanation for why someone would send her this.
***
She was still brooding over the letter during lunch that same day, looking at it from every possible angle. She was good at figuring things out and she was determined to figure this out as well.
“Hello, Hemione,” someone said from beside her. Luna had joined the Gryffindor table and was handing out copies of the latest edition of The Quibbler. Hermione tried to hide the letter quickly (afraid that Luna might see the mathematical riddle and answer it with some strange theory involving conspiracy theories and mythical creatures), but Luna had already seen in and swooped in with great interest.
“Is that for Arithmancy?” she asked, turning her head sideways as she studied the problem.
“No,” Hermione said. “It was delivered to me this morning, but I don’t know who sent it.” She looked at it again. “Maybe I’m supposed to use Arithmancy to figure it out, though. If I use the Agrippan method, then each 1 could symbolize A, J, or S…but that doesn’t help me. Of course, there’s also the Chaldean method, which means each one could be A, I, J, Q, or Y, but that doesn’t help either. There are too many possible combinations,” she said, scribbling the letters on the back side of the parchment. “If someone meant for me to figure this out they would need to give me more clues than this.”
“Well, perhaps you just need to look at it from another angle,” Luna suggested.
“I’ve looked at it from every angle imaginable, Luna.”
“What about every angle unimaginable?”
Hermione could not even wrap her mind around what Luna could mean by that. How does one look at something from an unimaginable angle?
“It’s not important,” she said, shoving it into her bag. “I’ve got more important things to think about anyway. N.E.W.T.s are coming up in only four months. I really don’t even care what the letter means,” she lied before burying her face in her books. But as she continued to read the same paragraph over and over, her mind kept returning to the mysterious letter.
***
“Maybe…maybe I’m supposed to add one and one to make two and then apply that to the Arithmancy code…oh, but that still gives me nothing!”
“I thought you said you didn’t care about that letter anymore,” Ginny said, not even looking up from the latest article about the Holyhead Harpies in her Quidditch Monthly magazine.
“I don’t,” Hermione insisted unconvincingly. “It’s just that if someone is making fun of me I’d like to know properly just what they mean by it. Wouldn’t you want to if someone sent you some strange letter?”
“Don’t you know some sort of charm to make it reveal who wrote it?”
“I tried,” Hermione said with a frown. “It didn’t work. Whoever sent it is quite skilled.” She thought for a moment that she heard Ginny let out a snort, but that must have been her imagination.
“You know,” she said, “if someone’s intent was to annoy me, they’ve succeeded. I almost suspect someone like Malfoy or Pansy is doing this just to bother me.”
“If they are, then why are you giving them the satisfaction?”
“I’m not,” Hermione said, shoving the letter aside.
“You said that at lunch.”
“Yes, well, this time I mean it! I am through with letting this person get under my skin. I have more important things to worry about. You should be focusing on your N.E.W.T.s as well,” she said with a pointed look at Ginny.
“I will,” Ginny said with a shrug. “But I’m not sure I want to break the tradition.”
“What tradition?”
“This new Weasley tradition of not completing our N.E.W.T.s,” she said cheekily.
“I’m sure your mother would be pleased to hear that,” Hermione muttered.
Try as she might, her mind was still on the letter as she read through her notes. Soon it was late and the common room was empty, with only Hermione sitting before the dying fire. She relented and put her things away, climbing the stairs to the dorm room she was now sharing with the other seventh year girls. She climbed into bed, the strange letter still on her mind.
***
The next morning another foreign owl landed before Hermione and proffered a roll of parchment that was attached to its leg. She gently took it from the owl and, noticing the same handwriting on her first mystery letter, quickly unfurled it. Hoping for answers, she was left just as puzzled as she had been with the first letter:
2+2=?
“Sounds like the beginning of some sort of math joke,” Ginny said when Hermione showed her the letter over breakfast.
“If it’s a joke I can’t say it’s a very funny one,” she mumbled.
“I thought you liked puzzles.”
“I do when they are able to be answered. One and one is two, and two and two is four. What do two and four have to do with anything? What do they mean?”
“Is that another letter?” Luna asked with interest.
“Yes,” Hermione said, not even trying to hide it. “This one is just as ridiculous as the last. I even tried spelling it out with Arithmancy, but I can’t come up with anything.
“Have you tried a different angle?” Luna asked, repeating her advice from the previous day.
“I told you,” said Hermione, trying not to sound too annoyed, “I have looked at it from every angle imaginable - and every angle unimaginable,” she added before Luna could say anything.
“Even backwards?”
Hermione arched an eyebrow. “Backwards? What good would it be to look at this backwards?”
“Well, sometimes reading something backwards can make you see things more clearly,” she said with a shrug. “That’s why I always read things frontwards, backwards, even upside down.”
“Oh…um, I’ll try that later,” Hermione said, though she doubted very much that these letters would make any more sense backwards than they did frontwards.
And Hermione did try looking at them backwards later that evening in the common room, not because she thought Luna was right but because she had already exhausted all of her other ideas and felt she had nothing to lose by giving it a shot. She held her mirror to the parchment at every angle, searching for some meaning in the otherwise innocuous, though infuriating, mathematical equation. She even wrote out the entire thing backwards on the other side of the parchment. Each time it looked exactly the same to her and she was no closer to understanding than she had been the previous morning.
Hermione leaned back with a sigh, holding the letter up in front of the fire, hoping some hidden message might appear. “It’s hopeless. I think someone just knew I would obsess over this thing and…” But then Hermione trailed off.
“And what?” Ginny prompted, flipping through her Quidditch Monthly once again.
But Hermione wasn’t listening. When she had held the parchment up to the fire, one of the number 1’s she had written on the reverse side shone through, almost adjacent to one of the number 1’s on the front side. When the two of them met they seemed to form a capital M. Suddenly, something in her mind clicked.
“Of course!” she said, feeling quite stupid. “If you create a mirror image from the 1’s and place them together, they form an ‘M’.”
“It’s a start,” Ginny said encouragingly, “but how does that put you any further along than you already were?”
“Because if I do the same thing with the 2’s they look like they form a…a heart.”
Ginny smirked. “A secret admirer then?” she asked.
“Maybe,” Hermione replied with a suspicious look in Ginny’s direction, “or maybe an admirer who is not quite so secret.”
At that, Ginny buried her head back into her magazine. “Well…what do you think the ‘M’ means, then?”
“Hm…not positive, but if I get another one tomorrow I think I’ll have a pretty good idea. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day after all, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” Ginny asked, trying, and failing, to sound nonchalant.
“And there’s only one place nearby where I know people frequent on Valentine’s Day…oddly enough it starts with an ‘M’ too.”
Ginny peeked over her magazine, her eyes shining playfully. “You know, when I think about it, it’s not that odd at all, is it?”
***
Just as she had predicted, Hermione received another letter the next morning, this one just as vague as the first two:
3+3 = ?
This time, though, Hermione spent very little time trying decipher the message.
Being as she was a year older than the other students - not to mention, the fact that she had on many occasions proven herself very responsible - Hermione had been given special permission to visit Hogsmeade outside of the regularly scheduled visits. That evening, Hermione made her way down a little before eight o’clock. She only hoped she was correct about this and she was not about to make a fool of herself.
Soon Madam Puddifoot’s Tea Shop loomed into view, brightly lit and seemingly filled to the brim with couples. She entered the shop and stepped to the side, surveying the shop for that familiar head of red hair.
“So you figured it out?”
Hermione spun around and found just the person she had expected to see. “Of course I did, Ronald. I must admit, that was quite clever. I would have not expected something like that from you.”
“Yeah, well, I kind of had some help…”
“From Luna?”
“How’d you guess?”
“It sounds like just the kind of thing Luna would suggest.”
He grinned and ducked his head down. “Yeah, I guess so. Ginny helped too.”
“So I assumed,” Hermione said. “But why? Why all of this?”
“Well, it’s Valentine’s Day,” he said, “and I didn’t want you to spend it alone.”
“Ron, I told you I was okay with it.”
“And I know you were lying,” he countered, stopping her protests. She knew he was right. “I know you too well now. Besides, I wanted to see you too. I figured you’d like a little bit of a riddle to go along with it. I knew you’d figure it out.”
He held out a single red rose to her. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
Hermione took the rose tenderly and then captured Ron in a tight hug. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Ron,” she whispered in his ear.
It was the best Valentine’s gift she could have received.
Colleen//Ravenclaw//78
Summary: Hermione has returned to Hogwarts after the Second Wizarding War, and receives some strange letters.
Characters/Pairings: Hermione/Ron, Luna, Ginny
Genre: Romance/Fluff
Beta: None
Rating/Warnings: PG
Medium: Fic
Word Count: 2335
Can the Order post to Tumblr?: Sure
Hermione did not recognize the owl that landed before her in the Great Hall during breakfast, holding out its leg to her expectantly. She took the rolled piece of parchment that was tied to its leg and offered the owl a piece of her toast before it took off.
The letter bore her name on the front, but there it was not signed, nor did she recognize the scrawled handwriting. Intrigued, she opened it, but found herself even more puzzled.
1+1 =?
That was all the letter said. No signature, no words, just a simple mathematics equation. What a silly letter, she thought, scanning every inch of the parchment for some clue as to who had sent this and why. One plus one equals two, of course. Everyone knows that.
Was this meant to be some sort of joke, a snide comment about the fact that she had chosen to return to Hogwarts to complete her final year? No doubt some of the other students and teachers thought it frivolous to waste an entire year back here when her adventures the previous year had more than proven her knowledge of the magical art.
For Hermione, though, returning to Hogwarts had been a necessity, to finish what she had begun eight years earlier. Even though it meant leaving Ron behind just when their relationship was starting to blossom, she knew she would have never forgiven herself if she had not returned. She needed to prove to herself that she deserved whatever opportunities were presented to her, prove that she was not simply receiving preferential treatment just because she had spent all of those months hunting Horcruxes with Harry and Ron. She wanted to fail or succeed on her own terms, no one else’s.
It had been hard convincing Ron that this had been the best thing for her to do, but in the end he had understood. Besides, they had spent all of her Christmas break together at the Burrow, and she promised she would return during Easter break as well. Though, with Valentine’s Day only three days away, Hermione had to admit she was feeling a little saddened, especially as all of the other Gryffindor girls talked excitedly about their plans for the day. She knew Ron would send her a gift (even though she had told him not to waste money on such a silly holiday) and she would send one to him as well; still, it was not the same as having him here with her.
Hermione showed the letter to Ginny as they made their way to Transfiguration. “Who do you think sent it?” Ginny asked as her eyes scanned the letter.
“No clue. I was thinking perhaps someone is making fun of me,” she said with a frown. “As though I’m wasting my time learning things I already know.”
“Oh, Hermione, I doubt anyone thinks that. Even if they did, I doubt they’d send you a note about it. Everyone knows you’re easily the most advanced student here. You’d probably turn them into a toad if they mocked you.”
“I would not!” Hermione exclaimed indignantly. “You know I’d never do anything that might get me expelled.”
“Well, maybe not, but I’ve been telling people that you might,” Ginny said with a smirk. “You’ve got to instill fear in them somehow.”
“I don’t know that I really care to be feared,” Hermione said, looking at the parchment again with a frown. It bugged her that she could not figure out a logical explanation for why someone would send her this.
***
She was still brooding over the letter during lunch that same day, looking at it from every possible angle. She was good at figuring things out and she was determined to figure this out as well.
“Hello, Hemione,” someone said from beside her. Luna had joined the Gryffindor table and was handing out copies of the latest edition of The Quibbler. Hermione tried to hide the letter quickly (afraid that Luna might see the mathematical riddle and answer it with some strange theory involving conspiracy theories and mythical creatures), but Luna had already seen in and swooped in with great interest.
“Is that for Arithmancy?” she asked, turning her head sideways as she studied the problem.
“No,” Hermione said. “It was delivered to me this morning, but I don’t know who sent it.” She looked at it again. “Maybe I’m supposed to use Arithmancy to figure it out, though. If I use the Agrippan method, then each 1 could symbolize A, J, or S…but that doesn’t help me. Of course, there’s also the Chaldean method, which means each one could be A, I, J, Q, or Y, but that doesn’t help either. There are too many possible combinations,” she said, scribbling the letters on the back side of the parchment. “If someone meant for me to figure this out they would need to give me more clues than this.”
“Well, perhaps you just need to look at it from another angle,” Luna suggested.
“I’ve looked at it from every angle imaginable, Luna.”
“What about every angle unimaginable?”
Hermione could not even wrap her mind around what Luna could mean by that. How does one look at something from an unimaginable angle?
“It’s not important,” she said, shoving it into her bag. “I’ve got more important things to think about anyway. N.E.W.T.s are coming up in only four months. I really don’t even care what the letter means,” she lied before burying her face in her books. But as she continued to read the same paragraph over and over, her mind kept returning to the mysterious letter.
***
“Maybe…maybe I’m supposed to add one and one to make two and then apply that to the Arithmancy code…oh, but that still gives me nothing!”
“I thought you said you didn’t care about that letter anymore,” Ginny said, not even looking up from the latest article about the Holyhead Harpies in her Quidditch Monthly magazine.
“I don’t,” Hermione insisted unconvincingly. “It’s just that if someone is making fun of me I’d like to know properly just what they mean by it. Wouldn’t you want to if someone sent you some strange letter?”
“Don’t you know some sort of charm to make it reveal who wrote it?”
“I tried,” Hermione said with a frown. “It didn’t work. Whoever sent it is quite skilled.” She thought for a moment that she heard Ginny let out a snort, but that must have been her imagination.
“You know,” she said, “if someone’s intent was to annoy me, they’ve succeeded. I almost suspect someone like Malfoy or Pansy is doing this just to bother me.”
“If they are, then why are you giving them the satisfaction?”
“I’m not,” Hermione said, shoving the letter aside.
“You said that at lunch.”
“Yes, well, this time I mean it! I am through with letting this person get under my skin. I have more important things to worry about. You should be focusing on your N.E.W.T.s as well,” she said with a pointed look at Ginny.
“I will,” Ginny said with a shrug. “But I’m not sure I want to break the tradition.”
“What tradition?”
“This new Weasley tradition of not completing our N.E.W.T.s,” she said cheekily.
“I’m sure your mother would be pleased to hear that,” Hermione muttered.
Try as she might, her mind was still on the letter as she read through her notes. Soon it was late and the common room was empty, with only Hermione sitting before the dying fire. She relented and put her things away, climbing the stairs to the dorm room she was now sharing with the other seventh year girls. She climbed into bed, the strange letter still on her mind.
***
The next morning another foreign owl landed before Hermione and proffered a roll of parchment that was attached to its leg. She gently took it from the owl and, noticing the same handwriting on her first mystery letter, quickly unfurled it. Hoping for answers, she was left just as puzzled as she had been with the first letter:
2+2=?
“Sounds like the beginning of some sort of math joke,” Ginny said when Hermione showed her the letter over breakfast.
“If it’s a joke I can’t say it’s a very funny one,” she mumbled.
“I thought you liked puzzles.”
“I do when they are able to be answered. One and one is two, and two and two is four. What do two and four have to do with anything? What do they mean?”
“Is that another letter?” Luna asked with interest.
“Yes,” Hermione said, not even trying to hide it. “This one is just as ridiculous as the last. I even tried spelling it out with Arithmancy, but I can’t come up with anything.
“Have you tried a different angle?” Luna asked, repeating her advice from the previous day.
“I told you,” said Hermione, trying not to sound too annoyed, “I have looked at it from every angle imaginable - and every angle unimaginable,” she added before Luna could say anything.
“Even backwards?”
Hermione arched an eyebrow. “Backwards? What good would it be to look at this backwards?”
“Well, sometimes reading something backwards can make you see things more clearly,” she said with a shrug. “That’s why I always read things frontwards, backwards, even upside down.”
“Oh…um, I’ll try that later,” Hermione said, though she doubted very much that these letters would make any more sense backwards than they did frontwards.
And Hermione did try looking at them backwards later that evening in the common room, not because she thought Luna was right but because she had already exhausted all of her other ideas and felt she had nothing to lose by giving it a shot. She held her mirror to the parchment at every angle, searching for some meaning in the otherwise innocuous, though infuriating, mathematical equation. She even wrote out the entire thing backwards on the other side of the parchment. Each time it looked exactly the same to her and she was no closer to understanding than she had been the previous morning.
Hermione leaned back with a sigh, holding the letter up in front of the fire, hoping some hidden message might appear. “It’s hopeless. I think someone just knew I would obsess over this thing and…” But then Hermione trailed off.
“And what?” Ginny prompted, flipping through her Quidditch Monthly once again.
But Hermione wasn’t listening. When she had held the parchment up to the fire, one of the number 1’s she had written on the reverse side shone through, almost adjacent to one of the number 1’s on the front side. When the two of them met they seemed to form a capital M. Suddenly, something in her mind clicked.
“Of course!” she said, feeling quite stupid. “If you create a mirror image from the 1’s and place them together, they form an ‘M’.”
“It’s a start,” Ginny said encouragingly, “but how does that put you any further along than you already were?”
“Because if I do the same thing with the 2’s they look like they form a…a heart.”
Ginny smirked. “A secret admirer then?” she asked.
“Maybe,” Hermione replied with a suspicious look in Ginny’s direction, “or maybe an admirer who is not quite so secret.”
At that, Ginny buried her head back into her magazine. “Well…what do you think the ‘M’ means, then?”
“Hm…not positive, but if I get another one tomorrow I think I’ll have a pretty good idea. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day after all, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” Ginny asked, trying, and failing, to sound nonchalant.
“And there’s only one place nearby where I know people frequent on Valentine’s Day…oddly enough it starts with an ‘M’ too.”
Ginny peeked over her magazine, her eyes shining playfully. “You know, when I think about it, it’s not that odd at all, is it?”
***
Just as she had predicted, Hermione received another letter the next morning, this one just as vague as the first two:
3+3 = ?
This time, though, Hermione spent very little time trying decipher the message.
Being as she was a year older than the other students - not to mention, the fact that she had on many occasions proven herself very responsible - Hermione had been given special permission to visit Hogsmeade outside of the regularly scheduled visits. That evening, Hermione made her way down a little before eight o’clock. She only hoped she was correct about this and she was not about to make a fool of herself.
Soon Madam Puddifoot’s Tea Shop loomed into view, brightly lit and seemingly filled to the brim with couples. She entered the shop and stepped to the side, surveying the shop for that familiar head of red hair.
“So you figured it out?”
Hermione spun around and found just the person she had expected to see. “Of course I did, Ronald. I must admit, that was quite clever. I would have not expected something like that from you.”
“Yeah, well, I kind of had some help…”
“From Luna?”
“How’d you guess?”
“It sounds like just the kind of thing Luna would suggest.”
He grinned and ducked his head down. “Yeah, I guess so. Ginny helped too.”
“So I assumed,” Hermione said. “But why? Why all of this?”
“Well, it’s Valentine’s Day,” he said, “and I didn’t want you to spend it alone.”
“Ron, I told you I was okay with it.”
“And I know you were lying,” he countered, stopping her protests. She knew he was right. “I know you too well now. Besides, I wanted to see you too. I figured you’d like a little bit of a riddle to go along with it. I knew you’d figure it out.”
He held out a single red rose to her. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
Hermione took the rose tenderly and then captured Ron in a tight hug. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Ron,” she whispered in his ear.
It was the best Valentine’s gift she could have received.
Colleen//Ravenclaw//78