FIC: and this is my prophet's junk (sybill trelawney, pg-13)
TITLE: And this is my prophet's junk
AUTHOR lilith_morgana
RATING: PG-13
LENGTH: 2000-ish
CHARACTER: Sybill Trelawney
SUMMARY: Not much is known about the Sight.
WARNING: Some dark themes and character death
nothing is easier than seeing death.
I'm sorry that my voice was hard.
( Soliloquy for Cassandra - W. Szymborska)
1
When she is seven, Sybill dreams that her brother will die in a fire. Every night for a year she dreams this, every night in this family of Seers where shadows are interpreted as omens, and tealeaves can be signs of what to come, she dreams. It surprises her that nobody listens. His face sinking deeper and deeper into flames at night and she puts a pillow over her head and cries. When she wakes up she can smell the burnt bones, the scent of flesh and hair and clothes dissolving into ashes - she tells her father, has to tell someone, and he says it's a nightmare.
At the funeral she stops in front of the coffin, breaks all her nails on the unyielding mahogany and whispers I told them, I told them, I'm sorry. ("She's too young for this," someone tells her mother. "You shouldn’t have brought her.")
They have tea and tart afterwards, as if they were celebrating but her mother claims it is what people do when they have lost someone to death. Have tea and tart. Sybill sits between her cousin Septimus and her father, in the empty spot left. Where her brother would be sitting, there is a shift in time, a faint ticking of a memory she never remembers sharing with him, a different life. Her brother climbing to the top of a tree, shouting at her to join him and don’t be so childish, Bill. (He always wants a little brother; she is immediately Bill and likes it, too, the way she likes being lulled into his world of boy games.) She asks to be excused after a few minutes, retreating to her favourite doll upstairs but the scent of bones and flesh in her nostrils never fades.
2
Back when they burned witches, they had special deaths reserved for the men and (in particular) the women cursed with the Sight. Special ways of beating the devil out of their bodies, of blinding their eyes while watching them burn. Professor Binns half-mumbles this in class once, as if it's a footnote in history - a dark detail in their history otherwise held up by structures of enlightenment and progress. They had special deaths and their professor tells them the witches enjoyed it.
"That’s a lie, sir." Sybill hears her own voice hit a shrill note. She’s still a first year, doesn’t know how to behave or where to place blame. "Not many witches could keep themselves alive in the fires. Besides, they'd decapitated most of them already."
Professor Binns looks nervously uninterested. "I think-"
"Perhaps you ought to teach us a more accurate history, Professor," someone interrupts. It’s Lucius Malfoy, his face calm and bright. Sybill imagines that he says it because of her, because he means something with his smug sneer and the twitching corners of his mouth as he looks at the approving Slytherins. They would laugh if they knew, but she doesn’t care. There is something about him that shines - his hair, the colour of it, the peculiar shade of light she can’t recall having seen before.
Lucius Malfoy is the first boy she kisses - a once-only kiss in a corner outside his common room - and she sees the Dementors in the corners of his eyes, in the way his lips touches her skin. He’s beautiful. He’s much too beautiful to waste any time on her; she’s much too weird for boy-kissing. So it doesn’t really happen, of course. Lucius leans down to pick up a tendril of her hair, puts it behind her ear and Sybill thinks I wish I had somebody to tell before she gets up on her toes and kisses him back. As he pulls closer she can see - feel - the fashion in which he is going to die. (He dies with his head bowed, his secrets revealed, loyal only to himself but still every bit as beautiful, the way dark things are.)
They don’t speak to each other again for years.
3
Not much is known about the Sight. Scattered rumours float around, of course. Rumours about how it happens (it's an accident), what it takes to give birth to an Oracle (fifteen clockwise walks around the garden in the moonlight, an ancient rite involving semen and feathers), how to employ all those thousands of years of symbols and star constellations, superstition and myth (by laughing).
All Sybill knows is that if there’s one core of it, one sole purpose behind, it can't be known anyway and this is the curse.
Nobody explains the Sight.
In a strange fire-language it blurts itself out of her, aches through the blood stream and up and down along the hard bent spine, over protests and wishes. She feels it in her body without words, like waves in her head - a heavy dark sound in her memory that suddenly ceases to belong to her but become everybody’s concern. She's property; she cannot bear the thought of it but she is property. A vessel for the story, a collection of distrusted prophecies.
The Sight doesn’t even explain itself.
Someone hands her fragments, or fractions of fragments (as though deciphering codes is what she does best.) She depicts all human details, all the facts in her head; she breathes the special brand of anger drawn from fear. They look like everything and nothing all at once, her drawings. She sees and she reveals and more often than not she's got it wrong, grits her teeth around the thousands of giggling fraud!; she flees into a memory or a song she used to know as a girl. So many faces to recognise, so many places of destructions: the scraping noises, the nausea, the fury, and then some kind of tenderness for what she sees, after all. Sybill loves it as best she can. It makes her feel like an old lady, this reluctant affection for a universe made to fight itself to death and then hunt her down for saying so.
"You've always been a precocious girl, dear," her mother says, serving tea with pity and that lingering taste of disappointment.
4
The autumn is violent this year, the year when the war is really breaking; the trees seem reluctant to stop shaking. All these months of worry has worn their nerves down.
Sybill sells advice like they were pints of Butterbeer down in the pathetic alleys of London, at the backdoors of the Hogsmeade pubs where the questions are as base as the souls of the clientele. Most of the men mistake her for a prostitute. She removes their hands from her body and wonders if there is much of a difference, anyway, and if she should feel grateful for having their - any - aching ecstasies directed towards her.
There is one man, one who offers more than fingered coins and promises of just a quick one, love and he, Sybill knows, is worst of them all. He’s the one she can’t outrun.
"It's growing darker," he says in his gentle voice. "You feel that, too, I'm sure. These are dangerous times for a Seer."
"I'll survive," Sybill replies.
"I have a teaching position available."
A month later, as she moves into his castle, he places a hand on her shoulder. Their agreement is silence, is silent. Her employer smiles his half-smile, quietly reminding her of what is truly important: make sure your silences are strong enough to echo what you know. Sybill nods. She is offered potions to take the edges off things and accepts them like she accepts everything else, her face numb with polite smiles.
"You should treasure your gift," Albus Dumbledore says. "It is part of who you are."
Over the years she learns to like him. He has many answers, most of them unhelpful and she can sympathise with that.
"I can't pity them like you do," she says. His love is disdainful, but real, hers is fluttering here and there, no fuller than the cobweb wrapping the corners of her tower in shame.
5
Back when they burned witches, they used to place the men and women cursed with the Sight in the middle of a town, usually in a square, inciting them to see. While the crowd watched they demanded a vision, something that would entertain, would humiliate, would make it all a little less dangerous to think of. Riddiculus! for Muggles, and humans never learn anything. Sybill sits in her ivory tower watching the students torment and ridicule each other, gulps tea that tastes of cedar woods and spices, its warmth tickling her throat.
When Sybill is nineteen and still inhabits the streets of London with her gift proudly displayed, she foretells Dolores Umbridge’s fate in a little corner of Knockturn Alley. She’s young then, Dolores, wears a silver ring on her finger and shakes her head when Sybill tells her what she discerns. It’s not much to tell. The baby will be stillborn and they both know it, even before Sybill puts her palms over the growing belly.
"I’m so sorry," she says thinking the woman must have felt the missing heartbeats for a long time.
The shop assistants at Flourish & Blott’s ask Sybill to leave fifteen minutes later, arms crossed over their chests and we don’t encourage that kind of business activity here, Miss. She sees Dolores Umbridge through the window as she walks away.
"Surely you have somewhere else to go," Dolores says to her in a crowded corridor, many years later. There is no reason why you should remain here when your services are no longer required."
And Sybill cries in Minerva’s arms the same afternoon. ("She’s not strong enough for this" she overhears her saying to Albus later, when they think Sybill has fallen asleep from the brandy and the exhaustion. "It’s heartbreaking to watch her.")
This is cactus land, she thinks dizzily when she wakes up the morning after. It’s cold around her, the fire has burned down and there are no house-elves around her quarters. She told them to stop coming upon moving in. At these heights she must be thankful she has anything at all; This is cactus land and it’s a sentence from something her brother read to her once, when she was a girl.
(Come on Bill, don’t be so childish! Get up here!)
She was always afraid of heights. When she allows herself to look down from her tower, she finds that she still is.
6
They capture Sybill Trelawney in August. She can’t remember how it happens, exactly, and it doesn’t matter. What is important, or ought to be, is lost as they chain her to a dark room, harsh hands hushing voices, trying to make her see. They expect her to be a warrior, in a world like this, an Amazon fighting for honour and justice (she has never mustered much care for justice). The thoughts jolt through her.
She sees.
She sees the end of the war, the betrayals and the loyalties; she sees the ceasing battles and hears the words afterwards. Some, they will say, were never even found. They will grieve those in the sunsets and at sunrise, when time is fragile and forgiving. In their history books, always, stylised lies (but fewer this time, as if they've finally learned) and blatant stupidity, some will be called heroes. They will be surprised.
"So you're a martyr now?" Severus Snape brings her a glass of water.
"Ironic, isn't it." Sybill can't feel anything from his brief touch. "I always thought you were the one with faith."
She sees.
For a while, she does what she does best - puts spins to old fears and cock-and-bull stories, feeds them fanciful tales of Chosen ones and their destinies. It keeps them busy. When the torture gets worse she can tell they have found out about her lies. One by one, they take turns with her; some of them seem reluctant to do their worst, some (Lucius) are grinning as they make her roar. She's grateful she's never had much pride.
"She's usless," Lord Voldemort states, finally. "Get rid of her."
And when she falls, she can feel a faint touch of ashes in her mouth as though she's really burning.
Notes: I wrote this over Christmas, actually, but forgot all about it. Inspired by the quoted poem - which is great, go read it - and a general passion for Cassandra the Seer. ♥ I have more to say about Sybill, I think. Perhaps some other time.
(Heh, and Sybill's brother read TS Eliot. Shut up. He did.)
Feedback is always appreciated.
AUTHOR lilith_morgana
RATING: PG-13
LENGTH: 2000-ish
CHARACTER: Sybill Trelawney
SUMMARY: Not much is known about the Sight.
WARNING: Some dark themes and character death
nothing is easier than seeing death.
I'm sorry that my voice was hard.
( Soliloquy for Cassandra - W. Szymborska)
1
When she is seven, Sybill dreams that her brother will die in a fire. Every night for a year she dreams this, every night in this family of Seers where shadows are interpreted as omens, and tealeaves can be signs of what to come, she dreams. It surprises her that nobody listens. His face sinking deeper and deeper into flames at night and she puts a pillow over her head and cries. When she wakes up she can smell the burnt bones, the scent of flesh and hair and clothes dissolving into ashes - she tells her father, has to tell someone, and he says it's a nightmare.
At the funeral she stops in front of the coffin, breaks all her nails on the unyielding mahogany and whispers I told them, I told them, I'm sorry. ("She's too young for this," someone tells her mother. "You shouldn’t have brought her.")
They have tea and tart afterwards, as if they were celebrating but her mother claims it is what people do when they have lost someone to death. Have tea and tart. Sybill sits between her cousin Septimus and her father, in the empty spot left. Where her brother would be sitting, there is a shift in time, a faint ticking of a memory she never remembers sharing with him, a different life. Her brother climbing to the top of a tree, shouting at her to join him and don’t be so childish, Bill. (He always wants a little brother; she is immediately Bill and likes it, too, the way she likes being lulled into his world of boy games.) She asks to be excused after a few minutes, retreating to her favourite doll upstairs but the scent of bones and flesh in her nostrils never fades.
2
Back when they burned witches, they had special deaths reserved for the men and (in particular) the women cursed with the Sight. Special ways of beating the devil out of their bodies, of blinding their eyes while watching them burn. Professor Binns half-mumbles this in class once, as if it's a footnote in history - a dark detail in their history otherwise held up by structures of enlightenment and progress. They had special deaths and their professor tells them the witches enjoyed it.
"That’s a lie, sir." Sybill hears her own voice hit a shrill note. She’s still a first year, doesn’t know how to behave or where to place blame. "Not many witches could keep themselves alive in the fires. Besides, they'd decapitated most of them already."
Professor Binns looks nervously uninterested. "I think-"
"Perhaps you ought to teach us a more accurate history, Professor," someone interrupts. It’s Lucius Malfoy, his face calm and bright. Sybill imagines that he says it because of her, because he means something with his smug sneer and the twitching corners of his mouth as he looks at the approving Slytherins. They would laugh if they knew, but she doesn’t care. There is something about him that shines - his hair, the colour of it, the peculiar shade of light she can’t recall having seen before.
Lucius Malfoy is the first boy she kisses - a once-only kiss in a corner outside his common room - and she sees the Dementors in the corners of his eyes, in the way his lips touches her skin. He’s beautiful. He’s much too beautiful to waste any time on her; she’s much too weird for boy-kissing. So it doesn’t really happen, of course. Lucius leans down to pick up a tendril of her hair, puts it behind her ear and Sybill thinks I wish I had somebody to tell before she gets up on her toes and kisses him back. As he pulls closer she can see - feel - the fashion in which he is going to die. (He dies with his head bowed, his secrets revealed, loyal only to himself but still every bit as beautiful, the way dark things are.)
They don’t speak to each other again for years.
3
Not much is known about the Sight. Scattered rumours float around, of course. Rumours about how it happens (it's an accident), what it takes to give birth to an Oracle (fifteen clockwise walks around the garden in the moonlight, an ancient rite involving semen and feathers), how to employ all those thousands of years of symbols and star constellations, superstition and myth (by laughing).
All Sybill knows is that if there’s one core of it, one sole purpose behind, it can't be known anyway and this is the curse.
Nobody explains the Sight.
In a strange fire-language it blurts itself out of her, aches through the blood stream and up and down along the hard bent spine, over protests and wishes. She feels it in her body without words, like waves in her head - a heavy dark sound in her memory that suddenly ceases to belong to her but become everybody’s concern. She's property; she cannot bear the thought of it but she is property. A vessel for the story, a collection of distrusted prophecies.
The Sight doesn’t even explain itself.
Someone hands her fragments, or fractions of fragments (as though deciphering codes is what she does best.) She depicts all human details, all the facts in her head; she breathes the special brand of anger drawn from fear. They look like everything and nothing all at once, her drawings. She sees and she reveals and more often than not she's got it wrong, grits her teeth around the thousands of giggling fraud!; she flees into a memory or a song she used to know as a girl. So many faces to recognise, so many places of destructions: the scraping noises, the nausea, the fury, and then some kind of tenderness for what she sees, after all. Sybill loves it as best she can. It makes her feel like an old lady, this reluctant affection for a universe made to fight itself to death and then hunt her down for saying so.
"You've always been a precocious girl, dear," her mother says, serving tea with pity and that lingering taste of disappointment.
4
The autumn is violent this year, the year when the war is really breaking; the trees seem reluctant to stop shaking. All these months of worry has worn their nerves down.
Sybill sells advice like they were pints of Butterbeer down in the pathetic alleys of London, at the backdoors of the Hogsmeade pubs where the questions are as base as the souls of the clientele. Most of the men mistake her for a prostitute. She removes their hands from her body and wonders if there is much of a difference, anyway, and if she should feel grateful for having their - any - aching ecstasies directed towards her.
There is one man, one who offers more than fingered coins and promises of just a quick one, love and he, Sybill knows, is worst of them all. He’s the one she can’t outrun.
"It's growing darker," he says in his gentle voice. "You feel that, too, I'm sure. These are dangerous times for a Seer."
"I'll survive," Sybill replies.
"I have a teaching position available."
A month later, as she moves into his castle, he places a hand on her shoulder. Their agreement is silence, is silent. Her employer smiles his half-smile, quietly reminding her of what is truly important: make sure your silences are strong enough to echo what you know. Sybill nods. She is offered potions to take the edges off things and accepts them like she accepts everything else, her face numb with polite smiles.
"You should treasure your gift," Albus Dumbledore says. "It is part of who you are."
Over the years she learns to like him. He has many answers, most of them unhelpful and she can sympathise with that.
"I can't pity them like you do," she says. His love is disdainful, but real, hers is fluttering here and there, no fuller than the cobweb wrapping the corners of her tower in shame.
5
Back when they burned witches, they used to place the men and women cursed with the Sight in the middle of a town, usually in a square, inciting them to see. While the crowd watched they demanded a vision, something that would entertain, would humiliate, would make it all a little less dangerous to think of. Riddiculus! for Muggles, and humans never learn anything. Sybill sits in her ivory tower watching the students torment and ridicule each other, gulps tea that tastes of cedar woods and spices, its warmth tickling her throat.
When Sybill is nineteen and still inhabits the streets of London with her gift proudly displayed, she foretells Dolores Umbridge’s fate in a little corner of Knockturn Alley. She’s young then, Dolores, wears a silver ring on her finger and shakes her head when Sybill tells her what she discerns. It’s not much to tell. The baby will be stillborn and they both know it, even before Sybill puts her palms over the growing belly.
"I’m so sorry," she says thinking the woman must have felt the missing heartbeats for a long time.
The shop assistants at Flourish & Blott’s ask Sybill to leave fifteen minutes later, arms crossed over their chests and we don’t encourage that kind of business activity here, Miss. She sees Dolores Umbridge through the window as she walks away.
"Surely you have somewhere else to go," Dolores says to her in a crowded corridor, many years later. There is no reason why you should remain here when your services are no longer required."
And Sybill cries in Minerva’s arms the same afternoon. ("She’s not strong enough for this" she overhears her saying to Albus later, when they think Sybill has fallen asleep from the brandy and the exhaustion. "It’s heartbreaking to watch her.")
This is cactus land, she thinks dizzily when she wakes up the morning after. It’s cold around her, the fire has burned down and there are no house-elves around her quarters. She told them to stop coming upon moving in. At these heights she must be thankful she has anything at all; This is cactus land and it’s a sentence from something her brother read to her once, when she was a girl.
(Come on Bill, don’t be so childish! Get up here!)
She was always afraid of heights. When she allows herself to look down from her tower, she finds that she still is.
6
They capture Sybill Trelawney in August. She can’t remember how it happens, exactly, and it doesn’t matter. What is important, or ought to be, is lost as they chain her to a dark room, harsh hands hushing voices, trying to make her see. They expect her to be a warrior, in a world like this, an Amazon fighting for honour and justice (she has never mustered much care for justice). The thoughts jolt through her.
She sees.
She sees the end of the war, the betrayals and the loyalties; she sees the ceasing battles and hears the words afterwards. Some, they will say, were never even found. They will grieve those in the sunsets and at sunrise, when time is fragile and forgiving. In their history books, always, stylised lies (but fewer this time, as if they've finally learned) and blatant stupidity, some will be called heroes. They will be surprised.
"So you're a martyr now?" Severus Snape brings her a glass of water.
"Ironic, isn't it." Sybill can't feel anything from his brief touch. "I always thought you were the one with faith."
She sees.
For a while, she does what she does best - puts spins to old fears and cock-and-bull stories, feeds them fanciful tales of Chosen ones and their destinies. It keeps them busy. When the torture gets worse she can tell they have found out about her lies. One by one, they take turns with her; some of them seem reluctant to do their worst, some (Lucius) are grinning as they make her roar. She's grateful she's never had much pride.
"She's usless," Lord Voldemort states, finally. "Get rid of her."
And when she falls, she can feel a faint touch of ashes in her mouth as though she's really burning.
Notes: I wrote this over Christmas, actually, but forgot all about it. Inspired by the quoted poem - which is great, go read it - and a general passion for Cassandra the Seer. ♥ I have more to say about Sybill, I think. Perhaps some other time.
(Heh, and Sybill's brother read TS Eliot. Shut up. He did.)
Feedback is always appreciated.