Seeing Surrender

Seeing Surrender

Sibyll Trelawney squinted her right eye slightly downwards, adjusted her admittedly far too large glasses a bit to the right, and tried, once again, to make sense of the jumbled tea leaves that her fifth-year classes had left behind. It was an amusing exercise, and never failed to make her feel unnaturally gifted, as her fifth-years were, sadly, anything but adept at Divination. Also, apparently, at artistic interpretation. Sibyll often felt that Hogwarts needed to offer some sort of class that would teach thickheaded students to recognize that suns are suns, and not five-legged sheep.

Peering closer at the bottom of the teacup, she suddenly spotted a small clump that she had overlooked earlier. Squinting both eyes now, she brought the teacup even closer to her nose, and then sighed with satisfaction. A waning moon, sure sign of trials to come, as well as a large theft of some sort. And how that little Parkinson brat deserved misfortune (and hopefully misfortune of the kind that would involve a loss of a rather valuable diamond bracelet). Always speaking up rudely in her class, never choosing to let the Aura of the Beyond enter her life, sniggering stupidly to that inefficient Malfoy brat while certain teachers were trying to instruct...Sibyll had never had a high opinion of Slytherins.

Severus Snape, nastily, had suggested to her that her dislike stemmed from the absence of gullibility in his students, but Sibyll had chosen not to hear that remark.

He was not going to have a glorious week, she remembered, and happily wiggled her toes at the thought. A near-drowning, she remembered, as well as a stack of books falling on his head and another rejectance letter from Albus about the Defense Against the Dark Arts position. Severus had been trying for years to snag that post, and had never really quite managed it.

Well, no. He hadn't managed it. Ever.

Sibyll was so cheered up by this reflection that she merrily tossed the teacup she had been examining into the wash-basin, pre-charmed to prevent breakage (students broke too many cups in class, anyway), and picked up the next.

Trials and tribulations, she read, smiling blissfully. The loss of a very large inheritance and the death of a distant female cousin. And all Billings had been able to read in the teacup was a large pot of gold. How innocent some people were, how silly and ignorant and sweet and innocent. Of them all, Sibyll was the only one that saw through to the stark truth of the world, which gave her the Insight into the stark truths of the future. She alone was Wise, and possessed of the Powers that Judge.

Happily, Sibyll fished out another teacup, and hunched over it with the devotion of a five-year-old boy to roly-poly pudding. Life was so wonderfully bleak, she thought with a smile which was not on her mouth, but centered somewhere inside her nose, making her nostrils flare with an inward giggle.

Sibyll was a strange little bat, living cooped inside her tower, hardly ever seeing the rest of the castle, and usually quite convinced of the truth of her powers. After all, Albus had hired her, hadn't he? So there must be truth to her Inner Eye, since she had been hired as a teacher by the most powerful wizard alive. However, long years of introspection and isolation had also convinced her that Albus might be the acknowledged master of wizardry, but that she, though having chosen a life of instruction, devotion, and learning, was the unseen Weapon, powerful and more powerful because she had the self-control to keep her wisdom under wraps and chose not to make an idol of herself.

...Never mind that she had not yet managed to charm blue teacups pink. Purple was a lovely color, and the mustard-and-magenta-splashed ones reposed peacefully in the kitchen garbage-bin.

She made quite an odd figure, what with her always untamable, bushy brown hair, immense glasses almost larger than her face, and the endless fringed scarves and shawls that made her Statement. Scarves represented mystery (you could tie one over your nose and look out at people with mysterious eyes), blindness (you could have people blindfold you during--er, you could blindfold the Outer Eye to better See with the Inner Eye), beauty (scarves were pretty), the Unknown (well, everything did, didn't it? Somehow they did, she was sure), and grace (they looked pretty draped over her arms), which was why Sibyll had conscientiously wrapped them around her hair, her neck, her arms, her waist, and whatever else was left, except around her legs, because that chafed and was uncomfortable. Sibyll was all for the Appearance, as long as it refrained from damaging the Self.

Usually, she was placidly happy, cornered in her tower rooms and draped like a Christmas tree in silky, fringed scarves and long, sparkling (cheap) strands of beads. Devoted students visited her frequently to chat and to See, and she could watch the Quidditch matches from her sitting-room window. A miniature retinue of two house-elves followed her around exclusively; they cleaned her Tower, lit her fires (not in that way, honestly) brought her food and drink, library books, new stacks of teacups when the old ones were broken beyond magical repair, parchment and ink, clean laundry, and the occasional bit of pleasure faith (romance novels of the more questionable persuasion).

Still, there was really no denying that Sibyll Trelawney was profoundly screwed up, especially in the area of relationships, because she most certainly was. She had never actually fallen in love, never thought she'd die for anyone, and never actually seen her sister and thought that she loved her. Sibyll remembered one time when she had liked her sister; it was at the zoo, and she had been five. Priscilla had let her have a handful of her carefully hoarded dried pastry to throw to the pigs and the ducks and the squirrels without making her beg for it. (True, Priscilla was three at the time, but three was early enough to be selfish.)

Her sister was one of the trials of Sibyll's life, pathetically enough. They had no other siblings, and Sibyll was the elder, but Priscilla had the wonderful gift of making Sibyll feel like a prize idiot whenever she chose. One memory, profound and profoundly hated, still came to mind every single time she thought of her sister.

It was Sibyll's sixteenth birthday, and they had had a special party; boys were invited. She had been so excited for weeks, and spent hours planning just exactly which coloured icing went on the cake, which songs would play when during the time she had allotted for dancing...and then, out of absolutely bloody nowhere, Priscilla pestered their mother for a pair of absolutely gorgeous ice blue robes, and the boys that Sibyll had been so excited about had spent the entire stinking evening clustered around her sister. And from then on there was really no competition, because Priscilla chose that moment to realize that she was indeed quite pretty, and Sibyll wasn't. From then on, Sibyll was the skinny insect of the family, and, eventually, she was just so fed up with the whole mess of teasing that she walked into her parents' bedroom one morning with a "tease-me-and-I-will-explode-something" glower, looking exactly like a dragonfly, with a thinly-cut pair of blue-green robes and the most enormous glasses anyone had ever seen.

"If they want to make fun," Sibyll had thought, "let me give them a good reason to." From then on, the teasing miraculously subsided. Perhaps they realized how much it bothered her, or it just wasn't as amusing to call her their little dragonfly when she undeniably looked like exactly that.

Oddly enough, Sibyll didn't discard her dragonfly look when she grew older. She had grown attached to her ridiculous glasses, and, though she had to replace the glass inside with real lenses when she turned twenty-four, she didn't care to change them one bit. And, unconsciously, through the years, she developed an odd little dragonfly-ish manner; flitting places and landing abruptly in chairs or in beds without stopping and standing in front of them first, and watchful, darting eyes, though the latter more or less faded away when she began to completely immerse herself in Divination.

Sibyll had not particularly liked Divination at Hogwarts, because the teacher was incompetent and plainly did not like the subject, but suddenly she was twenty-five and fed up with something she couldn't quite place her finger on--perhaps it was withheld teasing from her family, perhaps the lack of an economically sufficient job that she actually liked, the complete absence of a man in her life, except for her father (Uncle Edgar had run off with a barmaid named Gwladys six years ago and was now reposing peacefully in Greece, and her other male relations had managed to croak before she was ten), or just the hated sense of loneliness, all too familiar to the young girl with the weird glasses.

Fed up to the gills with the sense of whatever-it-was, and also painfully empty somewhere inside, Sibyll persuaded herself into a rather well-known bar one night, because she thought that was what lonely people did. It was called the Spirituality Club, meaning that people got very drunk and smoked quite a lot of illegal substances. Sibyll, having never done either, uncomfortably ordered a sherry and sat on a bar stool, feeling quite stupid, and wishing she hadn't come.

After about an hour and an entire bottle of sherry, she was fed up, not in the least tipsy, and ready to sell her soul for a cup of hot chamomile tea and a bed. (A single bed, which she intended to occupy alone, thankyouverymuch.)

"Going to a barssupposed to free you from worries and get you drunk, isn't it?" she demanded of the slightly hostile bartender. "Well, then," she snapped, jabbing a finger at his shoulder. "It doesn't. It's , and it's stupid, and I hate it, and I hate bloody stupid things that don't...oooh." She had tried getting off her stool, and found that the ground was wobbling a bit. "And I hate bloody stupid things that don't pan out the way they're supposed to. 'Sspecially..." oh, all right, maybe she was a little tipsy. But that was none of anyone's business, least of all that bloody bartender's, and she prepared to tell him exactly why it was none of anyone's business, least of all his, when an unsteady hand crashed onto her shoulder.

In normal circumstances, any twenty-five-year-old girl with a deplorable lack of physical strength would have been terrified and scuttled off immediately, but Sibyll was not exactly a normal circumstance, nor had she placed herself in one. So she just swiveled her head around and glared at the person through her large glasses, knowing that her eyes had to look at least eight times as large as they usually did when someone was sober. "What," she demanded menacingly.

And then she realized that the person with his hand on her shoulder was, in fact, a middle-aged man with short brown hair and navy robes that were a few sizes too big for him. He also looked fairly strong, and even a tipsy Sibyll could tell that this was not someone to antagonize.

"Oh, sorry," she said, just as he mumbled "Duck."

Sibyll blinked. Twice.

"Er?" she managed, finally.

"Duck," he repeated, his eyes unfocusing.

"Goose," Sibyll shot back, royally confused.

"Duck, duck, duck, duck, duck!" he repeated, his hand still heavy on her shoulder. "Duck!"

After about another minute of the very drunk stranger consistently repeating the word "duck", the bartender came over, clandestinely waving a couple of sober men over to Sibyll and the odd stranger. "Listen, you, get your hands offa' her," he began, and was interrupted by the stranger, who wasn't letting go of Sibyll.

"Duck," he nearly shouted. "Duck, duck, duck, duck, DUCK!"

And, just as he got to the last "duck", Sibyll finally understood what he meant, as the door of the bar was blown open, and a jet of red light from a duel in the street shot through the doorway, making straight for Sibyll.

True, she was completely terrified, but not enough to keep on resisting the stranger's hand. She half-rolled off her stool and was half-pulled off, but somehow ended up cowering underneath the counter while a whole rack of glasses behind the bar was blasted into splinters.

"Told you," the stranger said drunkenly, kneeling next to her. "Told you."

"Thanks," she managed weakly. "Er--how'd you know that...er, well, you know..."

His eyes widened, and he pushed his face up close to hers. She nearly gagged; whatever he'd been drinking smelled absolutely vile, and he was breathing directly into her nose.

"I'm a Seer," he whispered loudly, eyes wider than Sibyll felt that eyes could physically open. She caught her breath (through her mouth, so as not to breathe in the delicious smells in front of her), and was about to say something in the area of "So Divination's real, then?" when the stranger was promptly sick in her lap.

After a very humiliating scamper through the streets with sick down the front of her robes, Sibyll locked herself into her bedroom, stripped off her robes and threw them into the garbage bin, and proceeded to take a series of four long bubble baths.

She was still a little drunk, but not enough to lose all possibility of thought. In the middle of her third bath, she calmed down a bit, and started to think about what the man had actually said besides "duck" and "told you". He...well, apparently, he was a real Seer. And he had really saved her life.

Then, she started to wonder about the accuracy of Divination, and things sort of took off from there. She moved into a flat in London, visited crazy old women who claimed to be prophets and let them teach her what they knew, spent hours and hours in libraries and bookstores, researching Divination and the Inner Eye, and spent two months' rent on a crystal ball that had supposedly predicted, successfully, the names of the dead in a particular regiment in the War of 1066. Sibyll came to believe completely in the powers of foresight, and dreamed of someday becoming a celebrated Seer, just like her ancestor.

But one day, when she was about twenty-seven, Dover reposed peacefully in the sun when she had clearly predicted a terrible storm. Three boats should have been lost, and all but five passengers drowned, but instead, children skipped school to go swimming on the sunniest day for weeks. It was not necessarily a terrible thing to an outsider, but Sibyll was devastated. It was one of the first times that she had dared to predict something as terrible as this, and she had been unquestionably wrong. It wasn't just a matter of dates, either; the stubborn sun shone peacefully for two whole months, and not one boat sank in three years, though Sibyll spent nearly every one of her eighteen waking hours listening to the wireless for news. Finally, on her thirtieth birthday, she had to give up. It was one of the worst days she had ever known when she realized that Divination was not infallible.

Her predictions got steadily worse from then on, and some cranky old women said it was her loss of faith. Perhaps it was that, but she didn't know. All she did know was that she was becoming a complete failure at the one thing that she had loved, and it was slowly driving her crazy.

Then, she learned the art of cold reading--looking at people, drawing reactions from them...everything. She would listen to conversations about other people, and would predict small things to those subjects when she met them. She got a fairly decent reputation, but the name "gloom goddess" stuck with her, because her predictions were almost unfailingly bad.

Finally, she was running out of money, having thrown a mug of beer at a rude customer in the Spirituality Club while she was still on duty, waitressing. After a month of doing odd jobs in libraries and inns, she heard that Hogwarts wanted a Divination teacher, as her old, hated professor had finally left in disgust. She applied, practically begged for an interview, and Albus, though skeptical at first, hired her as a full-time teacher.

Sibyll was finally safe, financially, and she was positive she'd regain her old love of the subject once she wasn't practically scavenging around bars anymore. And she did love her job for two years, but then, subconsciously, the old desperation emerged again. Students laughed at her, whispered about her pathetic obsession, and even the Deputy Headmistress thought she was a bogus wreck. Sibyll began to hate herself for her incompetence, and this was when she learned to love failure in students, because she could make herself look brilliant in comparison. It grew to be her one grappling hook, and she milked it for all it was worth, in class and out. And when she wasn't drawing success from the failures of others, she was draining endless sherry bottles.

Once, though, in the year Sirius Black escaped from Azkaban, she fell asleep during the end of the second spring quarter, and woke up with an oddly calm feeling. She felt peaceful for the first time in years, and finally slept through the whole night without waking up twice or three times. She didn't know exactly why, but, for the summer months, she grew to love her subject again--to love it and to be obsessed by it. It faded once her students got back and (most) showed their usual skepticism and patent dislike of her, but she would spend the next few years waiting patiently to feel that same blissful calmness again.

Sibyll Trelawney was not really a professional hoax. She did not know whether she truly believed in Divination or not, but it was a livelihood, and she needed it. Sometimes she loved it, knew that she was brilliant, and trusted in it completely, but sometimes...

Well, during those "sometimes", her students' botched teacups came in handy.

Sibyll reached for another cup and smiled radiantly. It was Neville Longbottom's.