Fic: "Of Fantasy, Of Dreams, and Ceremony"

[alliterator.livejournal.com]

Title: Of Fantasy, Of Dreams, and Ceremony
Author: alliterator
Character(s): Sybill Trelawny
Rating: G
Warnings: Spoilers for HBP
Prompt: 56. If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down, these women together ought to be able to turn it right side up again. --Sojourner Truth.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not mine.
Summary: Sybill Trelawny woke up like she woke up most days: hung over.
Title comes from Julius Caesar:
He is superstitious grown of late,
Quite from the main opinion he held once
Of fantasy, of dreams, and ceremonies.


Sybill Trelawny woke up like she woke up most days: hung over. Her bed was shoved between two impossibly close walls and she was careful not to hit her head on the roof when she sat up. The room was cramped, but it was cheap. She wished she could stay at Hogwarts, but nobody was there – even the house elves left, moved to the Ministry for the summer. They'd come back when school started again.

Or maybe they won't, Sybill's mind said. Maybe the school won't open and maybe you'll be stuck in this cramped room for the rest of your life.

Sybill took a half-empty cooking sherry bottle that was next to her bed and had her first drink of the day.

She wondered when it had gone so wrong. When Dumbledore – the only wizard who ever believed in her, who was the only reason she was hired at all – died? No, that wasn't the start, that was only the latest thing that had gone wrong. Was it when that creature Firenze was hired? No, but that certainly didn't help matters.

For Sybill Trelawny, it had all gone wrong a long time before. As she consumed what was left in the sherry bottle, she thought about those bygone days when she had wanted only one thing: to be a diviner.

She had heard tales of her great-grandmother often; of how Cassandra could predict the future from the entrails of a mouse, from the patterns of a spider web, from the shapes of the clouds. And so, when it was Sybill's turn to go to Hogwarts, she studied and prepared to be just like her great-grandmother.

She went into Hogwarts with more knowledge than most. When they got into the carriages, Sybill thought, Cyclomancy, divination by wheels. When they past the lake, Sybill thought, Hydromancy, divination by water. As other people talked to her, she tried to remember their names, thinking, Onomancy, divination by names. In the Great Hall, as others laughed and ate, she thought, Geloscopy, divination by laughter.

But soon she found out that none of them worked. At least, not for her. The wind's direction and force didn't tell her what would happen (austromancy). All she received from burning plants (botanomancy) was stinging eyes and a reprimand from the Herbology teacher. She couldn't see the future in mirrors (catopromancy) or onion sprouts (cromniomancy) or the behavior of rodents (myomancy).

Even the more traditional forms of divination were lost to her. The tealeaves (tasseomancy) didn't form any shapes, the Tarot cards (cartomancy) made no sense to her, and looking at the stars (astrology) made her feel stupid.

Her Divination teacher went on talking about Breaching the Mystery of Time and Parting Time's Veil to Look Beyond. Sybill, frustrated by what she thought of as a betrayal of her past, decided to just make it all up.

Her teacher bought it all. She got consistent good grades in Divination, as her grades in other classes were falling. She was the star of the class, but she knew it was wrong. None of it made sense. In the back of her mind, she asked herself why the teacher didn't realize it was wrong, didn't know she was making it up.

Maybe he does, she thought. Maybe he's testing me, seeing if I have any real divination talent. But it kept happening, year after year, until Sybill's seventh year. By then, she couldn't take it anymore, couldn't stand making up predictions and pointing out imaginary futures in people's palms.

So, at the end of one of her Divination classes, she approached the professor, an old, wiry, silver-haired man named Middleton. She asked what would happen if everything she had said and done in that class had been a lie, every foretelling she made a falsehood. Professor Middleton, by then very senile and not quite aware of exactly where or when he was, quietly nodded and left.

Sybill realized after that that Divination was one big lie. You couldn't see the future by disemboweling a hen any more than you could see the future by burning laurel wreaths. Entrails and dice and meteors and dreams all jumbled up in her head. And she couldn't take it, she couldn't think of her great-grandmother as a fraud.

So she made it all up again. She made up a story about how she hadn't lied, how all the divinations she had done in class were correct. She lied to herself and she cut her mind in two. One part was the optimistic little girl who desperately wanted to be her great-grandmother; the other, much smaller part, was the cynical adult all those years in Hogwarts had made her. And she never let that part out.

Except it was seeping out now, forming around the edges of her fake divination persona. The empty sherry bottle clattered on the floor and Sybill staggered over to her small desk, which was cluttered with Tarot cards and dice and tealeaves.

And she looked at them and she remembered seeing Dumbledore's prone body, his dead body, beaten, bruised. And the mental wall broke and her mind was flooded and she realized she was a fraud.

And that night, she opened her only window and lit a fire in her room and watched as the flames consumed the cards and the dice and the tealeaves, as the flames consumed the life she had made long ago. And in the ashes, she found peace.