She nibbles on her tea leaves contemplatively and invites him inside. It isn't often that she receives company nowadays - this tower has become a fortress of sorts - and she hasn't bothered to clean up the shabby, barren room in which she used to hold classes. If this infrequent company can't step over a t-shirt, they're insufficient, she figures, and maybe she's right.
Sweat is supposed to be a very profound thing, she remembers reading long ago in some magazine referred to her by her students. Her students would say she should know this - it's divination - but she knows that she deals only with the most exquisite of approaches, and that 'profound' doesn't cut it. She doubts even Dumbledore himself knew that, but he's long since dead and gone - replaced by the harsh and unforgiving Protector. The one who gave her this barren fortress to execute her divining.
And look - there's the stranger: a tall, tall young man. Broad build - a soldiers build, and she croons that softly to herself a few times. She learnt English from cheap newspaper dailies and salvaged David Bowie CDs that the almost dying felt pitiful picking out of their comrades-the-dying 's arms. It gives her voice a ridiculous, lyrical quality, almost as though she's from one of those fanciful fairs-with-an-'e' that give elementary schoolers aneurisms just to look at.
"Come in," she says, in perhaps the most sensible voice she has used all day. "Pick a card." A hand snakes across and moves to grab one - for sentimentality, only for old times sake, she knows how this sort of visit goes - but she stops it abruptly, laying her withered old hand on it. "No - no, no, no. Here -" she reaches across and fishes out a Queen of Spades. She always pulls out the Queen when she feels doubt, and, really, that's always. "Viiiiiirgo..." she mutters, and seems too lost in thought for the boy to disturb her now. "I'm face to face with the man who sold the - a Viiiiiiirgo, that is."
The man looks at her pityingly. She's wrong, of course, and he feels sure that she's right to be insecure, but he's not thinking of that, but of a moment long, long ago. When she still taught, and had only a few thinly veiled lies and spindly webs of deceit. "When you taught me -" he stammers, and she realizes suddenly that despite his harsh disposition he seems no older than eleven. "What was it you said - about the Grim?"
But she's forgotten that life by now, and begins to hum softly to herself, winding her hands together like a machine.