Walk away to save your face;
You never were a genius.
Walk away to save your face;
You let it come between us.
Walk away to save your face;
You never were a genius.
Walk away to save your face;
You never were. You never were.
She sat in Dumbledore's great tower office, clutching weakly at a cup of hot and ridiculously sweet tea.
Second Sight. Gift or curse, depending on how you looked at it, how you used it, and – in the case of Sybil Trelawney – what exact part of it you had. She had, she knew, ended up with a somewhat shorter straw than the rest of her family.
But that didn't mean she didn't have it.
Oh, no. It didn't mean that at all.
The interesting thing about her powers, her mother had noted rather disparagingly when she was a girl, was that she was always wrong. She was so constantly and unwaveringly wrong that it was possible to plot the course the future would take by process of elimination.
She dreamed every night of a hundred thousand deaths that would never come, ten billion small and insignificant unpleasantries that would not occur. She dressed in fashions that never made it onto paper because she saw them coming in other possible futures, each more improbable than the last. She was more reliable than clockwork or planetary orbits or any of her relatives because she was never right.
Well, almost never.
Even the best diviner had their off days. For some of them, it would happen during a particularly powerful movement of the heavens or the Earth; the paths and threads and convergence would be too much or too little and they would begin to see alternate futures rather than the true future. A scrying pool might be contaminated with wine or salt or cat's piss; smoke or fire visions might have something different in the wood that caused a discrepancy in the diviner's attempt to Part the Veil and see what would truly come.
With Trelawney, it was just the opposite. On those two occasions, there had been so many portents in the air that her natural talent for seeing futures that were never to be was interrupted, overrode, and she saw the future.
She hated it. She didn't want to know what was to come; she never had.
She'd pitied the family members who saw the death of a loved one, because it would happen and everyone knew it.
Her father had been very ill, and her mother, stubborn and tearful, had not dared to scry his future. Trelawney had been very, very young – too young to control her strange, frightening dreams, but not too young to know that nothing she saw in them would happen in reality.
She dreamed of his death, a welter of bloody foam and convulsions, a quiet sighing out of breath and life, a choking silence as he gripped her mother's wrinkled hand for one last time, the last time – and she woke weeping, grinning, delirious and dancing to her father's ward and chanting to her mother that it was all right, he would be fine, don't fret, don't fret, he's fine!
Blessing, then, and also curse, for she'd dreamed of her father again the night before he truly did die – dreamed eight different things they would do on the following day, for it was the second Sunday of the month, when she visited him and told him of her studies…
Trelawney's fingers twitched on her teacup, and her breath hitched for but a moment as her eyes stung fiercely with unshed tears. She jumped as Dumbledore entered, dithered, cheerful and reassuring as ever.
She raised a finger and pointed at the bespectacled, messy-haired, green-eyed seventeen-year-old who had entered, somewhat bewildered, behind him. Not even her bangles chimed in the motion; the gravity bound them too tightly at that moment.
She spoke the words.
"I have seen it."
The boy had enough time to glance resignedly at his Headmaster before focusing on the one and only False Prophet. He only stared when she finished her sentence; Dumbledore dropped the tray of biscuits he'd begun to offer.
"… … Your life will be a long and happy one, Harry Potter."
'Cause I'm cursed with second sight, so…
A/N: You have to be worried when you're sitting at a computer, have the slightest of ideas, and five minutes later you have a ficlet on a character you don't even like much, anyway.
Song is Placebo's "Second Sight".