~*Five Visions of Jean's*~
Written by: Cisselah
(Beater 2)
written for Cearphilly Catapults in The Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition
Prompts: 1, 2, 5, 6 & s9
~*-.-*~
The vision hit Professor Jeanine Bramsdottir in the middle of her morning lesson. Actually, it hit in the middle of her sentence, making her trail off and stare into nothing with an open mouth, her eyes turning milky white as they stared into the future. From a rapidly growing distance, she could hear someone - presumably one of her students - calling her name. Grimacing, Jeanine realized that she had first year Hufflepuffs today. The poor darlings were probably working themselves into a fully blown panic by now, although she couldn't blame them. Few things were scarier than a witch in a trance.
A sudden silence fell heavily around her. Colors started to flash before her eyes. They started as brief flashes of blinding light over the white background that always came with the visions. A bit of red. A dash of green. A slow swirl of indigo blue. Slowly the colors started to melt together, forming a picture of what would be.
The forest was dark and unfriendly, the gnarled trees bending down forebodingly over the scene that was playing out. In the far distance something burned violently. A bunch of dark, cloaked people were surrounding the skinny form of a boy looking barely of age. He was standing tall and proud with the regal bearing of a king. Chin thrust up defiantly. Jaw clenched in determination. Hands curled into fist that trembled almost unnoticeably... This was the stance of someone that really didn't want to be here.
Jeanine had a really bad feeling about this.
The boy let his emerald green eyes slide over his company. He was dirty and abused, his skin smeared with mud and blood like he had just been dragged from the pits of hell. His raven hair was cut unevenly like he had tried to do it himself with a rusty knife (and obviously discovered that he had no talent for being a barber). A ratty looking device was placed on the bridge of his eyes, stretching out and circling both his eyes. His clothes - strange and foreign as they were - looked ragged and dirty like he had been wearing them for days. And most attention seeking of all was the lightning bolt shaped scar that was perched on his forehead.
The vision drifted towards the... thing... on the other side of the meadow. Its skin white as the bones of the grave, its eyes flickering with the crimson flames of hell, the demon that stood surrounded by its minions were the most scary thing Jeanine had ever seen. The mere sight of the fathomless evil lurking in those crimson twin points of hell were enough to make her start trembling in fright. A small, cruel smile curved on its lips.
The creature opened its mouth and said something. Whatever it said, Jeanine couldn't hear it, the silence of the vision absolute. For the hundred moment of her life, Jeanine wished that the visions came with sounds, which would make everything so much easier to understand.
But she didn't really need to hear the words to get the picture. The creature hissed something, raising its wand and firing off a bright, green light at the boy. He crumbled to the ground, his lifeless body lying absolutely still.
Jeanine screamed. She screamed and screamed and screamed, tear gushing down her cheeks as she realized what was burning in the background, what she really was seeing.
"Professor Bramsdottir!" A voice cut through her vision, yanking her out of it with brutal quickness. Dimly she realized she was kneeling on the floor, being held up by a strong pair of arms as she gasped for a breath that refused to come. She was trembling madly as her students watched her, their faces alight in horror and concern.
"It's burning!" Jeanine rasped out in a terrified breath, desperate to share this new piece of information she had uncovered with someone - anyone. "Oh Golden Griffins, it's burning! It's burning! Hogwarts is burning to the ground!"
Above her, a pair of midnight eyes widened almost unnoticeably. She had a brief moment to admire them (dark, deep and framed with thick, black lashes, they were a midnight sky with a thousand stars).
Then world turned black and she passed out.
~*-.-*~
Her second lesson was, as expected, very tense. The seventh year Ravenclaws were more interested in staring at her than watering their Herbology projects. Apparently, the news of Professor Bramsdottir's breakdown/terrifying trance-thingy had spread fast, and now everybody was watching the freak to see what she would predict next.
The forth time she barked at Mr. Malfoy to stop gawking and start working, Jeanine felt like she might as well give up. Nobody listened to her anyway.
"Stop it!" She commanded Mr. Pettigrew in an angry tone when he flinched. "I'm not gonna go all misty-eyed and predict your deaths. I'm not a very strong Seer. One vision every month or so. Nothing's going to ha-"
The vision hit her with like a lightning bolt. One minute she was standing there, telling her students she wasn't going to have a new vision for quite some time, the next she was swimming in a flood of colors, washing ashore in a landscape that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up in trepidation.
She was in a graveyard.
And someone was doing a dark ritual.
A cowering, fat man levitated a bone from a grave, dumping it into a bubbling cauldron. He was chanting, no doubt something nasty and dark. He drew a knife, raised it and closed his eyes a he - still chanting - held his arm above the cauldron and brought the knife down.
Jeanine gasped in horror.
The fat man raised the knife again, shuffling towards a short figure being held prisoner by one of the stone angels in the yard. Jeanine hadn't noticed him before, much too busy focusing on the fat man and his sick ritual. Squinting (although it did no good), Jeanine realized that she knew the short figure. Sure, he was shorter and younger than last time... Sure, he was looking more terrified than proud at the moment... Sure, he was probably going to die within the next two minutes and could therefore not be her already dead boy...
But... he was. He had the same raven hair, emerald eyes and lightning bolt scar. Young, dirty and wild-eyed, there was no doubt that this was the younger version of the same boy that had faced down the demon. Struggling to free himself, her boy was simply unforgettable.
The fat man raised the knife again. Jeanine screamed, screamed for it to stop, for him to please not, please don't, please just let the poor boy go. But he didn't, of course, because Jeanine wasn't really there. Jeanine was back in 1225, peaking into a far distance future.
With a slash downwards, the fat man sliced open the boy's arm. Horrified, Jeanine watched as he dripped the blood into the bubbling cauldron. A cloud of smoke welled up from the edge, a feeling of evil lingering in the edges of her vision as she watched as a man formed from the black smoke. His skin was white as the bones he had been born from, his eyes glowing evilly red.
It was a demon.
The demon.
Jeanine screamed inside her head, wanting to turn away, to put her hands over her head, shield her eyes from the sight of pure evil. But she couldn't. She was in trance, her body numb and beyond her reach, her eyes locked on the scene that played out bellow.
Something shook her hard.
Screaming, Jeanine was yanked out of her vision and into the present. She struck out with her hands, desperate for her freedom, trying to battle away the strong hands that held her as her mind struggled to return from the horrible future of the vision. Her hands hit something, her nails ripping into flesh, drawing blood. Loud cursing broke through her thoughts, a pair of midnight eyes glaring at her as the hands held her still.
Blinking, Jeanine stared at the man that held her down.
Professor Camiel Readen was not looking very happy. The Defense Against the Dark Art's professor was bleeding viciously, glaring down at her with enough animosity to scare a Boggart into hiding.
"Are you done, you crazy woman?" he coldly asked her.
Dizzily, all Jeanine could do was stare up at him from her position on the floor. Camiel was the sort of surreal beauty that came with a terrible personality. He had a perfect face, all angles and sharply cut lines. A firm jaw, narrow chin, high cheekbones and dark, midnight eyes that shone with the light of a thousand stars. His mouth was full and kissable, the kind of mouth that made you think very sinful things, but curved sharply in a smile that Jeanine had always seen as cruel.
He was a fallen angel, as surreal as the vision she had just seen, but far more beautiful.
"You're much prettier when you're not real!" Jeanine mumbled incoherently to him, then for the second time this day... she surrendered to the darkness.
~*-.-*~
Lunch was a fairly awkward ordeal. After a visit to the Hospital wing (where it was confirmed that Jeanine was perfectly healthy if not a tad bit of a freak) Jeanine had been sent to her quarters to rest, her next lesson cancelled (possibly for the best. Jeanine wasn't sure she could handle the second year Slytherin's today). She had only bothered to drag herself out of bed to attend today's lunch, trying to show the students that she was perfectly fine and capable of showing herself in public without falling in a trance and starting screaming about demons and chopped off arms.
Unfortunately, the rest of the Hogwart's population didn't have the same opinion.
Forced to endure the staring and whispering that would no doubt plague her students for at least another couple of days, Jeanine poked her potato with her fork. The damn thing rolled to the side of her plate, trying to flee the offending piece of cutlery.
Beside her, Camiel sat stiffly and drank wine from his goblet, clearly not happy with the seating arrangements. For some reason, he had always hated her, even though Jeanine had no idea what she had done to him that could have made him despise her so much.
"Are you certain you are alright?" her friend, Professor Hestia Haavergot asked her. The Potions professor was seated to her left, glancing between Camiel and Jeanine as she frowned in deep thought.
"Yes," Jeanine assured her, wanting to sink to the floor and die on the spot. "I'm fine. Whatever happened to make me have two visions in one day, it's over now. No more visions..."
From her right, Camiel snorted.
Jeanine threw him an angry glare.
Suddenly, the world tilted slightly. A familiar feeling rose in the pits of her stomach, the rare warning of a vision to come.
No, Jeanine thought. No! Don't do this! Not here, not now!
She tried to push it down, to stop the white that was creeping over her sight.
"Jeanine?" Hestia's voice was worried. "What are you doing? What's ha-"
The world turned mute. Blanching as a white veil fell over her eyes, Jeanine watched helplessly as colors flashed before her eyes. They danced and swirled, forming a picture of...
Holy Hippogriffs.
Staring at the sight before her eyes, Jeanine felt her breath leave her in a short gasp. Bright colors exploded above her, cheerfully mocking the gathering students bellow. Laughing wildly, two identical boys recklessly swept across their audience on brooms. They were identical to each other, from the secondhand robes to the shockingly red hair, their faces laughing as they threw more objects into the sky, objects that exploded in bright colors.
A short woman, dressed in shrieking pink, screamed at them furiously, her toad-like face distorted into violence and hatred as she gesticulated wildly.
The redheaded twins, still laughing, dived for her, scaring her into cowering pathetically as they laughingly flew over her head. They turned on their broom, looking down at their audience as they hovered high in the sky. One of them began to say something, the other finishing his sentence in a comfortable way that made Jeanine sure they had done that many times before.
One of them threw up a bunch of objects. The crowd went wild as they exploded in a cloud of colors that spelled out something that looked like 'Weasels' Whistling Wheezes'. Laughing joyfully, the twins turned on their brooms, flying into the sky as the crowd cheered for them and the pink toad lady screamed in defeated fury.
Jeanine came out of her vision so suddenly she almost hit Hestia in the nose when she jumped.
"What was that!" Hestia's eyes were wide. Looking around, Jeanine realized that the entire hall was looking at her in openmouthed shock.
A wave of dizziness washed over her. Swaying in her seat, she turned to look at Hestia.
"Don't let the pink toad take over!" Jeanine urgently told her friend, eager to impart this piece of wisdom on the Hogwarts staff.
Then she blacked out, her face hitting her plate and burying itself in her gravy as unconsciousness took her for the third time.
~*-.-*~
Despite Hestia's protests, Jeanine left the hospital wing and attended her lesson with the fourth year Hufflepuffs. The entire class was dead silent, following her every gesture and word as she calmly described the properties of the Naked Priestgrabber, a mischievous little plant that grew in the monasteries of southern France. The lesson went well, and to Jeanine's relief, no visions ambushed her inconveniently.
One of the Hufflepuffs did however get grabbed by the Priestgrabber and had to be brought to hospital wing, traumatized by the ability to see through her fellow students' clothes that the Priestgrabber had bestowed on the poor girl. Hopefully it would wear off within a few days.
Feeling like she was better off in bed, Jeanine dragged herself to her last lesson. It was seventh year Gryffindors, which was a pain in the ass considering how the Gryffindors were the students brave enough to flood her in questions.
What did you see?
Did you have a vision?
Have does it feel?
Did you see my future?
When is the next Transfiguration test?
Questions. Questions. Questions.
Jeanine was almost relived when their voices lost their meanings and silence descended upon her, the world turning white as the colors started dancing.
This vision was perhaps the briefest and strangest one yet.
Her boy, raven-haired and emerald eyed, was leaning against a thick wooden door together with a frizzy haired witch and a redheaded wizard, all three of them looking as old as Jeanine's first year students. They wore Gryffindor robes, and with a startle Jeanine recognized the room as one from the third floor.
The three students, unaware of their silent watcher, had their ears pressed against the door, clearly listening for something outside. They were panting like they had run a mile, their legs trembling from exhaustion. The girl turned around and froze, her face turning white as freshly fallen snow. Her eyes, wide and brown, stared at Jeanine like she was a three headed dog.
The girl opened her mouth and whispered something to the boys. They froze too, turning their heads to stare at Jeanine, their eyes widening like they could really see her.
Then, as one, all three of them screamed and started scrambling for the door.
The vision cut out.
Jeanine stared at her class.
"What did you see?" Ignotus Peverell asked her in an excited voice. Jeanine gave him a blank look.
"I need a bloody drink," she mumbled and slumped in her chair.
~*-.-*~
Four visions in one day, Jeanine thought as she stomped down the corridor towards her chamber. That's it, I'm crawling into bed and I'm not getting out of it until the day is over!
She was almost there when the fifth vision hit her. Stopping abruptly, Jeanine almost toppled over as the world disappeared once more. White. Then colors, dancing wildly and excitedly, forming a picture of the future. Then...-
No!
Horror filled her, washing over her as she stared at the scene that was playing out in front of her. She wanted to scream but couldn't find her mouth. This couldn't happen. This wasn't her future. Wasn't her destiny. This was a mistake. This was wrong.
Oh God, this had to be wrong.
This was not happening. She could change this. She would change this, if it so was the last thing she did. She would change the future, destiny be damned. This was not happening to her
As the vision faded away, Jeanine turned on her heels, ignoring the door to her chamber as she stumbled towards Hestia's chambers on trembling legs.
Hestia opened after the first knock.
"Jeanine!" she pulled a trembling Jeanine into her room as she closed the door behind her. "What happened?"
Still shaking from the shock and horror of what she saw, Jeanine sat down in a red armchair, stroking a lock of hair behind her ear as she zeroed in on a bottle of wine.
"I had a vision," she told her best friend. "A horrible vision"
"Oh Jeanine," Hestia put her hand to her mouth. "What did you see?"
Jeanine grabbed the bottle, conjuring a goblet to let a generous amount of wine flow into the goblet. She put the glass to her mouth and drank desperately. Then she closed her eyes briefly and said;
"It's about Camiel, Hes,"
"What about him? Oh! You didn't kill him, did you?" Hestia looked at her worriedly, clearly seeing it in her mind's eye. Jeanine didn't blame her. Everybody knew that Jeanine and Camiel were bitter enemies.
"I wish! It's so much worse!" Jeanine cried, waving her goblet around so that wine spilled all over the floor.
She gave up a small whimper as she thought about the vision. Then she stared at her best friend with eyes that were filling with tears.
"I kissed him!"
Hestia started to laugh.
~*-.-*~
The End.