Ace of Swords
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Harry stared at the cards in his hand, numbness washing over him in a floodtide of want, regret, and then, nothing at all. The material was rough to the touch, and Ginny's eyes drilled into his forehead, searing through the contents of his mind, seeming to soar past all of the obstacles thrown up by years of living, and strike the inner core with alarming force.
It felt oh-so-very odd to be sitting on the common room couch and observing as the fragile wall between past and present shattered itself under the force of a single object. But it was happening--there was no denying that. Outside, the night sky, impartial to the made-up boundaries between Muggle and Wizarding world, stretched enticingly over what had once been sun, casting its depiction of legends from the maw of yesteryear through the thunderous voices of the stars, joining together, straining towards the last, haunting refrain of the age-old song.
Harry looked up from the cards to the open the window, where Hedwig sat, snowy
feathers ruffled against the intruding zephyr. Then, the Boy-Who-Lived turned
back to Ginny.
"Can I have them?"
The girl blinked, then double-blinked. "Can you wha...?"
"Can I have them." It was a statement now, not a question. The redhead blushed. She blushes so easily, Harry thought.
"Yes, yes! Of course you can. They are...were...your mother's. It's only fair."
Harry leaned forward. Something about Ginny's tone of voice told him she was loathe to give up what she had just discovered. He sighed, a twinge of guilt suddenly poking at the corner of his mind. Harry shot Ginny a crooked smile.
"Thanks...um...thanks." There was an awkward silence. "This means a lot."
"I know it does."
More silence. It tore through the room like a eager spirit, dancing its way into both awarenesses and provoking a jarring sort of alienation.
Harry bit his lip.
"So...let's try this again. You found the cards in the hallway."
"Yes."
"Just after getting out of Ancient Runes."
"Yes."
"Hmm. Fifth years in Ancient Runes...that means that I was in Divinations--or getting out of Divinations class at the time. And you didn't see who dropped them?"
"No."
"I..." Harry seemed to hesitate, his own behavior becoming apparent to both himself and Ginny. He had always been one to say what he needed, then move on, not pick the other person apart with questions that could be only apprehensively responded to.
"Thanks...again," he said, attempting to project as much warmth into his voice as was possible.
Ginny's blush deepened, and she nodded. At a loss for words, the duo stared for a moment. Then, the girl broke eye contact, rushing up the stairs to the dormitories all-too-quickly.
Harry glanced after her, then allowed his green eyes to stray back to the deck of cards in hand. He turned them over and over and over and over, Lily Evans catching the light from the dying embers every now and then.
Lily Evans.
Wife. Mother. Daughter.
Stranger.
The last barriers seemed to come down all at once, and Harry found himself imagining things, pulling this and that out of a false memory. He would see her, red hair, smiling face, a shy, feminine thing, unbreakable despite the apparent fragility. He would see her, poring diligently over a textbook by the light of a a candle in its demise, brow furrowed slightly. He would see her, head thrown back, laughing just as loud and lusty as any boy, plunging recklessly into the unknown alongside his--
...my father.
Harry pulled his knees up to his chest, frowning slightly. He reached out, opening the casing and withdrawing the cards.
So, Mum was into this sort of thing. I wonder...and who would have had this in his or her possession to begin with? I really wonder...
He had always prided himself in his early-learned independence, and feeling a need as immense as this was galling to say the least. He was, after all, the Harry Potter, flawed perfection, willing to offer up his life for his loved ones, the Dark Lord's bane, savior, hero....sent by none other than the gods themselves. He was immortal, and incapable of feeling reliant.
If only they knew. Merlin, if only they knew!
Growing up without parents had not left him sad, an emotional wreck, or bitter in the least. Merely hollow. A spot that screamed to be filled. A longing that could not be quenched. A hunger that refused to die.
The embers of the hearth seemed to flare up with a startling abruptness, but that could very well be just another illusion. After all, Harry had been feeling exceedingly tired...
Aunt Petunia's voice was beckoning to him again. He turned instinctively, making an attempt to follow it. The walls of Number Four, Privet Drive seemed to tumble into nothingness, vanishing around him and giving way to a dark corridor.
And suddenly, the voice was no longer that of Aunt Petunia's. It was different. So very different...so very...maternal. He began walking faster, faster, needing to reach the end of the tunnel. Light, thick and honeyed, spilled into the darkness. He reached out for it...
Red hair flashed in what little illumination there was. Green eyes glinted, and, rather abruptly, Lily Evans was standing before her son. Harry nearly choked, coming to a sudden halt. He wanted to talk to her, say something to her, but he could not. The words caught in his throat.
The smile broadened. Lily held something up for Harry to see, and his gaze widened. It was a card, depicting a beautiful young woman kneeling on a patch of grass, arms outstretched, breasts bared. The fullness of her flesh sang of intense profusion, and one word had claimed the bottom half of the image: Empress.
"It's your protection, James." Lily grinned, then laughed teasingly. Harry tried to tell her that he was not James, but she vanished into smoke, and the card changed from Empress to the opprobrious Tower symbol.
Blonde hair shone despite the lack of proper lighting. Draco Malfoy had surfaced, and he reached out, grasping the piece of stiffened paper with long fingers, then disappeared, just as Lily had done, leaving Harry...
...Awake. Very, very, awake. He jerked involuntarily, green eyes snapping wide open, raw, unabridged torrent of emotion left unchecked.. Cheeks flushed, Harry scanned the common room. The embers of the hearth had all but died out, and it took several seconds before he realized that his own fingers were clutching the fabric of the couch hard, just short of ripping into the material.
Shaken, Harry forced his muscles to relax all at once, and he collapsed backwards on the seat, staring unseeingly up at the ceiling. Dawn would come soon, he hoped, and vanquish the ghosts that flitted through his psyche like the transparent specters they were.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
"It's your protection, James," Lily grinned, then laughed teasingly. Ginny tried to speak, to tell the redhead that the person she was addressing was not James, but Harry's mother vanished into smoke before she could, and the card changed from Empress to Lovers. Draco Malfoy's face surfaced, and he turned, the usual leer pasted onto his features. He laughed, fingers closing around the Lovers and then disappeared as Lily and done, leaving...
Ginny Weasley woke up, hands clutching violently at her linens. Eyes wide, she was filled with the sudden, preternatural, sickening, abhorrent sensation that she had not been in her own body, that she had been seeing through somebody else's eyes, despite the fact that the memory of the dream was fading with startling rapidity, leaving behind only a vague sense of insecurity, and the sudden need to dance memory back to life. Throwing the covers off, she attempted to fill her lungs with much-needed air, but found it too stuffy to do so. Ginny rolled over, avoiding collision with the floor by mere inches, then stumbled to the window, thrusting her head out and greedily drinking oxygen.
Not enough. Good Merlin, still not enough.
Withdrawing, she glanced frantically around. The unprotected stairwell caught her line of vision.
Throwing a backwards glance to make sure everybody was truly asleep (Hermione in particular), Ginny bolted for the opening, managed to reach the bottom of the stairs without her knees giving way, then set her sights on the exit to the Gryffindor common room.
Not before catching a glimpse of Harry, however.
She paused, eyes locked with hopeless tenacity upon the slumbering form. Girlish wistfulness, ideality, virtue, all came rushing back to her. It had been a young firstling's infatuation with the Boy-Who-Lived, nothing more, nothing less. How many afternoons she'd spent, fantasizing, how many days, nights, wasted, wishing he were her's. Affection in vain.
They were friends now, not close friends, mind you, but friends. Ginny had stepped back, taken a good, long look at the rift between Harry and herself, a rift that would most likely never be bridged, and then turned away, not wanting to look anymore. She had run from the scene of the impossible, seeking solace in a Ravenclaw named Bran Athertorn, a boy of her age.
Everybody knew what "solace" had very quickly turned into, one hot summer's night in one of Hogwarts' many rooms, a place where both Bran and Ginny should never have been in the first place.
The first loss of innocence had been a bittersweet hymn--grasping hands and whispered voices and screamingly obvious incompetence to perform. And when morning's first rays had melted the mist from the outer grounds, when the sun had broken down the walls of dusk, he was gone, she had come to a rude awakening, alone, feeling as though nothing had been gained and that everything had been lost.
The rest of her days as a fourteen-year-old had slipped by in a haze of languid summer, irritating brothers, overbearing parents, and a secret only she knew about.
Ginny was wary when it came to the carnal now. The house of flesh, human pleasure, had remained untouched ever since Bran Atherton. The thought of waking up alone...the thought of plainly being alone frightened her. Aloneness was cold; aloneness was savage; aloneness was an empty void that you would spend the rest of your life floating in once you stepped over the edge.
She didn't want that.
Clambering out of the portrait-hole, Ginny found corridor dark, deserted. She shivered. Dawn would arrive in a few hours.
Inhaling sharply, Ginny continued walking, pacing back and forth, up and down. Blood pounded in her veins; memory sang in her ear, repeating one word over and over again:
Alone, alone, alone, alone, alone...!
I don't want to be alone! she answered defiantly.
Footsteps from behind alerted her: somebody else was awake. She froze, startled, then turned when a familiar voice rang out, bouncing from wall to wall in an endless cacophony of sound.
"Weasley. What are you doing out here?"
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
"Weasley. What are you doing out here?"
Draco Malfoy looked undeniably different when the sneer that usually graced his features had vanished, replaced by an expression of genuine bewilderment. He waited for her to reply, and was semi-jolted back to reality at her words. Ginny stared levelly at him; perhaps it was Ron's disdain, perhaps it was Fred and George's attitude towards 'all things Malfoy.' Whatever it was, it had served well in nurturing a certain brand of animosity between the two, something that had developed over time, finally exploding into a silent war between the heir of one of the wizarding world's oldest families, and the shy, redheaded girl - the type whose father would castrate any boy stupid enough to so much as lay a finger on his baby.
"My name is Ginny," she corrected, sounding very much like a nagging old biddy. "And these are the steps to the Gryffindor tower. I don't see what a Slytherin is doing around here, unless it involved some diabolical scheme I'd have to rat you out to McGonagall for."
Ginny had expected something like pure, unadulterated fear to cross Draco's visage, but all he did was shake his head, as though he were too busy to be snarky. Ginny grimaced in distaste, then watched in curiosity as Harry Potter's nemesis hesitated once before turning.
"Don't try anything on me that would call for revenge, Weasley," he said, falling backwards into his old, unpleasant self. He began striding to the bottom of the stairwell from whence he'd come, Ginny's murderous stare on his retreating form, wishing desperately that the staircase would decide to shift itself at the last minute and leave Draco in complete and utter disorientation.
She got something better.
Malfoy walked off the last step with a jaunty sort of twist...
...and ran right into none other but the head of Slytherin.
Draco, in a mad attempt at stopping, bowled head-first into Snape. The Potions master gave a startled yelp and went flying backwards, landing in a heap of black robes, shrieking for Draco to get off of him. Draco responded by complying, hastily removing himself from on top of his professor. He would have been content to slink off into the shadows had Severus not grasped him by the collar and dragged him backwards, forcing him to stay. There was a stony glint in Snape's black eyes.
I don't believe it, Ginny thought wryly. The halls seem to be seething with Slytherins tonight.
Severus' voice was hard as he adressed his star pupil.
"I want to know," he hissed, "what exactly is going on here; why are you out prowling the halls when you're supposed to be in bed?"
Something about her teacher's tone of voice told Ginny he was really saying something along the lines of: "I don't care how late you stay out. What I want to know is why you were careless enough to allow yourself to be caught?"
Draco seemed at a loss for words. Snape looked furious; for a moment in time, Ginny assumed he was going to take away points from his own house. Instead, he released Draco and turned his eyes upon the youngest Weasley girl. His voice barely totaled a whisper.
"And you, Weasley. Do you have a good explanation for being out here?"
Ginny was about to say that no, she didn't, but neither did Draco. She never got the chance to; Snape jerked a thumb over his shoulder and in the direction of the empty staff room. Ginny blanched. This would make the third detention she'd had with Snape in one year. Vexed, the girl's reticent aegis (3) dropped, and she spoke up, demonstrating the reason as to why she'd been sorted into Gryffindor.
"But Professor Snape! That's not fair," she protested. There was a sanguinary blade in her tone this time, something that very rarely reared its head. Snape raised one eyebrow.
"What was that, Ms. Weasley?"
"I said..." she hesitated. Draco was shooting her eager looks, displaying his willingness to see her all but decapitated. She turned away from her fellow miscreant and glared up at Hogwarts' most hated teacher. "...I said...that's not fair."
Severus actually managed to look exasperated. "Not fair that I'm punishing you for being somewhere you were never supposed to be in the first place?"
"No," Ginny plunged on, regardless of the consequences. "Not that. You're not fair, that's what."
Draco's expression had gone from malice to fascinated horror to spiteful pity in a matter of seconds.
"You're not fair. This is bias. I'm going to get in trouble, and Malfoy's going to get away with murder just because he's in Slytherin. Your house."
"Enough," Snape snapped. He looked tired, fed up, weary...livid. Gesturing towards the staff room once more, he ordered Ginny towards it. "On you go, Weasley. I'll be there to deal with you in a few minutes."
Draco, who had been watching the entire time, seemed about to vanish back up the corridor when Snape halted him.
"Not so fast, Mister Malfoy."
Draco looked stunned. Snape's face was set in stone.
"You, too. In the staff room, with Ms Weasley."
Draco glanced unbelievingly at his Potions professor. When Snape's expression refused to waver, he stormed off after Ginny, mumbling something about how his father would hear of this. Ginny snickered to herself, then quelled her own mirth at the prospect of having to spend what looked like ten entire minutes in the staff room with none other than Draco Malfoy.
Good Merlin...this is going to be a long night...
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
The origins of Tarot are unclear, revealing themselves to neither wizards nor Muggles. Many speculate that this art of Divinations has roots in Greece or Egypt; some even go as far as to guess that they have roots in the Orient. Disregarding where they came from, Tarot was made especially popular in both France and Italy in the late 1400s.
Harry lifted his quill from the parchment and sighed. All of his weariness, all of the sleep lost, seemed to settle on the still air and then vanish with that single breath. The deck of cards were scattered in random positions upon the lifeless stone of the steps leading to the Ravenclaw tower. Pliant rays of early-morning sunlight cascaded through a skylight, spilling onto the floor and creating vortexes of the contemplative mood that settles with such subtle ease when one has locked himself away in a quiet place.
The quill hovered for just a moment longer, then dipped artfully back to its task.
There are many names for 'Tarot,' some of which may aid in pointing us in the right direction as to the whereabouts of their origin:
1.) Trao....a Hebrew word, meaning 'gate.'
2.) Orat...Latin, 'it speaks.'
3.) Taru...Hindu, for 'cards.'
4.) Torah....Hebrew, 'the law.'
From what can be gathered by looking at these names...
The quill lifted and fell, lifted and fell, all in turn. Harry found his own foot tapping out a rhythm to go along with the steady up and down, soon becoming immersed in his own thoughts, as he usually did while writing.
The Ravenclaw staircase seemed the most logical place to get some work done. It was mostly silent around this area, and the students themselves had the notorious reputation of heading down to great hall for breakfast rather late. Pausing for a moment, Harry rubbed a sore neck. The vibrant green of his gaze came to settle upon the cards' casing, carelessly tossed into its own little corner.
Lily Evans.
Friend. Martyr. Parent.
Stranger.
Concentrate, he told himself. Concentrate.
...thus concluding, we now come to the second matter: a demonstration of the interaction between two particular cards. Namely, the Emperor and the Heirophant. These symbols reinforce each other, both placing heavy emphasis on a structured way of doing things....
Harry lifted his head. His eyes fell inevitably upon the Empress card, so opposite to the tokens he was reporting on. Life. Abundance. Luxuriance. He squinted.
Something was wrong...
...something was....
?
The hand guiding Harry's quill fell motionless. He reached down, the gestures his fingers made an eloquent, silent expression of true confusion. They closed around the Empress, lifted her up, and his eyes narrowed.
Words filled the bottom half of the card, words that had not been there in the first place. Harry squinted harder, surprised when the text became readable to him, and even more so at the language that it was in:
"Il gioco finché la Scheda è trovata, o gioca nell'Eternità ."
"Italian, Mr. Potter," said the voice at Harry's back, the presence he had been sensing for the past five minutes. He turned to find Severus Snape hovering somewhere beyond the stairs, looking just as perplexed as Harry felt. "I see it's finally shown up, after all these years."
"Professor Snape...what?..."
Snape looked resigned. "Come with me, Potter."
