Desiring Other Times
Chapter 19 – Parcae
Disclaimer: For the love of (insert name of deity), are any of you stupid enough to think I own Harry Potter? Anyone?
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One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has all been suffering, nothing but suffering.
Jane Austen
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They say that 'Life is a jest; and all things show it.' Or, that 'Life is just one damned thing after another.' Personally, I agree more with the latter interpretation of our mournful existence on this earth, but perhaps it is more applicable to Harry's life. Almost killed by Voldemort when we were barely a year old, then again when he was eleven, then losing his magic… the worst that has happened to me was that I was present that night thirteen years ago, and just got expelled – okay, withdrawn from Hogwarts. My troubles are hardly anything against his – and to think I'm his elder brother, even if only by a few minutes.
Mum and Dad really laid into me when I got home, but it was still like that time when they had to choose another school for Harry, except they didn't get so angry at him, for obvious reasons. Almost immediately after they finished shouting at me (I think what little ice had formed on the roof had cracked and shattered from their volume), they began discussing which school to send me to.
"…State College?"
A shaking head. "No, they're not as accredited as others."
A pause. That had been their fifth suggestion, ranging from all sorts of respectable but more local schools of magic.
Mum sighed. "Well, if you're going to shoot down every school in Europe that I've suggested-"
"How about Australia?"
"Too far."
Silence. "America?"
Mum sighed, again. "Which one? There's so many."
"Er… how about the one that Hermione girl, the Muggle, the one she's going to?"
"Ah." A little bit of satisfaction entered Mum's voice. "Muggle courses as well…"
"And he'd have a friend to help him settle in. Responsible, like you." Dad's voice turned sly.
"That… would be acceptable, I believe." She tried to keep the pleasure at the compliment out of her voice but even I could hear it, despite the heavy melancholy that had settled onto me.
I sighed, and leaned my head against the window. So Malfoy had somehow heard that the destruction of Gryffindor Tower was somehow linked to me and Henry… and he'd convinced the Board that I should be expelled for the incredibly catastrophic damage. It wasn't as if Dumbledore could do anything less – we had partially destroyed one of the Wizarding's monuments, and it would be remembered for decades onwards that the 'Chosen One' had accidentally reduced Gryffindor Tower to rubble.
That is, if word got out – and considering Malfoy's rather malicious mindset, the media were probably already rolling off the first editions of the latest News Flash. All in all, getting out of the country seemed like a very good idea.
But what about the Triwizard Tournament? After, well, the latest mess I had perpetrated, surely the Tournament wouldn't still be held at Hogwarts? I shook my head – it really wasn't any of my business, in the end. The Tournament was for students past their majority, and I certainly didn't pass that requirement.
"Jeremy? Come here, now." I turned and shuffled over to where Mum and Dad were looking at me rather sternly.
I could feel my torso stiffening with tension as part of my mind ran through all sorts of emotional guilt trips my parents were sure to put me through before finally closing up the conversation. The chill of anticipated fear thrummed through my veins and another part of me (the cynical part, this time) wondered just how I would ever be able to face up against Voldemort if I was this scared of my own parents.
Because I care about them, and what they think of me.
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"…and due to some, uh, unexpected construction work being conducted at Hogwarts, the Triwizard Tournament has been rescheduled to later this year, and will be held here at Washington State Wizarding and Witchcraft Academy!" Cheers and raucous celebration reverberated about the hall, with murmuring gossip and some disappointed barracking taking a backseat in terms of volume.
The Headmistress of Washing State Academy had glanced at Jeremy during her announcement, and he had frozen when he realised that despite the fact that Dumbledore had pinned all the blame on Henry, there were people that knew that he had still been somewhat involved in the situation, so to speak.
Perhaps Headmistress Belinda Eckhard had been immensely curious (as humans are wont to be) as to why the Chosen One would cross the seas to attend school in another continent. It wouldn't be unreasonable to wonder – after all, if he had been any other student, she would have been instantly suspicious that said student had been behind some horrible disaster (or at least a rather salacious scandal).
Hermione hadn't been clued in as to why Jeremy was there (Dumbledore and Jeremy's parents had invented some complicated 'security issue' to explain to the media just why the Boy-Who-Lived was transferring to an American college), so she had been rather ecstatic that he would be joining her at the Washington State Academy. A hug later (and some internal promises on Jeremy's part to never mention that to Ron), Hermione had proceeded to show him about the college.
It wasn't an old established academic institution like Hogwarts – in fact, it had only been around for a hundred years. The United States Muggle government had a surprisingly large amount of power over the Magical community – this was due to the relative youth of 'white' America compared to Britain, and the segregation had been impossible to adhere to during the early colonial years. As such, the Ministry of Magic was more of a department in the Muggle government, and the existing wizards and witches had become so accustomed to this that 'Pureblood Fanaticism' only tended to rear its head among the more fanciful youth and migrants.
So the rather Muggle (and modern) college facilities hadn't been the only things to surprise Jeremy. The purebloods that hadn't acted anywhere near like Malfoy, the way all the wizards and witches seemed to move between the two worlds almost seamlessly and effortlessly…
He turned and grinned happily at Hermione.
"I could get used to this," he quipped.
She smiled wryly, and continued on with her explanation of how a typical school day would run.
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'This must be heaven,' is what Jeremy had thought to himself as he marvelled at the utopia that was Washington State Academy, lost in the euphoria of his first day at a new school.
It had been perfect – a world where the worst arguments were about so-and-so cheating on their love interest. Jeremy had had some troubles with catching up on his Muggle subjects, but Hermione had been there every step of the way. A few days after he'd transferred, several students from Hogwarts had also turned up at WSA. These were students whose parents were rich enough to afford sending them overseas for an education, and had parents who were willing to send their child to a school that taught Muggle subjects.
Cedric Diggory raised his glass to Jeremy and nodded politely, then drained his glass of orange juice. Privately, he would admit that pumpkin juice really wasn't his thing, but to say that out loud would be… well, he wasn't quite sure who it would be insulting, but he certainly didn't want to insult them, whoever they were.
Dumbledore smiled benignly from the staff table, eyes sparkling particularly when he gazed at Jeremy.
Jeremy's eyes widened when the sparkle of laughter in those blue eyes suddenly morphed into raging fury, the aged face lined not with laughter but with wrath, he blinked rapidly and the image was gone. What had that been? Jeremy shook his head slightly, as if to physically clear his head.
He looked at the others in the hall, and had to restrain himself from screaming when he saw corpse-like figures scattered intermittently through the crowd, their pallor and dulled eyes like those of a zombie. Jeremy clenched his eyes shut, whispering in head that this couldn't be happening, he wasn't going crazy, he wasn't…
"…Jeremy? Are you alright? Jeremy?"
Rubbing at his eyes, Jeremy opened them again and turned to face the voice. Hermione peered worriedly at him, and her eyes widened when she caught sight of something odd, something out of the ordinary, something that completely and utterly went against the things she believed in…
But they were in the Magical World, and rules were meant to broken.
"Your eyes!" She whispered, "Your eyes!!"
Panicking, heart racing, Jeremy tried to catch his reflection in the cutlery, in the smooth surface of his drink, anywhere...
"Oh sweet mother of…" He gasped, blinking rapidly and rubbing at his eyes as if it could change it, change it, make him wake up from this, what was going on?
"You're…"
Hermione and Jeremy peered at the reflection of Jeremy's eyes, the pupil-less eyes, the eyes that were pure orbs of white. Even the veins that ran through the whites seemed to have become bleached white, as if his eyes had been replaced with white ivory billiard balls.
"…a Seer," finished Jeremy, untraceable horror shivering through his body. A distant part of him wondered why he seemed to abhor being a Seer, but right now, all he could think was Oh no, no, no, no, NO!
Hermione bit at her lower lip and glanced about – through some stroke of luck, the others were all more focussed on eating and chatting with each other than to wonder why Jeremy was peering at himself in the back of a spoon. She whipped out her wand, muttered Oculi Plasticus, and conjured two brown-hued plastic contacts.
"Here," she muttered, proffering the contacts. "Put them on, quick."
Jeremy nodded and fumbled a little bit as he tried to discreetly put on the contacts.
"You'll have to order some from the Muggle world – these won't stay real for long…" murmured Hermione, as she fretted a little. "I think I can get Mum and Dad to order some for you, but…"
Jeremy blinked a little as his eyes watered in the presence of the plastic contacts, but eventually his eyes grew accustomed to the physical intrusion. "I can still see… them."
"See what?" Hermione sat up a little straighter and peered anxiously at Jeremy.
"Some… some of them… they're… I don't know, but… they look like zombies…"
At that, Hermione's eyes narrowed. "That can't be possible-"
"It's true! I'm not lying, I can see them-"
"No, not that…" She corrected him. "There hasn't been any history of Seers in your family, has there?"
He shook his head.
"Then it should be impossible for you to be that sort of Seer – yes, I'm willing to concede they exist, considering your situation," she added a little testily. "The sort of Seer you're saying you are – those only turn up in families where almost all of them are Seers and strong ones at that!"
"…it doesn't change the fact that I can definitely see the lot of them… the… zombies… and what do you mean?"
Hermione impatiently tapped her fingers on the tabletop. "The kind of Seer you are – you can see what these people will become in some time in the future." She frowned. "And I assume that since you aren't looking at me like I'm some sort of monster that I'll be alive in however many years your seeing into the future."
Jeremy shivered as the full import of Hermione's words sank in. Those zombies weren't zombies – the people that had been sitting there before that had now been replaced by corpses would be dead sometime in the future when Hermione looked like she was twenty something and Dumbledore had turned into some sort of wrathful wizard.
"Oh Merlin…" He muttered hoarsely. "How do… how do I make it stop?!"
Hermione's face twisted in apology. "I don't know, Jeremy. I don't know," she repeated.
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Author's Notes: Sorry for the exceptionally late and short chapter – I'm currently going through end of high school assessment, so yeah, not much time left for me to work on this kind of project.
1. Belinda Eckhard – Teutonic names. Belinda: "beautiful snake". In Teutonic times, the snake signified wisdom, not treachery. Eckhard: "edge brave".
2. OculiPlasticus – Oculi is plural for Oculus, an architectural term for a circular architectural feature, derived from the Latin word for 'eye'. Plasticus is the Latin word that evolved from the Greek 'plastikos' meaning 'mouldable'. This conjuring spell requires some talent in mental imaging, as the mind needs to provide the stimulus for the item conjured.
3. Brands of Sight – there are several types of Seers.
Type 1 is the kind like Trelawney that sometimes blurt out a prophecy and have the talent to read clues in things like tea leaves (anyone can do that, but it requires real talent to be able to discern what is really there).
Type 2 is comprised of scryers that seek out visions of the future through use of objects like crystal balls and scrying bowls.
Type 3 is comprised of all the kinds of Seers that have a more subversive talent for the Sight, and it tends to encroach on the day-to-day life of the Seer in question.
In terms of control, the Sight is an inverse bell curve: Type 1 has a more 'chaotic' ability, while Type 2 is more 'controlled', while Type 3 is almost impossible to control.