Written for the What Are The Odds Flash Comp organized by the HP Rare Pairs Discord server.
Ship requested : Igor Karkaroff/Sybill Trelawney.
"Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love."
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Igor Karkaroff wasn't a traitor for nothing.
Especially now that he knew he was right: there was a future. A better future.
A lot of times, he had wondered: was it all worth it? As he'd wake up next to the not-so-young woman with all the bracelets and chains, stroking lightly her bare shoulder in an affectionate gesture, his answer confined to the obvious.
He was so defenseless against those big, clear blue eyes. Blue, but nothing like the sea or the sky; nothing like aquamarines, topaz, turquoise or sapphires, for no crystal or stone could if only equal a hundredth of their preciousness to him.
She had little specks of golden-brown spots in there - it was like Greece. Her skin smelled like Greece.
He hadn't traveled there, but she told him she knew they would eventually venture in Athens before he died. She knew he was doomed, but she welcomed him nonetheless, as if it didn't matter. As if he was some kind of long-lost lover she had just found again in this life. As if... she knew him in a way while knowing nothing about his reality.
They wished they would have more mornings like this, where he could hold her in his arms while she rested, telling him the lucid dreams she'd made that night and the vivid imaginings she had about them, no matter how crazy or irrealizable, because he would always listen.
He'd travel with her to unknown, foreign countries and destinations he had no idea before.
They had met for such a short time, but they still had met and he could have thanked all the Gods he knew, in slavic and in all other languages he could possibly think of for that accident to happen.
He had spilled a honey jar at breakfast while she was helping herself, staining her favorite lithomancy bracelet, coating it with a layer of sweet, sticky, mellifluous matter. The precious stones were unusable for weeks after that and she wouldn't help him anymore to calm down his anxieties by trying to predict how long and at which conditions he could outlive the hunt, there, outside. Traitors never survive long if they don't know how to surround themselves properly.
And then it was like tides. They were always together in orbit of the other, always passing by the same hallways, bumping into each other, clashing furs and pearls, glasses and beard. She'd say "excuse me, I didn't see you" and he'd half-apologize, "pay a little attention", and then her eyes would become rounded, enlarged and she'd really noticed him then.
"No... it's not that I haven't seen you. In fact, I've already Seen you..."
Later, on nights when he couldn't fall asleep, despite being protected by the castle walls and Dumbledore's temporary protection, when the Dark Mark on his arm reminded him of his former aches and pains, he'd end up strolling along the side of the North Tower, carefully avoiding the Astronomy Tower where Professor Sinistra was giving demonstrations to her students.
"Are you lost, Miss Trelawney?"
"No. This maze of a castle won't have my Sight or my sense of direction!" she perorated into the night, a bottle of sherry in hand.
"You're not walking straight."
"It is you who are lost, Mr. Karkaroff. You may not believe it, but you are the one who is lost."
It had taken him a long time to accept it, so long that today he would not for anything in the world do without the gravitation into which she was drawing him. He let himself be told fortune-telling and palm reading (and her eyes filled with hot tears that he only wished to brush away with a caress) whereas he had always dismissed it as an old wives' mystery, despite the respect he had for the professional women who exercised these talents in his native land.
Her skin was an invitation to a journey. He could hear the bells singing and the faint reverence of orthodox chants in her voice, recalling of the sacred days in Russia.
They were doomed but he always had an escape plan. They would meet together in another life, in another plane of existence.
It was a great adventure. He'd learned that she was not closing the door on love, even star-crossed, lifeline impossible, tragic ones. Her theatrical desires welcomed him and like the waves, would let him go crashing on the shore of whe wrong island. Like the waves, she would cry and throw dice at him because cards were unforgiving and crystal balls all too clear, and still she refused to tell what she knew until she'd fell into a trance-like state, fast-paced words finally out of her mouth, pouring into her classroom like a hurricane.
He remembered. It was at this moment they had given into their bond for the first time. Her sherry-flavored lips and the remnants of tears on her face had swept him into a stormy sea where, by holding on tightly to him, he had taught her to finally let go.
She'd patiently let him remove one by one all of her bracelets, talismans and other trinkets to embrace the bony edges of her body, her fragile wrists and ankles. She'd let him worship her body like a temple and map her freckles like the stars she hated for their silence, allowing her to seek warmth and protection in his arms, accepting the sign of all his disgraces's ugly look. All that mattered was the future, or rather, the present as present is nothing less than a future-in-the-making.
Memories of Athens came flooding before his eyes. They had spent late spring holidays there, endlessly visiting museums and ancient ruins, hand in hand as if they were racing time, daring the prophecy to happen. He'd wake her up in the middle of the night, making love with tender desperation as they could sense the end nearing closer and closer.
When the mark had burned again, he had fled and returned to Greece alone. She knew he was in danger, told him that it was the end, but he wouldn't listen. His goodbye embrace had the taste of an adieu and when he was gone she could not process nor the present, nor the future, drowning in sherry bottles, her cards and crystal balls tucked away out of sight, out of reach, in the closets of her apartments.
(...)
The bells of the holy Orthodox church of Ipapantis were ringing at ten o'clock in the evening when they entered his hotel room and led him barefoot, under a balaclava, through the city towards what appeared to be the deserted cove of a large sea coast.
And then he was, surrounded by the prison-worn statures and grimacing faces of his former colleagues in black capes. There was nothing their squealing laughter could reach, because he had lived, he had loved, he had been warned and been mastering his destiny until the very end. What had seemed a senseless escape had become the future he had built for himself and that she had always expected. So how could he regret for a single moment having turned against his family on the intuition of better life choices?
No, he hadn't betrayed them for nothing, whatever that nothing might represent in their eyes. He wouldn't let them soil those stolen moments, those stolen pearls and jewels, those blurry eyes open wide to the world, turned towards him and the future. He'd only regret that she'd have to mourn his passing.
Her name was all he could think about as he collapsed to the ground, etched in pain.
(...)
It was when his body was found dead, severely beaten-up, drown off the aegean coast, that she felt the impact. The adventure was definitely over. She wouldn't see him again. She had let him go away…
She'd wanted to gouge out her own eyes, but she too, alas, was doomed... how could she had forgotten such a thing?
Minerva and Poppy had found her disheveled, screaming her lungs out, her tarot cards torn apart, crystal balls and tea cups shattered everywhere on the ground of her bedroom. Dazed in alcohol and adrenalin, traces of tears still fresh on her cheeks, she was walking on shards which cut her skin without looking or even seeming to feel any pain.
"Sybill Ophelia Trelawney, in Merlin's name, can you tell me what is happening here?"
"F-for all this time… h-he was s-seeing and… I was b-blind… We knew it would end like this… I thought we had come to terms with it…why does it hurt so bad, huh? Tell me, why does love hurt so deep?..."
She broke into tears again, fists clenched on her crumpled skirt. Suddenly risen to her feet, she started to shout to the ceiling, as if talking to the sky with large and brutal gestures, beating her chest:
"Ah, fatal stars, snakes servants of death, know that I will avenge this affront! Take my affliction and our doomed souls as an example. Take away this gift; I don't want it anymore."
"She's in a delirious state," diagnosed Poppy Pomfrey. "Sybill, do you listen to me? You need to calm down, okay? Count to ten with me."
"I will drown where he drowned, I'll asphyxiate the same! Count to thirteen instead, for it is the sheer number of my karma-negative destiny."
Minerva, who had been distraught until then, walked over to the debris on the floor and took a trembling Sybill, crying her eyes out, into her arms. Poppy helped support their colleague and friend as she collapsed.
After several months in the care of the therapists at St. Mungo's, Sybill regained her sanity and her Sight, although her heart was not quite the same. The story that had gone too far remained the longest-kept secret of her long life, that of the traitor and the Seer.