AN
Uhhh, Content Warning for disturbing, morbid images related to dead things depicted on Rhea's cards.
1992, 1st year
"Are you okay?" Harry asked, curiously eying the boy.
He had not been expecting to run into Neville Longbottom hopping through the corridor on his way from the library.
"Looks like the leg-locker curse," Daphne commented.
Neville Longbottom looked at them with wide eyes, frozen to the spot.
"Was it one of us?" Rhea asked, the lightness of her tone at odds with her words.
Harry saw the boy gulp, then nod hesitantly.
"Draco?" Blaise asked and received another nod in return.
"Hmm …" Daphne gave him a considering look, then took out her wand and, ignoring Neville Longbottom's violent flinch, cast the counter-course.
"Er – th-thank you," the boy said in a small voice.
"You're welcome. Would you like us to tell Draco not to bother you anymore?"
"You would do that?" he gaped at her. "I mean – Sorry." He winced. "Would he actually listen to you?"
"Of course. All I want in return is a small favour."
Harry watched Neville Longbottom's face fall instantly.
Rhea looked between them curiously, then over her shoulder at something Harry couldn't see, then excused herself to 'walk her pet fish'. Harry only noticed then that Theodore had managed to disappear silently once more. It kept worrying Harry, because Theodore didn't have the same safety on his own that Rhea had – or seemed to have, anyway. Luckily, so far, nothing had happened. Nothing that Harry knew of, at least.
The larger the group the Slytherins walked the castle with, the less students from other houses bothered them. Really, Harry's two incidents were the nastiest they had all experienced so far. They were lucky, if Pansy's horror stories about the older students could be believed.
Harry was too lost in his thoughts to catch the rest of the exchange. By the time his mind returned to the present, they had already continued on their way to the common room. He really wanted to know what favour Daphne had wanted in return, but he couldn't very well ask about it now. That would be – No. Just – no.
At least he knew Daphne well enough to be reassured she would never ask for anything unreasonable. Still. Harry wanted to know.
Maybe Healer Wright had been right. Harry still thought it wasn't that bad, but spacing out had never helped him before.
o
"There's something going on with the groundskeeper," Pansy said during breakfast one morning.
"Like there's something going on with Professor Quirrel?" Rhea asked.
Pansy was about to continue, but then Rhea's words seemed to register and she turned her head to the other girl. "What? What do you know about Quirrel that I don't?"
Rhea shrugged. "His health keeps fluctuating. It's confusing me. And all the cards are telling me is some gibberish about fey alliances and twice-told tales."
"His health keeps fluctuating?"
"As if his body can't decide whether to slowly die or not."
It said a lot about Harry's housemates that no one even looked disturbed anymore at whatever Rhea said these days.
"He does look rather sickly, doesn't he?" Blaise noted.
"You were saying, Pansy?" Draco spoke up.
"Hm? Oh, yes. The groundskeeper is hiding a secret in his hut. I want to know what it is."
A worrying glint entered Draco's eyes. "We could take a look during the next Quidditch match. No one will be around to catch us, then."
"Oh, my," Daphne said teasingly. "Draco Malfoy willing to miss out on watching a Quidditch match? Wonders never cease."
Draco turned up his nose at her. "A good mystery is worth it."
"You don't even know if there is a mystery to begin with."
"It's that oaf of a groundskeeper – he's always hiding something."
If Draco's absence at the match hadn't been odd enough, Rhea's presence definitely made things weird.
"Just a feeling," she had told them when asked, which couldn't be a good sign.
Surprise: It wasn't.
Harry didn't know what he had done to deserve two Bludgers going after him, when he had been innocently sitting among the spectators – and why the bloody hell was Madam Hooch not doing anything about that?! – but the Slytherins made room for Harry to dodge the damn things, several shouting for the teachers, and Severus made it in time before one of the damn things managed to seriously injure Harry.
Harry caught Severus' eye. He knew exactly what Severus was thinking in that moment and not at all surprised when he took Harry to the side later and told him to be extra careful from now on. Draco, Pansy and Tracey took the news with grim expressions when the others told them what had transpired. Their story about a fire-breathing dragon hatchling apparently paled in comparison. Harry just wanted to go to sleep.
o
Harry took a deep breath.
"You need to be careful around Quirrel," Severus had told him. "I don't have any definite proof, yet, but there is something not right with that man."
"Rhea?" Harry asked and the girl looked up at him from where she was lounging in one of the common room armchairs.
Almost everyone else was still outside, celebrating Imbolc, but Rhea had disappeared quietly early on and Harry was certain he wouldn't find a better opportunity than this.
"Would you – I wanted to ask if you could – perhaps read your cards for me?"
Rhea gave him a blank stare, then swung around to face him properly. "You would like a card reading?"
"Yes, please."
Rhea tilted her head. "The girls' dormitory is empty right now, we won't be disturbed there. Let's go."
"What? But boys aren't allowed there."
"I know. It won't be a problem."
"Er – If you say so."
Harry didn't know what he had expected, but no one stopped them on their way up and the girls' dormitory looked almost identical to his own. The beds were the same, though there were only five. All the furniture was the same. Just like the boys, the girls had all made their beds differently, put different things on their side tables and desks, but, overall, it was neither neater nor messier.
Rhea had him sit on the desk furthest from the window and dragged a chair from another desk over, then went to her bedside table to retrieve a set of cards.
"Alright. You have a specific question in mind?"
Harry blinked. "Not as such."
"Then think of one. It works best with specific questions."
Harry took a moment to think about that. About the two separate incidents that might have been nothing. (Though the Bludgers definitely were not nothing.) About Severus' warning about Quirrel. Rhea noticing an oddity in Quirrel's health. Rhea being able to vaguely predict the future or something with her cards.
"Okay," he said. "I would like to –"
"I don't need to know your question," Rhea said as she shuffled her cards. "You simply need to concentrate on it. The connection would be stronger if we touched, but neither of us would be comfortable with that, so you need to be careful not to let your thoughts stray."
Harry blinked. "Alright."
There was a moment of quiet where the shuffling of the cards and the water lapping against the windows were the only sounds. Then Rhea nodded to herself and started putting cards on the table.
"I usually go for seven card spreads," she told Harry as she slowly laid out a flattened V-shape. "And I prefer to look at them as a whole rather than go one by one. I heard others do it differently."
"I wouldn't know," Harry said.
When she flipped the first card over, Harry's heart sank. When she flipped over the next and the one after that, he felt the blood drain from his face. All seven cards were monochrome and depicted … dead things.
"What –"
"Hm?" Rhea looked up at him. "Oh, don't worry – they're all like that. Doesn't necessarily mean something bad." She gave him a lopsided, yet unsettling smile. "Doesn't necessarily mean something good, either."
Harry blinked. "Oh. They – er – fit you."
That put one of Rhea's better smiles on her face. "One of my greater uncles designed them."
"Greater uncle?"
"Brother of my great-great-something-grandparent." She made a dismissive gesture. "Too many generations back to count."
"They must be quite old then."
The cards looked almost new. Harry wondered what kind of spells had been put on them to keep them in such good condition.
"Not at all, they were a gift handmade for me."
Harry almost gaped at her, before he remembered himself. "Your greater uncle is still alive? He must be hundreds of years old!"
"Eh? No, he's not. He died ages ago."
What.
"What?"
Rhea arched an eyebrow at him.
"But you said -"
"Ohh! I thought you knew. He's a Necromancer, Harry. It's kind of our thing not to stay dead. Doesn't mean we return to life, either. If Death grants us immortality upon our demise as a reward for our loyalty to Him, we return as undead beings."
Harry blinked.
"Now, give me a moment to look at these."
Harry looked at the cards. Looked some more. Decided that was enough and turned to stare out the window instead.
"You got distracted," Rhea eventually said.
Harry blinked, dragging his eyes back to her. "How do you know?"
Rhea tilted her head, eyes still on the cards. "Because there are two stories in here and neither is complete.
"This one," Rhea said, tapping the card second from the left, depicting an unbound, kneeling person about to be beheaded by a looming shape standing behind them, "in the position of past influences – represents wounds of the soul. Traumatic experiences. The feeling of something essentially missing, of being inferior, of being small and weak and never enough.
"This one," she tapped the third card from the right, showing a dark, looming house with skeleton birds on the roof, turned on its head, "for possible obstacles – represents home. Reversed, it stands for not feeling at home, not feeling safe, being afraid and being hurt.
"And this one," the second card from the right, a skeleton holding a candle, "in the position of future influences – is a tentative encouragement to take your life into your own hands and accept the help others are willing to give."
She scrutinised Harry intensely for a moment, then nodded to herself. "That would be the distraction, then. Now, as you will have noticed, these three leave a lot of room for interpretation. The other four are more straightforward."
Harry followed her gaze back down at the cards.
"A past enemy." On the very left, a horrifying-looking corpse with a manic grin, holding a knife with dark stains, turned on its head.
"Outside influences are a stolen object." The third card from the left, probably on its head though Harry couldn't tell for sure, skeleton hands reaching for a crystal heart.
"A struggle between life and death for the present." Right at the bottom in the middle, a white skull and a burning black candle balanced on a scale.
"And a possible outcome will be an unexpected confrontation." On the very right, two dead wolves biting the other's neck, fur matted with dark stains, their ribs showing through missing flesh.
Rhea tilted her head once more. She was starting to remind Harry of a bird. "Is this to do with the Bludgers? Then it seems an enemy from your past might be trying to take your life," she said matter-of-factly. "Although this one here," she tapped the card in the middle. "Doesn't necessarily pertain to yourself and your enemy. I got this one for Quirrel a few times."
Quirrel.
"The interpretation is of course entirely up to you," Rhea continued, picking up her cards again and reshuffling them into her deck – though Harry noticed that she lingered on the one that showed the balanced scales. The struggle between life and death. Quirrel's card. "Since you alone have the full picture."
"Thank you," Harry said, as was polite.
Rhea gave him an eerie grin. "No, thank you. This was quite enlightening. And it took off some of the edge of doing Imbolc rituals."
"Oh. You don't like the Imbolc, then?"
"I didn't say that. It's just that the cleansing rituals don't quite agree with me. The rest is fine."
"May I ask why that is?"
Rhea gave him an indecipherable look at that and then merely tapped the corner of one of her unusual eyes.
o
There was nothing Harry could do, really. He told Blaise and Daphne about his suspicions regarding Quirrel and that Professor Snape had warned him to be careful around the man. He didn't tell the others, because he honestly couldn't deal with how overbearing they would become again. (And Rhea already knew, anyway.)
Quirrel, they all noticed, was getting paler and thinner as the weeks went by. ("Guess his body decided on dying, after all," was Rhea's comment.) Whatever was going on, Harry hoped it would prevent the man from attempting to kill Harry again – if the Bludgers had truly been his doing. (And the stairs, maybe. Quirrel had been nearby, after all, according to Severus.)
Around Ostara, the teachers suddenly increased the students' workload, essentially confining them to the library for all of their free time and the entirety of the Easter Holidays. It took Harry's mind off of his worries for a bit, but even he was not excited about the amount of homework he was expected to do.
"How are you keeping up with all of this and still finding the time to read fiction novels?" Blaise asked Rhea on a particularly bad day, his voice dripping with incredulity.
Rhea, nose buried in what Harry thought might have been the magical equivalent of fantasy science fiction, made a vague wave with her free hand. "Do it during class or not at all."
Daphne raised her head to join Harry and Blaise in staring at her.
"What about your marks?"
"What do you think?" Rhea looked at them over the edge of her book. "I'm pretty sure I'm driving half the teachers mad." She returned to reading, adding – almost as an afterthought, "And it's the end-of-the-year exams that count the most, anyway."
"Then you should really do the assignments," Daphne said. "They are to help us prepare for those exams, after all."
Rhea didn't even think about it. "Nah."
Harry looked between them, then went back to his own book, declining to make a comment. He wasn't the only one who still managed to get a bit of leisure reading in here and there – Theodore and Oliver had also finished the current load already. Sue would surely have been done by now as well, if she wasn't such a perfectionist. The others all appeared to be in various states of frantic desperation. Or they had simply given up, if Vincent's soft snores were anything to go by.
There was a sudden gasp and then Pansy frantically shushed them all, an almost manic glint in her eyes.
"I knew it!" she whispered, "I knew it!"
Harry craned his neck to try and see what Pansy was seeing, then noticed Draco's smug and Tracey's exasperated expressions and realised what this must have been about. As if wanting to confirm his suspicions, Hagrid the groundskeeper emerged from the aisles. Looking around surreptitiously and trying to hide a couple of books behind his back.
Pansy and Draco were the most innocent students you could find in the library right until Hagrid was out of sight once more.
"Theo, correct me if I'm wrong – that was the section on dragons, wasn't it?"
"Theo's not here anymore," Blaise commented, amused.
Pansy looked around, blinking owlishly. "I didn't even notice him leave."
"Well," Draco said, returning from the same aisle Hagrid had emerged from mere moments ago. "I can confirm that it was indeed the section about dragons."
"Hah!" Pansy clapped her hands, only to get shushed by Daphne.
"Quiet down," Daphne whispered harshly. "Do you want to get us thrown out by Madam Pince?"
"It's not like we're getting anything done anyway," Pansy said, already rolling up her scrolls. "You coming, Draco?"
As Harry and the rest were informed during dinner that day, the groundskeeper had drawn all the curtains of his hut tightly shut, smoke was constantly rising from the chimney despite the warmer temperatures outside – all very suspicious, probably trying to hatch an egg.
This little obsession of Pansy's and Draco's continued on for several weeks unchanged. Harry was honestly impressed they still managed to keep up with the homework assignments regardless.
He couldn't have missed the moment something changed, because Pansy excitedly barged into the common room, announcing that they had seen the dragon hatchling and, yes, it was indeed of the fire-breathing kind. Kept in a wooden hut.
"That can only go well," Blaise said.
"And what now?" Daphne asked pointedly.
Pansy gave her a blank look. "What do you mean 'what now'?"
Daphne raised an eyebrow at her. "What are you going to do with this information?"
"Why would I need to do anything with it? All I wanted was to know."
Draco eyed her sceptically. "This is the perfect opportunity to get that oaf into trouble."
Harry still did not understand what Draco had against the man.
He ultimately decided to just keep watching it all go down in exasperation shared by the other Slytherin first-years as Pansy and Draco kept bickering, occasionally interrupted by Blaise or Daphne or Tracey.
The next day, Hagrid's hut caught on fire.