Simple Sybill
Author Note: Many thanks to Twisted Biscuit, for giving me this idea!
Professor Trelawney fluttered slightly as she arranged her shawls in the mirror for what appeared to be the fifty-seventh time. Everything had to be just so. She couldn't go out looking like any old commoner on such a momentous occasion, after all. She fluttered some more just thinking about it, and lovingly stroked one of her crystal balls, which was lying on the table next to her.
It was a dream come true, really - she hardly dared to believe that this moment was actually happening. She was going to meet Cassandra Vablatsky; legendary seer and celebrated author of 'Unfogging the Future' – a world renowned exemplary text for furthering education in the art of the Inner Eye.
Professor Trelawney sighed a very deep, satisfied sigh. Then, picking up her cross-stitched handbag, she repositioned her spectacles and made her way out of Hogwarts, and off to her first vacation since she began teaching in the school twenty-four years previously.
She arrived, at last, in a rather normal, ordinary looking Muggle village. Sighing at the sight, Professor Trelawney reassured herself that such people as she must suffer anonymity, when they really deserved adulation, for the sake of protecting the Inner Eye from the chaos and hassle that life in the centre of Wizarding society would bring.
Floating up to a rather plain brown wooden door, she quivered in excitement for a few seconds, re-arranged her beads and bangles, and then raised her wrist to knock daintily upon the wood.
It opened rather violently a few seconds later, giving the Professor such a shock that she took a hurried step backwards and nearly tripped on a trail of lace hanging from the bottom of her petticoat.
The woman framed in the doorway, however, was perhaps even more shocking. She was large; one might use the word butch, if one wanted to be vulgar about appearances, and was wearing a distinctly unattractive Muggle tracksuit and trainers. Her hair was graying and scraped back into a ponytail, while her face was lined, cragged and looking deeply suspicious as she stared at the Professor. There was not a bangle, bead or bracelet in sight.
Professor Trelawney hesitated slightly longer than was perhaps strictly polite, reassured herself that the Inner Eye would never be concerned about something as mundane as appearance, and recollected herself.
"Cassandra Vablatsky," she questioned, cautiously.
"Yeah, that's me," the woman rumbled back at her. "Who're you?"
Professor Trelawney's eyes lit up in delight. She rushed forwards, eager to take the hand of one of the most famous seers in history.
"Sybill Trelawney," she gushed. "I have longed to look upon your face for many years now, my dear! We have both been blessed; you and I, by the Inner Eye, and mine urged me most ardently to seek you out on this day. And so," she finished, with a delighted little tinkle of a laugh, "here I am!"
Cassandra gave a deep sigh. "Oh Lord, you're one of them." She gazed levelly at the woman on her doorstep for a moment, and then rolled her eyes. "Come on then, you better come in."
"You are not enchanted to meet another possessed, as you are, of the sight?" Professor Trelawney, asked, rather put out by the attitude of the older woman. She busied herself with rearranging her shawl to give just the right effect, while attempting to recover her composure.
"Hardly," Cassandra retorted. "I'd rather not have 'the sight' as you'd like to call it, if you must know." She continued, not appearing to notice that her words had frozen the other woman, in incredulity, to the spot. "It's a damned nuisance."
Sybill Trelawney clutched, horrified, onto the many beads surrounding her neck. "Surely you don't mean that, my dear."
"Course I do," said the other woman, amused. "Coffee?"
When the Professor appeared to have lost the function in her legs, Cassandra moved into her kitchen and began busying herself boiling the kettle. When her guest still appeared immobile, she thought she better try again.
"Sybill? Would you like a tea? Coffee?"
The question seemed to recover the other woman slightly. She jangled her bracelets as she moved, and said, in a rather wraithlike voice. "I'd prefer tea. It's always useful to read the tea leaves afterwards – as I'm sure you know," she simpered.
Cassandra shrugged. "Whatever floats your boat. Don't have the leaves though – you'll have to make do with teabags."
"Teabags?!" Professor Trelawney echoed, appearing to swoon slightly. "But how can you portend the dangers and trials you will suffer through in the future with a simple teabag?" she continued, shocked at this woman.
Cassandra had the nerve to snort at her. "I like my future to stay just that; in the future, nicely shrouded in mystery with a whole lot of surprises along the way. Knowing what would come next would take all the fun out of life."
"But… but, my dear!" Sybill Trelawney exclaimed, her hands shaking in a mildly impressive imitation of a butterfly. "Your book; Unfogging the Future – how could you have written such a marvelous text with this… this… dislike you seem to harbor for such a beautiful gift?"
Cassandra laughed. "What? That piece of crap? Oh, made the whole thing up."
Professor Trelawney appeared to have a minor heart attack. In any rate, she staggered rather impressively, clutched at her heart in a paradigm of doom, and flopped lifelessly into a nearby armchair.
A few moments later, a ragged gasp was heard to ask, "What?"
Cassandra appeared unfazed by her reaction. She stirred her cup of coffee twice with a little silver spoon, and, peering out from under the rim of a pair of rather busy eyebrows, questioned her guest, "Sugar?"
Professor Trelawney ignored her. In fact, it appeared that all logical thought had abandoned the woman. She blinked, her magnified eyes filling with tears underneath her spectacles. She blinked again, and then managed to pull herself together just slightly.
"You… you made up, 'Unfogging the Future?'" she questioned again, her voice trembling. "The text I have used to teach countless classes and numerous children the divine art of the Inner Eye? The text from which thousands of eager students have studied late into the night, to try and achieve that rare gift which is bestowed upon so very few, myself included?"
"Yeah," Cassandra said levelly. "That about sums it up."
Professor Trelawney made an odd noise, a little like the air suddenly being let out of helium balloon, and collapsed back into her seat.
"Look," continued Cassandra, roughly. "I needed the money at the time. I was fresh out of teacher's college, and I didn't have two pennies – Knuts, to you," she added, for the Professor's benefit, "to rub together. I was desperate! I had this problem which wouldn't go away-"
"The Inner Eye is not a problem!" Professor Trelawney all but shrieked. "It is a gift! A gift that is given to precious few people – you should treasure it." Her voice started to break on the last words, and Cassandra, anxious not to have a weeping cross-species of bug-eyed beetle and fluttering moth stay for a protracted length of time within the confines of her sitting room, hurried to reassure her.
"Okay, okay, this 'gift' if you will," she amended, holding her hands up in surrender. "Whatever you want to call it, I never asked for it and I never wanted it."
"No," she continued forcefully, interrupting the Professor who had looked up in outrage again, "it's true. I didn't want it. I got these 'visions'," she said in barely concealed disgust, "of things I frankly didn't want to be seeing. I looked through every book in every library I could find, but couldn't for the life of me find any sort of spell to get rid of the damn things."
Professor Trelawney closed her eyes in anguish and mouthed the words, get rid of the damn things, in silent horror. The power of speech seems to have temporarily eluded her.
"And besides that, they gave me a bloody great headache," Cassandra finished emphatically, pressing two fingers to her skull for emphasis and sounding very put-upon.
Professor Trelawney's lower lip developed a pronounced wobble as she gazed upon the woman who had once been her idol. "Pain should be but a mere trifle," she implored, "for the exchange of such a wonderful gift. I would gladly suffer through ten thousand headaches for the sake of my Inner Eye remaining free and unclouded," she finished, managing to make her voice ring proudly by the end. She chanced a look at the other woman, but deflated when she noticed that Cassandra remained both impassive and unimpressed.
"Whatever. I'd have much rather been done with it years ago," she grunted. "However I knew I was stuck with it - there was nothing I could do about that, never mind however much I would have wanted to. But I could make some money out of it."
She took a sip of her coffee and sighed, settling back into her armchair as she assessed the trembling woman opposite her. "Knew a lot of people went in for that kind of stuff-"
"What kind of stuff?" Professor Trelawney hissed, in a voice which would have been considered dangerous if it hadn't been so hysterical.
"You know," continued Cassandra, "predicting the future, finding out your destiny." She paused, speculatively, and squinted as if trying to remember something. "Divination, I think they call it now." She shrugged. "Complete twaddle if you ask me", she added in a rather derogatory undertone.
"But… but," stuttered Professor Trelawney, "you're a seer!" she finished, as if this somehow epitomized the entire argument.
"Exactly," came the prompt reply. "On occasion I see brief glimpses of the future, but I can't control it and nor can I usually understand it. It's highly irritating actually," she added conversationally. "And I'll be damned if you could convince me that you can teach other people to see it. If you haven't been cursed with-"
"Blessed, my dear, blessed!" shrieked Professor Trelawney.
Cassandra rolled her eyes. "Fine. If you haven't been blessed with foresight, then you'll never be able to see even the tiniest glimpse. Can't be done. Fact. You either have it, or you don't."
"So…" began the Professor, obviously hesitant to continue any conversation which could reveal more sacrilege from this woman.
"So, I needed money. I knew there were enough Wizardfolk out there desperate enough to read absolutely anything if they thought they might get a peek at what their miserable futures held in store for them. So, I made up a load of rubbish about crystal balls and tea leaves – anything to get the readers salivating – and sent it off to an editor."
The Professor actually whimpered. Then, suddenly, an idea seemed to strike her and she sat bolt upright, practically quivering with excitement. Turning, she addressed the older woman.
"You, my dear," stated Professor Trelawney, with as much authority as she could muster, "have clouded your Inner Eye. I can hear it screaming out for my help – in fact you're extremely lucky I decided to visit you, or it could have been too late."
Cassandra frowned, but was interrupted before she could get a single word out. The Professor practically launched herself at the other woman, her eyes gleaming with triumph and delight. Grabbing her by the shoulders, she smiled delightedly and peered so closely into the celebrated seer's eyes that their noses actually bumped.
"Yes! Yes! I see it now. Your Inner Eye is merely obscured by the mundane existence of this Muggle town. Yes, dear, I see it now – my own Inner Eye has revealed to me the path we must now take. Come, dear, I shall take you back to Hogwarts with me, and together we shall heal the injury that has slain you soul like this-"
"Oh goodness," she gasped, immediately afterwards, actually interrupting herself in her horror. A quivering hand flew distractedly to her forehead, before hurriedly re-arranging her many shawls. "Imagine if I had been too late! Your Inner Eye may have withered and died, forever extinguished from this world! You must come with me, right now, my dear. There really is not a moment to lose!"
She broke off abruptly as both her wrists were suddenly contained within a vice-like grip, and she was forced bodily backwards.
"I'll do no such thing!" Cassandra interrupted her, scowling. "Among other things, I have a class to teach tomorrow morning, nine o'clock sharp, and the little brats would like nothing better than the morning off. I won't be giving them that satisfaction."
"A… a class," stuttered poor Professor Trelawney, slightly dazed by her abrupt departure from close proximity to the other woman's nasal hair.
"Yep. I'm a science teacher. Well," she amended, "substitute science teacher. Apparently their usual fool went and got himself tonsillitis - so they called me up." She frowned suddenly. "Didn't give me much notice though; which reminds me, I've still got a few lesson plans to draw up. Year nine will be absolute hell if I don't give them enough to stick their noses into."
Professor Trelawney, horrified, could only murmur, "Science teacher?"
"You wouldn't mind, would you?" urged Cassandra Vablatsky, nodding her head towards the front door. "Wouldn't normally be this rude to a guest, but I've got a lot of work to get through before tomorrow morning."
"Oh," said the Professor, rather vacantly. She looked distinctly confused for a moment, before actually tottering towards the door, her knees having apparently taken far too many shocks today.
"Nice of you to drop by, though," she heard behind her, a few seconds before a door slammed rather vehemently on her gauzy posterior.
Dazed, shocked, horrified and shattered, Professor Trelawney made her dejected way back to Hogwarts.
Just as she was climbing the stairs in the Entrance Hall, she had the misfortune to meet Minerva McGonagall making her way down towards lunch in the Great Hall.
"Good trip, Sybill?" the Transfiguration Mistress asked.
Professor Trelawney could have sworn she sounded smug.