In Your Own Nature

by VoxMaille

A/N: Not mine. Nope. This is short and wonky and was finished on a random inspiration in the middle of the night. And as always, a thousand thank yous to Elanor Gamgee for beta-reading this. You ROX.

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Assignment: Write a one-scroll essay on something you dislike and why. You do not have to share this essay with the class; simply bring it with you to your next Charms lesson, where we will use the sealed scrolls—which I will be checking with a Scroll-Scanning spell, so do not bring in anything blank and sealed shut— in our aura-changing practises.

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I hate Divination.

I used to think that it was just because it was the only subject where Hermione couldn’t fix my homework—because really, Trelawney’s not a bastard like Snape; she’s just a complete bloody idiot and a fraud. I mean, spending half of class telling us that Harry’s going to die, what rubbish! It nearly kills me to have to sit there and listen to her blithering on and on while Lavender and Parvati simper and peer into whatever obnoxious future they’ve conjured inside their empty skulls. And those revolting poufs! Who the hell let her get away with that?

If it were just that, though, it’d be almost tolerable . . . you can do things in those kind of classes, even when you slough off all the time. Not schoolwork things, I mean. Other things. Have a little fun in them, you know?

“Can I have a look at Uranus, too, Lavender?” Oh, that was a good one. I could make lists and lists of things to say that Trelawney would never guess at. Heh. 

Anyhow, the point is that it’s all stupid and useless. It hasn’t helped anyone be safe from anything ever. All that hand-wringing and whinging and eye-rolling and nothing ever comes of it. Hermione might be right about the whole thing just being a big pile of, well, stuff that I can’t say anyplace where she might overhear me. It never does anything at all—just a bunch of whoofy smoke and it’s all made-up anyway. And even if it’s not, Trelawney’s never done anything helpful with it ever—did that prediction of hers third year do anything for Harry? Nothing.

But it kind of makes me wonder—what if you really could see things?

A little—you know—not big things. Not You-Know-Who or any stuff like that. Not like Harry and his scar.

Like if you were just sitting somewhere and kind of were half-asleep and realised that you sort of maybe knew each play your opponent was going to make right before they made it—like when they were going to slip up and you could catch them, right then. 

Every time you played.

Would that make you just a really excellent chess player or something else?

Would it be cheating? What if you weren’t sure if you were imagining things because with the way things are now everybody’s making themselves crazy? Would you mark it down to instinct, talent and luck and hope that you’ve gone completely barking mad?

Except there was that time when the Chamber of Secrets was open. When we were in the closet. I was waiting for them to say Ginny’s name—like when they announce the test scores at the end of the year. You don’t know for certain until they come out, but you know that Hermione got the top marks. It’s just waiting for them to make it official. 

Or back in March that year when my stomach jumped and for once it wasn’t because Harry had gone and done something incredibly bloody brilliant. I didn’t want to go to the infirmary. I don’t think I needed to, in order to see—well, you know. But that was okay. Like Ginny was okay. Except I don’t know if Ginny’s really okay, because she’s always been a bit different after that—and maybe there’s something about Hermione that’s different too—I think she knows how much some people hate her now, and I think maybe that has to make you a little different.

But anyway, there are some things that I just know. Sometimes . . . it’s, you know, not often, but sometimes it happens and I know. Just like that.

It’s funny—but not funny like the twins or Hermione’s stupid SPEW buttons or the way Harry snores in Professor Binns’ class and Professor Binns is even deaf as a ghost, so he still hasn’t figured out that Harry’s sleeping even though Harry is drooling all over the desk, right there in front of him—it’s that other kind of funny—but I knew a split-second before everyone else did that it wasn’t Harry who’d been killed during the Third Task.

It was like swallowing something heavy and hard and awful and it wasn’t a good kind of feeling at all, even though Harry was alive. Hermione had my arm in a clench, and I couldn’t shake her off—I wanted her to let go of me because I had that funny feeling and thought maybe she could tell what I was thinking—that I was relieved and how could you be relieved about that when someone was dead and it was someone you knew, somebody you’d seen at those Ministry picnics and played a scrimmage or two with and you’d both eaten that awful potato salad that had been cooked specially “just like a Muggle” and then he’d stopped the twins from feeding it to your Puffskein, even though Fred had gone on to kill it anyway, later, and I sat back down and it nearly pulled her over, but she didn’t let go and then I really knew it, even stronger down in the pit of my stomach and I knew. Then she sat down too, so hard that I wondered if she’d fainted and I didn’t mean to or anything, but I grabbed her around the waist because she had let go of my arm and it didn’t matter—I still felt awful, and nobody, not the twins nor my mum nor anyone else there on that bench knew anything—they couldn’t know, nobody could know, how could anybody know—and I was sitting there and was glad that Hermione couldn’t feel what was wrong with me through my arm where I was trying to hold her up—because we needed to get down there as soon as we could and we needed to find Harry because he was alive, but he couldn’t be okay—nobody could be okay after—I didn’t know what, but I thought I had a second there where I saw something and I didn’t think it was—well, it was all cold on my spine, like when Scabbers turned into that bloody Pettigrew and we saw him and he was my pet—but he wasn’t and he hadn’t ever been—but now Harry, we had to find Harry, and that was when everyone else knew, too, because someone said Cedric’s name and it came across loud and clear and I bit my lip hard and pulled Hermione up to her feet and thanked anybody out there that no one could read my mind, because I was the first—before anybody else in those blasted stands, I was glad someone was dead, and I hate that.

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