JEWEL OF THE NILE
Chapter Fifty-Two

By the time he reached the North Tower, Harry was beginning to wonder whether he hadn’t been mistaken about Trelawney. For one thing, he’d caught up with her far too quickly … and for another, there just wasn’t much of a resemblance. Apart from the disparity in their physical appearance, the Mystery Woman in the Pensieve had been as quick and lithe as a snow tiger. And this Sybil, even with no one around to see her, was moving with a labouring old-lady gait that didn’t even begin to be a match.

Maybe he was wrong.

But he followed her anyway, quick and silent under his old friend the Invisibility Cloak - up the stairs to the tower, up the ladder which descended conveniently from the ceiling, and across the fussy crowded classroom - still close with the stale odour of leftover incense - to its darkest corner, which turned out to conceal a door.

A muttered password (‘Heineken’ - now that’s a new one, thought Harry), and the door slid open to admit her … or perhaps, more accurately, just melted away into nothing. She stepped into the darkened room beyond and paused just beyond the threshold; Harry saw the swirl of her cloak as it left her shoulders, heard muted twin thumps which meant she’d taken off her shoes. It was just enough noise, just enough time to give him the opportunity; he slipped through the passageway unnoticed, barely yanking the tail of the Cloak free as the door hardened inexorably into solid wall behind him. Nonplussed by this - there didn’t seem to be another way out, and he didn’t fancy being trapped in Sybil Trelawney’s apartment until morning - Harry flattened himself into the corner she’d just vacated, and took stock of his surroundings.

It was the emptiest room he’d ever seen.

It wasn’t especially large, but its lack of furnishing, particularly as contrasted with the classroom he’d just come through, made it seem vast - all bare, scarred stone floor and interesting shadows thrown against the hexagonal walls. Lumos, she’d said a moment ago, upon entering, and yellow light had immediately sprung up in soft arcs from no discernable source, allowing Harry to see the black wrought-iron screen that divided off one corner - presumably there was a bed behind that thin shield of rice-paper, maybe even a small wardrobe - and the black leather davenport that faced the opposite wall, flanked by sleek, spare glass-and-steel end tables. In front of the davenport lay a small area rug in black-and-white zebra stripes with a blood-red border; apart from that, the room was empty.

No homey little tchotchkes. No pictures on the walls. No windows.

All of the walls were mirrored from floor to ceiling.

Harry began to think he’d been right about her, after all. This wasn’t a Fruit Bat room … and standing there in the pitiless gaze of all those reflections, Trelawney looked like a Charles-Dickens bag lady who’d taken a wrong turn on her way to the Ladies and ended up lost in an Escher print. He couldn’t believe that she’d been teaching here, living here, for longer than he’d been a student - starkness of the décor aside, this room put him in mind of what his bedroom at the Dursleys’ would have looked like, if he’d been able to shovel out all of Dudley’s junk: in a word, uninhabited.

But she’d dropped her tired-old-woman walk, along with her fussy handbag … and now, Harry noted, had conjured a bottle of Ogden’s Red Label and a whiskey tumbler from thin air and was pouring herself a generous three fingers’ worth. He watched as she tipped it back, swallowed without wincing, and - after a brief pause during which she seemed to be contemplating a refill - snapped her fingers to Banish the empty glass. The bottle she set on one of the end tables; a moment later, it was joined by the chittering beads around her neck, the eyeglasses on their amber necklace, the gaudy flashing rings.

She straightened up, and Harry almost recoiled against the look of hatred that the wall in front of her reflected back to him. It took him a panicked moment to realise that she hadn’t discovered him - that she was looking at herself.

“You miserable old hag,” she said softly to the mirror. “Christ Almighty, how I’m sick of looking at you.”

The mirror didn’t answer back; if this was how she talked to it every day, Harry could see why she wouldn’t want an enchanted one. Too, he could understand her sentiments - if he looked like the Mystery Woman, he’d be a bit disenchanted with Trelawney, too. Her wand twitched, and he braced himself … he was going to see her in a minute, she of his thousand sweaty-handed fantasies, his twilight world behind the draperies, and in his anticipation it was getting harder and harder to hold onto the righteous indignation that had spurred him up to the Tower.

Or maybe it’s that nobody acts under just one motivation?

Maybe. But as the enchantment settled over her, he saw not the Mystery Woman but a platinum bombshell, emerging in a shimmer from behind Trelawney’s image, all bee-stung pout and curves. Wow, he thought, forgetting to be disappointed. That’s some trick, all right - but barely had time to register approval before she shrugged, and sighed, and changed again, into a serious-eyed Lois Lane brunette with horn-rimmed glasses and sleek shining hair drawn back into a tortoiseshell clip at the back of her neck.

And then kept going.

More red to the hair. More length to the face. Eyes shifting from gentian-blue to sable-brown, skin deepening from alabaster to clover honey and then back again, each incarnation more lovely and ephemeral than the last … and still she sighed and raised her wand again, in a gesture that had nothing at all to do with narcissism, Harry thought, and everything to do with bone-deep discontent.

Harry knew he ought to just keep his mouth shut - this wasn’t a beauty pageant, despite physical evidence to the contrary, and she wouldn’t appreciate company right now. Beyond that, he of all people knew what she was capable of in terms of vengeance - wasn’t that the reason he was here, after all?

But he felt himself taken over with an odd wild mix of emotions - curiosity, and sympathy, and something else that wasn’t nearly so simple - and couldn’t quite stop himself.

“Which one is really you?” he blurted out, shrugging off the Cloak and pushing himself away from the wall. The face that she turned toward him - sweet and heart-shaped, with eyes as bottle-green as his own and just a hint of stubbornness to the chin - looked first startled, then angry, then, finally, resigned.

“You’re too fearless for your own good, Mr. Potter,” she said - a veiled threat that just didn’t seem right, coming from those Kewpie-doll lips. (Disturbingly enough, this was sort of exciting.) “Luckily, you have fast reflexes as well. Nine times out of ten, that’ll save you, even if you’re stupid.”

Oh. Maybe not a threat, after all.

In fact, there was probably a compliment in there somewhere, Harry decided, and began to walk toward her, pressing again on what he instinctively sensed was a sore spot. “Is this it?” he asked, stopping a decorous eight inches away from her but then - incredibly, as if disembodied - watching one of his hands in the mirror come up to fondle a silky black curl. “Is this your real face?”

Oh, she’s going to take you apart, Potter. But she didn’t; just swallowed and flinched slightly as that brave-but-foolhardy hand slipped higher to cradle the back of her head.

“No.”

It sounded like an admission. She looked uncertain of herself and sulky because of it. When he stepped a little closer, she stiffened, but didn’t pull away.

“Is your name really Sybil?”

Lowered eyes. “Yes.”

Harry’s heart was pounding. “The woman in Snape’s room the other night,” he said tentatively. “Is that - is she, I mean …?”

She shook her head. “No.”

Stabbing disappointment - his fantasy-made-flesh was as fictional as Lois Lane, then - and then, a sudden, spine-chilling thought. “Trelawney,” he said, unable to keep his voice from cracking over the word. “I mean, the Professor. That’s not what you really…“

“No! Christ, no.” She looked horrified at the very idea.

Without thinking, Harry ran his thumb over her cheekbone, a gesture that did as much to calm himself as it did to calm her. Over her shoulder, he caught a glimpse of them in the mirror and had to force down a pleasurable shudder; standing that close to each other, black heads bent together, they could have been brother and sister.

Kinky.

“Who is she, then?”

She was silent so long that he thought at first she hadn’t heard him. Just when he was about to ask the question again, however, she took a deep breath and blew it out angrily.

“She’s a joke,” she said dully. “A bad joke that I played on myself, a long time ago.”

Her eyes came up to meet his. “You’re lucky, you know,” she said, “that no one’s ever let you forget who you are. It’s easier to lose yourself than you might think.”

Harry had almost forgotten to breathe.

“Is that what you’ve done?” he asked, his voice a whisper. “Lost yourself?”

“Something like that.”

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, Harry thought, more surprised when she was when his knuckles somehow found the soft point of her jaw and began to skim their way up to one ear. He was here to be indignant. Accusatory. To let her know that he knew.

But she looked so melancholy, so hopeless, those false green eyes wrenchingly sad but resolutely dry.

He really wanted to kiss her, but his traitorous brain kept feeding his mouth questions. “Why did the Ball make you so sad?” he wondered aloud - oh, for Merlin’s sake, who do you think you are, Potter? Sigmund Freud? Sybil let out a little huff of disillusioned laughter.

“Why do you care, Harry Potter?” she wanted to know. “That’s not why you’re here, after all.”

“I don’t know why I’m here,” he said, surprised at how easily the truth fell off his tongue. She shrugged.

“Fair enough.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s silly.”

“Try me.”

She smirked, unamused. “You infuriating puppy … you never give up, do you?” Her expression was deliberately closed-off, unreadable. “I hate Dumbledore’s Balls. Always have.”

Harry thought fast. “I’ve never seen you dance,” he said cautiously. “Is that it? You don’t like to dance?” His eyes narrowed. “Or is it that you do like to?”

Silence, in this case, was an affirmative.

“I’m not a very good dancer, myself,” Harry said, but once again his body was giving him the lie; he’d already pulled her just that much closer, torso-to-torso. For a brief moment, he thought she might pull away … then, with a little sigh, she relaxed into him, her head falling naturally onto his shoulder, her curls tickling his chin. He caught a faint whiff of her plumeria shampoo, but for once didn’t associate the scent with Divination at all.

They rocked together in the center of the bare stone floor, moving to inaudible music. This gets stranger and stranger, Harry thought, but decided not to question the moment, not now.

He could wait a little longer for his answers.

**