Hogwarts School - Elsewhere

"I think mostly for fun. Though I imagine it'll help me in my job at St. Mungos. I work in Spell Damage there."

Huh.

That was unexpected - it was a usage he hadn't really considered.

He kind of liked it.

"That's a good idea," Altair said, and it was meant as a compliment, though his brow furrowed and it looked like he was seriously considering the fact.

"What kinds of things would you be reading in a situation as relating to Spell Damage?"

His interest had been peaked.

It was early morning, but he couldn't sleep. So he had risen with the light. Covered himself in that long, black cape and made his way to Hogsmeade to deliberate, to see if he could make contact with the ghost that he had released into that old Castle in which he had previously spent so much time.

It was a plan had backfired on him. Vincent had turned out not to care. Or he was too scared. Part of the problem was, surely, that Vincent Vega was both family and spirit. And Altair had walked too rocky a path. He had imposed that viscous presence onto them. Had made himself a threat more than a friend.

Fourty years later there was not much he could do to change that.

He leaned forward now, propping his elbows onto the stony edge of a grave memorial, to gaze up at the shrack. He should not, of course, for there was something about respecting the dead and buried. Then again, when had Death ever cared to respect him, in that prolonged time that it had spent trying to drag him under?

Altair knew the depth of those pits like the back of his hand. It would take those blackened forces a lot more to try figure out how to beat him at his own game.

There was a flutter then, caught in the side of his field of vision, gentle, wings pale, translucent in the morning light. As he turned, dark eyebrows rose in surprise as the insect made its way past his face, and he grasped for the meaning of the sudden appearance of his mother's patronus.

Except, it was not.

He turned again, toward the rising sun to find the moth was not acting on its own, pushing the hood back off his head to extend his range of vision - there were hundreds, thousands of the little fluttering creatures wobbling against the pale blue of the morning sky, a sight that would truly have been one to behold for someone less used to seeing the unreal.

But where did they come from?

A presence to his left - a boy, by the looks of it, hardly more than seventeen - drew his attention and he straightened, moved accross the grass in the direction of the figure.

"Are these yours?" he asked, gently, not meaning to rip the other out of a potential trance, yet recognision that this might not be completely deliberate.

---

OOC: This is a meeting of two Seers caught in the same vision.

He was pondering.

He'd been doing that a lot lately, grasping for strands of meaning. For where to turn to to push himself into the furl of everything that went on around while he covered himself up here in his bookish little cave.

It was as though the world just kept going and all he managed to do was to be overwhelmed. It was frustrating.

So now he did the usual, pushing books into a shelf while debating the general use of his life, a cup of dark coffee propped on the small table beside him. Wondering what the hell they were doing in Hogwarts nowadays and what that ghost of his was up to, that hadn't even bothered to talk to him ever since he'd visited the Castle to set him free.

Figures.

But the bell rang, and his mind was set on other things, the sound of clicking heels luring him out from the aisles, coffee in hand, to catch a glimpse of a tall figure moving about his little bookshop with a - was that a camera?

Leaning his shoulder against a bookshelf, Altair observed her for a moment.

"You know, your film is going to catch fire the moment you open that thing up," he said calmly. Over the years, he had experienced many odd things - amongst them the occassional father that found it appropriate to bring their children. People trying to take photos were also among them.

But O for effort, he supposed.

"It certainly does," said Altair.

Then, with a bit of hesitation --

"What's the darkest story you know?"

---

To Francis,


I tore you apart.

And I would have done it again.

And again.

And again.

May you rot in hell.


Your protegee,
Lukas Altair.

Patience was not his virtue. Had never been, not as a student, nor as a professor. In case of the latter, it had made him too hard, to angular in his dealings with the students. Rather than build up them he'd used them selfishly as a source to knowledge, to build a case of his own.

That conscience floated through him now, and he let it linger. To feel at the degree to which he tried to assign guilt, and how this was, most of all, directed to himself. There were a couple of ways of interpreting it. He could either read himself as a person that stole the ideas of others. Or he could be more generous, and take into account the degree to which he tried to place them on an equal footing as himself. Because their thoughts and emotions mattered to him.

Like most things, it was hardly ever so clear cut. He did not believe in the blacks and whites. But introspection was useful, sometimes.

"He’s running from change. Or maybe… from what change could mean for people like him."

He could tell that she was thinking, and so, he let her.

What he really needed was input, something new to add to the problems that he had engineered in his mind, a fresh breath of something that could brush against them and topple them over and give way to solutions that he'd previously thought impossible.

However, there was also the fact that he was somewhere between thirty and fourty years her senior. And the ideas of rich, old, white men had a tendency to become rigid, to calcify, stale and settle.

"Maybe it’s easier to pretend the world is simple. That there are clear lines between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Maybe Bellestorm is afraid of what happens if those lines disappear. If people like my dad, my sister… if they’re no longer something to be feared, but something to be understood."

He gave a slow nod in signal that he was following. It was, in part, a wise assessment, but he feared that they were on their way to settling into another old pattern.

Altair made a motion with a hand and his circle reappeared, shimmering against the surface of their table this time.

"I tend to try to flip things on their head," explained, with a mild smile. "To try to understand what's going on in their minds and hearts. So, from that viewpoint, it looks to me like we have two groups that are rooting for what you call change. Now, the way you describe it, one of those is going backwards --"

He gave the circle a spin.

"-- and the other is going forward."

Another gesture, and the circle changed directions.

"Now, this to me looks familiar - what I see is black and white, backwards and forwards, good and bad. If one direction equals us, and the other equals them, how do we move away from the us-them dynamic?"

He made another gesture, and the circle became a ball and, as it took on more and more details it became apparent that it was a tiny sun. Even a few tiny planets appeared circling it, and some of these planets had little moons. They appeared to have taken on a life of their own, going in circles within circles. But he didn't look at them, he was staring at the table surface for a moment, searching for words that would let her know that she did not find her thinking wrong. Simply, that he thought there was much more potential out there to be found.

"What I'm wondering is this: If we are more complicated than that, how will pushing us into the same framework contribute to breaking that cycle?"

Of course, this was also deeply entangled with the matter of emotion, of humanity - that very real, raw thing that defined them.

"But also, what if we imagined that they were as afraid of us as we are of them? Could there be a way to learn to understand why they were afraid? And how could we go about making us into something to be understood rather than to be feared?"

His gaze lingered on her now, a sheen of silver in one eye.

---

"Soo," he said, leaning back in his chair.

"Why Psychometry?"

He had not expected this. For her to turn up like this. For her to sit down in the chair as suggested and, now, to lean in to his words and his presence. A part of him, alluring as it was, wondered if there was some sort of power in him that had made this happen, that he'd somehow tapped over into his lost legilimency to convince her, in her own mind, to remain.

A different part of him felt at the warmth gathering at his chest. Altair was someone used to his dark corridors and sullen solitude, to walls barricaded with magic and an existence dependent on his condition for every passing day, the volativity of the spirits that he had summoned. He was used to living under the weight of his decisions, of guilt and shame, and the feeling of having to be a weapon - for the Supra Mortalitas, for Francis, and for Pryce.

The feeling of being turned down and abandoned when he'd needed her the most.

Unlovable.

(It had been twenty years.)

But Eva leaned into it. And while it had not been his fate to have children, and he had never thought of himself as capable of bringing them up the way they deserved, he had imagined, sometimes, what it could have been like.

Now they were two flames caught in an important moment, flickering more strongly with the added heat, the growing base of fuel.

She reminded him of all of the important things. She reminded him of his priviledge, as a man, as a pureblood. And he knew very well that he walked right through these waters, these waves - these goddamn tsumanis - with his feet dry due to an undeserved priviledge assigned to him at birth.

"Bellestorm wants to take us back. He talks about returning to the way things were before, as if that would fix everything. But it feels like a retreat. Like we’re running from something."

It was a good assessment and he leaned back, giving her space.

Continue.

"I just want to make sure we don’t forget the ones who are already being pushed aside. I just want to make sure we don’t let it happen again."

(Unreal?)

Their angles were radically different, but it did not mean he did not agree. That he could not see. That he could not feel the surge of her emotion in his chest. Continuing to grow the fire that had awakened with the election, the electricity of possibility in a moment of momentum.

And he felt a wave of gratefulness - for her presence, for the fact that he'd leaned into his own intuition and ventured into the evening. For being able to speak his mind and not be alone.

(Lately, he'd been thinking about returning to teaching and now that desire intensified. There was a good chance that things would get worse. As they always appeared to do, before they got better.

But he was done assassinating politicians.)

"I think you're onto something," he said.

Again, he raised a hand to tap at his temple.

"But we have to be smart. So hold on to that picture - imagine that he's running. What is he running from?"

There was a wall.

And he stood now, looking down on the reading figure, considering his position.

He had once made himself too reliant on Legilimency, as made clear in his failing relationships, by his sudden helplessness as the power had been ripped from his hands. And he had realised how some of his isolation, his loneliness, could, on one hand, be traced to the constant suspicion placed on him for knowing too much, on the other to not actually having to converse with anyone to get a rough understanding of what they were about.

As someone as private in his affairs as Altair, it provided a paradox, and he took his moment to feel at it, to allow for the ambigousness to pass through him without pushing away the taste of phantom bitterness that it left on his tongue.

To be powerful was not a place of cheating, but it was one of priviledge. He had to leave room to contemplate the complexity of co-existence in a world such as theirs.

Looking at the reading boy, he also understood something else.

That what Tigran wanted right now, was to read.

Seeing this simply required a basis of social intelligence and a general respect for other people's time and space. Then again, learning to See had provided him with a new set of tools to understanding his own and other people's existence, slipping into his subconscience as easily as his Legilimency had done, many years prior.

"Some day, you'll become a good Occlumens," he commented, giving the boy the hint of a smile.

And he turned the corner, and disappeared.

---

---

---

"I struggle with the concept of quenching my mind," he said, his voice saturated with an absent-minded thoughtfulness. "My mode has been to open all the channels and try to learn how to handle it."

He placed the cup on Tigran's desk. It was the same cup that he'd been offered last time, though it had been cleaned and refilled with a fresh brew of coffee.

"But at times it has left me completely overwhelmed and unable to deal with the world at all."

The cup was accompanied by his own. Under his other arm was a small pile of books, which he turned to placing inside one of the bookshelves. His black shirt was folded back, revealing the black ink of an Ouroborous tattoo at his underarm.

"But I always thought there was a real link between psychology and divination - it's one of the reasons why I turned to alchemy, which provided a spiritual dimension for what can come accross as an almost scientific framework."

It took little effort to understand that this was a man that was used to moving about the world. One that cast a shadow, and who knew how to use it to his advantage. Furthermore, Altair was familiar with that mask of neutrality, the veiling of emotion. They were alike in that matter, and that was reason enough to be careful.

People like them had secrets.

I revealed vulnerability, peaking his curiosity, morphing the atmosphere into something slightly more humane.

And yet, there was no doubt that theirs was a meeting of two powerful predators.

It must have been a curious display for the boy, to watch the adults consider each other in such a careful manner.

"There are many books on Alchemy. This particular one is much more than that."

Altair said nothing. It was not uncommon for a customer to lecture him about their books. Once upon a time, when he was younger, he would have quipped back, but now he merely inhaled, exhaled, let it go. Reminded himself that it was quite possible that the book held secrets that were missing from the version he had stored on the lower floors of Muspell.

Besides, his Occlumency helped navigate rowdy waters.

Damascus. Europe. France.

He didn't write now, putting the ravenfeather down on the clear glass. His tall figure leaned forward over the counter slightly, palms down against its surface, considering.

Altair had history with France, even if he'd never learned the language. He'd once taught there, in Beauxbatons, a subject as dubious as Theory of the Dark Arts. He'd liked their inclination to allow such a subject in the first place.

Again, his eyes found the other's, stayed with them. Things would usually stand or fall with the following question.

"Would you be open to a performance of psychometry?" he asked, delivering it as straight forward as possible. Letting him into their home, with all that this entailed, was something not everybody were too keen on.

"It would require me to go to Damascus and have a look at said bookshelf. Which should remain as untouched as possible."

In the case of specific objects, psychometry, especially when coupled with his strings to the spirit world, was his most powerful tool. It revealed the webs that he needed to follow its journey. In the case of missing objects, that psychometry became even more important, as all divination might have to be performed indirectly.

"Discretion guaranteed," he added, unable to hide the fact that he wouldn't mind, really, having a look at this particular collection.

And he knew that taking on this job was either going to be a triuph, or a disaster.