June 9th, 1890 — Crowdy Memorial Library

It was the rare occasion that both of the Urquart twins had left the house. Topaz really wanted to read some book, which neither of her sisters was able to find in a bookstore. As such, Ruby had suggested they just go to Crowdy library. Libraries were hardly filled with people and those who were reading there were usually so focused on their work, that they didn't notice who came in and who came out. She was confident that they would go mostly unnoticed. She also suggested the split up, so if someone asked who she was, she could just claim to be Ruby. Ruby wasn't a murderous beast on fullmoons yet. Besides, a Lestrange wedding was taking place on that day (everyone was talking about it), so a majority of Topaz's haters would be there, rather than the library.

Topaz had reluctantly agreed and their aunt agreed to chaperone them there, seeing that she wanted to borrow some novels herself.

Once there, Topaz went to the section with the advanced magical theory (at least the one allowed to non-Ministry people) and Ruby went to the Divination section. Their aunt was going to run some errands around Diagon Alley and then pick them up in about two hours.

Ruby had brought her tarot deck with her, so she could keep herself busy with that. After a strenuous month of exams, she didn't want to be reading any books.

Lately, the readings she was doing for herself, were showing a pattern. Namely, the Knight of Cups appeared in her future. After the disappointment that was the Hogwarts coming-out ball, Ruby felt that the universe was mocking her. The cards could be interpreted in many different ways but one popular meaning for the Knight of Cups was the arrival of a 'Knight in shining armor'. As if! It would probably show up in her life in a less thrilling way if it meant anything at all.

To make this starter even cheesier, someone had left a window open nearby and when the door of that particular section opened, giving entrance to a young man, a gust of wind flew across the room and took some of her cards flying towards his direction.

The Knight of Cups was one of them.

Savino Zabini

  

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set by MJ

It was his first time visiting this London library, and he had gotten his hopes up reading one of the library guides, only to find out, in an attempt to visit that floor, that he did not have the clearance. More disappointing than the look of the forms they had saddled him with if he wanted to access those prophecy records was the librarian’s advice that it might take months to receive the permit, if he was granted one at all.

Loath to leave without achieving something, Savino instead made his way to the public Divination section; he hadn’t brought nearly enough of his symbol reference books with him to London, and there was one in particular he was missing. He hadn’t found it yet - in fact, he’d only just stepped into the section at all when some tarot cards, lifted from a table in the wind, tumbled towards him through the air, one of them smacking into his arm and falling to his feet.

He stooped to pick the couple of cards up, admiring their designs and identifying each one in spite of himself before he made his way over to where they had come from, to a young lady seated before an open window, her hand on the rest of the deck.

“Was this in your spread?” Savino asked in slightly-accented English, taking care to place the Knight of Cups the right way up in front of her, not about to prescribe doom where it had not previously lain. He probably ought to step away and leave her to it, but he couldn’t help himself from smiling at her. “That’s good news.”

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It was too late to go after the fleeing cards, so she held onto the ones that had remained on the table. She would actually cry if any of those cards were lost. She had hand-painted them herself, the whole deck. It had taken her months. It would be a devastating loss.

Thankfully, her cards didn't go far and the young man picked them up and brought them to her table. At his question, she nodded shyly. It appeared that he also knew the art of reading the tarot cards, for he knew what the Knight of Cups meant.

"Oh, here's hoping," Ruby said shyly. "It probably means nothing. I never feel like my hands are tuned to the right vibration when I do readings for myself. I suppose it is because it is the most difficult, to be honest with ourselves."

It was rare for Ruby to be this talkative with a stranger, but this was about Divination. She always loved talking about it with fellow admirers of the art.

  

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set by MJ

Savino smiled sympathetically. “I know the feeling,” he admitted, nodding at her in agreement. “It’s like playing yourself at chess.” Always difficult to separate yourself into the reader and the read, hard to turn off the glimmer of consciousness to your moves - and that could unbalance the cards, like she said.

But if the Knight of Cups wasn’t necessarily in her future of its own accord, it still probably meant there was something she was striving for - something she wanted. Savino knew he didn’t know her at all, but he wouldn’t pretend he wasn’t intrigued. If she was being shy, he scarcely noticed: he took most reticence in strangers here as a weird British thing.

“Still, my sister is sick to death of doing readings for me,” Savino added easily, with a joking air but being pretty truthful. He didn’t have the wealth of friends here in London who cared about Divination, and safe to say his family were already finding his entreaties a bit of a chore. He glanced in the library section around them, wondering if this girl was here alone. “Have you anyone else to read yours?”

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He understood. Ruby nodded to his chess metaphor. It was always nice to come across a fellow practicer of the divinative arts. To outsiders, these practices seemed foolish and phony, you couldn't hope to be taken seriously by them. They would find all that talk about 'vibrations' and 'tuning into the universe's voice' foolish.

"At Hogwarts, I do," Ruby replied. "But nobody at home. Everyone in my family is more... intellectually inclined. I'm the only one with a silly hobby." She smiled shyly. Even though she loved Divination, even she felt like it wasn't as important of a skill as dueling or potion-making. Her twin would devour books on magical theory which were like Greek to Ruby.

  

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set by MJ

Oh, Hogwarts! He’d forgotten if it was summer or not here, since even the Zabini cousins here had long since graduated and he couldn’t remember if Incantima’s term times were the same. Nor could he remember if Hogwarts was eight years as well or not, admittedly.

But he didn’t have time to mull on that long, because the young lady had just called the rest of her family intellectually inclined, as though she were the family idiot for liking tarot. He hadn’t expected that. At least not from someone who seemed to enjoy the activity enough to be in the Divination section of the public library in her holidays. He’d heard it from other sorts before.

“Oof,” Savino said out loud, a brief laugh bubbling up at her diminishing it all to a silly hobby, “there’s a brutal assessment of my life.” He pretended to clutch at his heart as if her words had wounded him, his other hand coming to rest on the table to prop himself against it, his curiosity undiminished. “You think it’s that silly?”

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Ruby had a great love for divination and its practices but she did feel insecure about it being the only thing she was really good at. Especially when her twin, who didn't attend Hogwarts anymore, was interested in much more difficult subjects, such as advanced magical theory. She felt like she was wasting her opportunity on a full Hogwarts tuition on learning Divination and advanced art magic.

"I--" Ruby started. She felt bad giving that impression to this young man, who was clearly interested in the subject. She hated herself for being so insecure about the things she liked, for not being able to stand up for them! She wished she was good at things that she was neither good at, nor she particularly cared for. Deep down, she wished that she could be more confident about her entire being.

"I just don't feel like I'll ever do anything important with it," Ruby admitted. "It's a good skill to have at parties, but it won't save any lives or anything. Not like Aurors, or healers do."

  

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set by MJ

He had not come to London to get into arguments with strangers about the use of Divination, Savino reminded himself. Nor did he want to quarrel with a girl who seemed perfectly nice, two minutes after meeting her. But. But! He was not going to agree with an opinion he disagreed with as profoundly as this one. He might not be able to actually convince her, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t worth trying.

(He felt like there might be something more tangled up in this young lady’s opinions of the worth of Divination, but he couldn’t quite work out what.)

“Nothing important?” Savino repeated, his incredulity tempered by a slight smile and his dropping into the empty seat opposite her. He had nothing against the work of Aurors and healers and those saving-the-world sorts, but, as was their nature, they often came in too late to save everything. “You don’t think looking ahead is any help? What about all the tragedies to come?”

He raised his eyebrows earnestly. “Is there nothing in your life - or in anyone else’s - that you look back on and regret? Nothing you wish you could have changed?” Maybe not. She was young and polite and pretty, after all: perhaps her whole life had been perfectly plain sailing.

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"Well, I could have used a warning that my sister would be turned into a werewolf," Ruby replied. It hadn't occured to her that the man didn't know who she was. She assumed, by now, that everyone knew who she was and what had happened to her sister.

The truth was that Ruby's fascination with Divination had begun sometime after Topaz had been turned. She had been in a bad place mentally and the notion of being able to predict something good in her life had drawn her to the tarot art. It had been addictive. Whenever she got a positive reading, Ruby was filled with hope that something good would happen in her life.

  

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set by MJ

Whatever he had been expecting her to give as an answer, it wasn’t that. There was something about the matter-of-fact way she said it that startled him, and although the rest of his argument he’d planned for about avoiding tragedy had been ready to go on the tip of his tongue, that revelation was not something he could just skim past.

“Oh,” Savino said, face softening into sheepishness. “I’m so sorry,” he offered quietly. “That’s horrible. Forgive me for asking - I didn’t know.” (But of course he didn’t - he might be into Divination, but he didn’t see everything about everyone.) Really, he was surprised she had told a stranger something so serious - if all she had said was yes, there’s something, he would have understood. Was that common knowledge to all of England, or was she just that brave about it?

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   Ruby Urquart

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Oh dear. She had met one new person who didn't know about Topaz (and who seemed to have similar hobbies to hers!) and she had ruined it by telling him about it. At least he seemed genuinely upset about it and apologetic about asking the question that had lead to that answer.

"It's all right," Ruby comforted him softly. "I should have guessed you do not know. People tend to recognize me -- you see, she is my twin." Naturally, that lead many people to believe that she was Topaz, which then caused them to act as though lycanthropy could be contracted by simply being in the same space as a werewolf.

"So you are not from here, then?"

  

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set by MJ

She didn’t get angry at him, at least. “Ah,” he offered, aware that she might have bitten his head off about it if he’d seemed less sorry. Her twin. It sounded like she was used to facing up to the issue by people in public, if everyone recognised her so easily. Maybe they were an important society family. That, he thought, would make a bad problem even worse. “I only meant to say that... seeing the future could make all the difference.”

No need of a crystal ball to answer her next comment, though. “It’s that obvious, I see,” Savino said, shaking his head and smiling. “No, I’m not. Savino Zabini,” he introduced. “My family is just visiting, from Italy.”

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What a fateful meeting. The Zabini family had had its own fair share of scandal. Something about someone's wife not being a pureblood, which lead to a divorce and daughters who were now "ruined". It was a difficult situation, as they were ruined only for people who cared about one's purity of blood. Their problem wasn't something that actively made their life difficult, like Topaz's condition. Her twin turned into a beast every month and there was no way of stopping it. They, on the other hand, could simply just marry a half-blood and be done with it.

This Savino Zabini didn't seem that sort, though. If he was a snotty pureblood, they wouldn't still be talking after Ruby had revealed her sister's lycanthropy.

"I really want to visit Italy," Ruby replied, deciding not to comment about his family's scandal. It wouldn't be polite. "You have so much art!"

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   Savino Zabini

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set by MJ

He had half-expected her to register the surname, and bring it up. After all, he had already put his foot in his mouth, so it would be fair payback. Savino had a fleeting sensation that she had made the connection, but if she had any opinions of his scandalous cousins the young woman did not say.

Instead, she brought up something much brighter, something he was nearly as keen on as Divination. “That’s funny,” Savino remarked, a wide smile dawning on his face. “That’s part of the reason I always like coming to Britain, for the paintings!” It didn’t have Italy’s rich tradition, not quite, but he was quite taken in by all the innovation and romanticism of it. The Pre-Raphaelite artists were unlike anything Italy had! (Of course, even Rossetti’s parents had been Italian; but that was just a fact, that the Italians did make the best artists.) “You are fond of art, then?” He said hopefully.

If he were in the habit of being cynical, Savino might have thought this encounter was almost too good to be true. Fortunately, he was not; fate must be on his side for once.

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   Ellory Lestrange

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Another ongoing theme in Ruby's posts, other than the mention of her life before the Transformation as an antithesis to her life now, is the mention of her hand-painted tarot card deck. In case this piece of information was missed in any of her other posts, the story goes like this: Ruby took up a project to create an entire tarot deck from scratch, with illustrations of her doing. Her art was somewhat influenced by the pre-raphaelites, though instead of pale maidens she preferred her people to have significantly more melanin in their bodies. Her Empress, for example, had been modeled after her dear deceased Mama.

"Oh, I love it," Ruby replied with a grin. "Actually, I painted these myself." Her hands gestured at the tarot cards spread on the table. She bit her lower lip, waiting for Mr. Zabini's evaluation of her work. She really wanted him to like her art...

  

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set by MJ

She didn’t just love it, then. “You are an artist!” Savino said delightedly, picking up a few of the hand-painted cards to look at closer. “They’re beautiful, really quite enchanting,” he enthused, taken by the uniqueness of them, and thinking they somehow revealed more about the young lady’s character - and her opinions of the future - than anything she could quite say herself.

“You really must come to Italy, then,” he agreed a little absent-mindedly, as he wondered whether the hand-painted tarot cards had more of a connection to their creator than cards usually did, and if this affected her readings at all, made them somehow more accurate. It had not sounded like they were, but... “You would love Rome, of course, and Florence for the Uffizi alone. But Venice for the views,” Savino told her with a grin, looking back over at her from the cards he had clasped in his hands. A pity no one got to see them unless they were being used. “It’s a shame you can’t display these.”

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   Cecily Gallivan

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