December 8, 2021 – 1:56 AM
Elliot Carmichael — Played by Beanie
December 12th, 1891 - Savino's London Townhouse
There were far too many debutantes here. Debutantes, and eligible bachelors, and seers. In Elliot's experience, debutantes did not mix well with the Sight, and he was far more interested in talking to other seers than he was in talking to anyone who was trying to get married. He had settled in with a deck of tarot and was trying to come across as more eccentric than he was unmarried — hopefully some of these debutantes remembered the rumors that swirled around him when he left Hogwarts midway through the year, and would leave him alone.
It wasn't that he was uncomfortable dealing with debutantes, although he was. It was that he was uncomfortable mixing the Sight with his own eligibility, especially given the visions his Inner Eye gave him.
He was shuffling Mr. Zabini's tarot cards when he saw him. Elliot waved. "Care for a reading?" he asked, still shuffling. He was less comfortable with someone else's cards than he was with his own, but it was still his favorite method of Divination.
Savino Zabini Elias Grimstone
December 10, 2021 – 8:42 PM
Savino Zabini — Played by MJ
Hm, well, this was not exactly the gathering Savino had planned for – and he didn’t know the finer detail of how some of these guests had come to be here, but he could certainly guess who to blame for it – but at this moment he was, fortunately, distracted by one of the guests he had intended to invite.
“Ah, I’d be delighted,” Savino said, with only a touch of exaggeration – if it saved him from the perils of small-talk with a young lady who had more interest in discussing the particular shade of the wallpaper than foretelling anyone’s futures, that was just an added benefit. So he dropped into the free chair and peered at Mr. Carmichael’s shuffling with obvious interest. “Are you fond of tarot?”
In truth, tarot was not Savino’s particular favourite, at least not when it came to delving into his own future. The cards tended to... bring up the same things for him, time and time again. But who knew? Maybe in a different diviner’s hands they would spell out something new.
December 13, 2021 – 4:19 PM
Elliot Carmichael — Played by Beanie
Elliot knew card tricks.
Not very many, but a few — he had occasionally done them in class to ensure that his O.W.L.-level students were paying attention, and the habit stuck. So before he stopped shuffling the cards, and because Mr. Zabini was obviously watching, he bridged the two stacks in his hand and let them settle.
"I'm fond of the direction that tarot provides," Elliot said. "I known that it may be a little gauche, but it's arguably my favorite method of divining." He didn't like scrying — if anything, it spooked him — and when one used crystal balls, they were less able to direct what they wanted to see.
(Of course — this all hinged on the cards obeying.)
"Past, present, and future or mind, body, and spirit?" Elliot asked. They were different layouts, but simple, just three cards.
December 19, 2021 – 9:56 PM
Savino Zabini — Played by MJ
Savino watched the card flourishes with an interested smile affixed to his face, trying to force himself to relax into the right frame of mind for a reading, particularly for a first-time reading from a different diviner. “Oh, I would not say gauche,” Savino assured him, shaking his head easily enough – he had nothing greatly against them. “I sometimes find them a little – narrow,” he explained (attempted to explain), meaning a little too pointed, finding that direction better for when one was mining for particular details, “but they can be illuminating, too.” But he supposed that was why he liked crystal ball gazing, the boundlessness of it, the lack of direction.
(Or getting to fish about for other things, and avoid that which he didn’t want to see.)
He considered the potential spreads, wondered which would provide more clarity. “Mind, body and spirit, I think,” Savino decided lightly. At least one of those cards would be a bust, perhaps, but the others would be interesting. He concentrated upon the cards to let them choose themselves.
December 22, 2021 – 4:53 PM
Elliot Carmichael — Played by Beanie
Elliot nodded. Finished shuffling the cards, he focused on them and said aloud, "What do you have to tell us about Mr. Zabini's mind, body, and spirit?" One did not have to ask the question aloud, but Elliot did enjoy some amount of theatricality, and it was better to teach asking the question aloud. It was still habit, even after Hogwarts.
"Miss Reid likely told you," Elliot said, "But I used to teach Divination. I found that tarot worked well for the students, especially those who did not possess the Sight themselves." Divining and Seeing were different, although Hogwarts — and most laypeople — tended to assume they were inherently coupled.
He shuffled the cards once more, having asked them for the information they sought. He fanned the cards out and held them for Mr. Zabini, maintaining eye contact rather than looking to see what they held. "Select your cards in the order they speak to you, if you will," Elliot said.
December 29, 2021 – 10:19 AM
Savino Zabini — Played by MJ
He could understand that – Ruby Urquart was not a Seer, and talented at Tarot – but Savino fully expected that Mr. Carmichael, a former professor who was also a Seer, and who had a self-expressed preference for the cards against many other instruments, would be especially attuned to them.
All the worse for his future, Savino considered, bracing himself as he selected the cards. There was a particular foreboding when it came to one, but he still believed in general that forewarned was forearmed, and he did not think the cards had the capacity to shock him about his future, not anymore.
But, lest Mr. Carmichael was at all surprised by what he saw in them, Savino deliberately kept the conversation afloat, perhaps as a cushion of distraction for them both. “Yes, she told me,” he said, with the quirk of a smile. “But – if you don’t mind me asking, that is – why did you stop teaching?”
He seemed like he would have been good at it, making Divination accessible to students of all sorts. (Maybe, Savino thought to himself with a grin, lessons had become somewhat less rewarding for him without having Miss Reid for a student.)
January 2, 2022 – 11:10 PM
Elliot Carmichael — Played by Beanie
Elliot laid out the cards in the spread. "I usually flip everything before I interpret," he said, by way of warning Mr. Zabini. He felt a soft thrum in his hands as he revealed the cards — Elliot had never known if this was the anticipation normal people had when reading tarot, or if it was an area where his Sight was joining him once again.
He scanned the cards during Zabini's next question. The Ten of Wands, upright; Death, reversed; the hermit, upright. The first two combined felt particularly ominous to Elliot — he'd given enough readings, and Seen enough terrible things, that the only betrayal of it on his face was an arch of one eyebrow. The last card — Zabini's spirit — was an upright hermit, and felt warmer, to Elliot.
The interpretation came to his tongue, but he hesitated to give it right away. Elliot looked up at Mr. Zabini. "It would be unlike Miss Reid to tell you the pattern of my visions," he said. It was entirely possible that Zabini knew — Elliot's visions of death were not a kept secret — but he was foreign, and Temerita Reid did not reveal the truths of others. So maybe he didn't. "When I have visions, they're of death. And I kept having them in class, or around students. I couldn't prevent the visions from coming to me, or from coming true. So I — decided to leave."
It had been his decision — but he hadn't been sleeping, his teaching started to slip, and he'd felt as he had when he'd decided to leave the Ministry. So — he'd quit.
January 5, 2022 – 9:47 PM
Savino Zabini — Played by MJ
Try as he might to keep an even keel, there was a familiar twist in his gut as the cards were turned, his insides becoming ice. It felt worse, physically, when he actually dreamed of it – and after, woke up shivering and cold and numb from it, skin tingling as he came back to his body like the future had somehow crept into his limbs as he slept.
This was different – not feeling it so much, but feeling the weight of the knowledge, the cool fact of it, face on. The direction of his future was something that had sunk in for him long ago, but it was more real when someone else saw it too. One more nail going in.
The rest of the party – gathering – felt quite distant now, a hazy background murmur. But no, he hadn’t known that – Savino dragged his gaze up from the cards as well when Mr. Carmichael explained it. “Ah,” he said softly, with a little surprise and dismay, but rather more understanding than he had had before. “That must be – difficult, always seeing others’ deaths.” Seeing his own was unpleasant enough, but at least there was no great theme to the rest of his visions; Mr. Carmichael was locked into a darker pattern, and Savino could only imagine the kind of toll that would take. “How do you cope?”
January 14, 2022 – 5:16 AM
Elliot Carmichael — Played by Beanie
Elliot shrugged his shoulders. It was difficult — obviously difficult, the fact of it written out repeatedly over his adult life — but he lived like this because he had to. The visions would not stop if he wanted them to; Elliot wasn't going to point that out to Savino, who had to know that already.
"I've tried preventing things," he admitted, "Usually too late. And I've tried treating it like a distant puzzle, but visions are too — intimate." That was something only other seers would understand, if they understood, Elliot hazarded.
He glanced down at the cards in front of him. "Divining usually gives me the space to see other things. But — not always," he said, gentle — that death had come up for Zabini anyways meant that the stagnation Elliot felt emanating from the card loomed larger for him than it did for most.
January 18, 2022 – 12:31 AM
Savino Zabini — Played by MJ
So his visions might be different, but the methods and mechanisms he had tried were the same as any Seer, Savino supposed. (He couldn’t help but wonder why people’s Sight was so specifically harnessed to certain things, or how it could affect people so differently... but that was perhaps an investigation beyond his capabilities, some inner working of body and mind and genes.)
He nodded at the word intimate. He felt that, too: how could any Seer not, when something forced its way into their mind; how they had a brief window to some potent moment of someone else’s life; how they lived it in the moment, as no one else could experience it but the subject themself?
Only there was a certain vulnerability in this moment, too, because Savino had given him – a man still scarcely more than a stranger – that small window willingly. “I would not have agreed to this so swiftly, if I had known,” Savino apologised quietly, now that he was aware Carmichael had more than enough to deal with without lumping Savino’s future on him too. “I could have found you a more cheerful volunteer.” He smiled, because he’d meant it almost as a joke – but Savino certainly wouldn’t have asked him to read his cards. (Although perhaps Mr. Carmichael would be less shaken by this, or more understanding of it, than most people would.)
He brushed his fingertips over the faces of the cards now laid out, one by one, still drawn to them in spite of what they said. “What do you read in them?”
January 25, 2022 – 5:38 PM
Elliot Carmichael — Played by Beanie
So Zabini knew, then, what awaited him. Elliot glanced over the cards again, his fingers hovering over them, as if his interpretation would change. "Your body is carrying a burden with it," Elliot said, as gently as he could. "With the reversed death card, I feel that you are resisting this as best you can — and that the burden is of an increasing stagnation."
How did it feel, to know your body was fighting you? Elliot didn't know; he had only ever fought his mind.
He cleared his throat and met Zabini's eyes for there last card. "The hermit, as you know, generally means you have a single purpose, and that you know yourself — I expect that this is your relationship to Divination, and I believe you are at harmony with it, that the Sight gives you your purpose."
He could not relate to that, either.
February 9, 2022 – 1:41 AM
Savino Zabini — Played by MJ
Savino tilted his chin in the slightest of nods as Carmichael elaborated on the cards. He had read them well: stagnation was the – right word for it. When all he wanted was progress, change, the thought of everything – slowing to a halt was exactly what he was afraid of.
Resisting it was as much as he could do. In truth, Savino sometimes merely felt he was eking out his days as long as he could – without a focus on Divination, he could barely imagine what he would do with himself. Savino caught himself smiling inexplicably – he had just asked Carmichael how he coped with his Sight, hadn’t he? And, funny, Savino didn’t know what he would have done without it.
“Well, I suppose I had to find a purpose somewhere,” he admitted with a tight, careful shrug, wondering what the other man thought of it, his relying on something most other Seers thought a burden. “You must think it strange.” Maybe he was just delusional, and that was that.
Savino broke his gaze away, trying to be comforted by the Hermit card. “But maybe one out of three isn’t so bad,” he joked. If his body would betray him, and his mind was fighting a losing battle, at least he had some part of himself to fall back on.
February 15, 2022 – 12:45 AM
Elliot Carmichael — Played by Beanie
Elliot shook his head. "I don't think it's strange at all," he said. They all had methods of coping with their Sight, and who was Elliot to judge anyone else's? And Savino had to live knowing that his body was going to betray him; that was more difficult than what most people had to handle. No one needed to know how things were going to end for them. Maybe it was because of his own visions, but Elliot thought that most people didn't need to know details of their deaths.
"One out of three is more than most people have," Elliot agreed.
