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Halley's Comet was visible over Britain when you were six years old. You remember hearing about it on the wireless and all the grown-ups making a fuss over it. You remember your parents took you and Padma out to the countryside in the middle of the night; they tried to get you to look in a telescope some other grown-up had brought, but it was cold and you kept trying to tuck your hands into your coat sleeves, and you were sleepy and wanted to go home.
When at last you saw the comet, it wasn't all that impressive. Just a faint, whitish smudge on the night sky. Everyone seemed a bit apologetic about it, the way Londoners always apologise for the weather.
"You'll have another chance," your mum said, half reassuring and half doleful. "You'll see it again when you're an old woman."
You remember those words so much more vividly than you remember the comet itself. Because even then, even when you were so small, something about her prediction didn't sit right. It wasn't the idea of growing old that was the problem, nor was it a fear that some disaster would befall you and you wouldn't live to see the comet again at all. No, at the age of six, such mortal concerns were far too remote to have much meaning for you.
Only... when you were old, would you truly be an old woman?
The question rattled round in your mind for years afterward. Sometimes it settled into the background for a while, and at other times it popped up anxiously for no discernible reason. An old woman? Surely, someday you would have to be one. It wasn't as though there were any way around it. The inevitability of it haunted you—a shapeless dread for which you had no words.
You often found yourself vaguely, abstractly searching for some other hidden path, some exception to the rule that would allow you to slip through the cracks and escape that fate. It was like flying on a badly-balanced broomstick that always listed to one side, uncomfortable in the air and finding nowhere stable to land.
The year you turned seventeen, Comet Hale-Bopp made its spectacular appearance, burning every night in the sky for months on end.
Firenze never called it Hale-Bopp, of course. That was its human name. He only called it the Great Comet, in tones of heavy and sombre reverence. That spring he took the class out onto the grounds to observe it at night (the narrow stone steps of the Astronomy Tower were difficult for him), which left most of the students grumbling and yawning, but you enjoyed the night air and the chance to be near your favourite teacher.
You wanted to be near him, but not in the way that Lavender did—Lavender, who rested her chin in her hands and gazed at Firenze's handsome, almost-human face with moony sighs and stars in her eyes. You were drawn to him in another way, one you couldn't then understand.
The thing about Firenze was that he seemed to have mastered being two things at once. Both man and beast. Both fantastically magical and yet solidly real; you saw his equine flank twitch, you saw his breath in puffs of fog as he peered up at the sky. Refused by his own people and only uneasily accepted by yours, he stood between worlds and devoted his hours to teaching young foals of the planets that wandered so far away, so infinitely removed from the Earth and all its little creatures and all their little hatreds.
"The comet is an omen," he intoned.
"An omen of what?" asked some bleary-eyed student.
Though you weren't the one who asked the question, Firenze turned his bright blue gaze directly at you before he replied: "A great battle."
Both the intensity of his stare and the clarity of his answer startled you. Ordinarily he left his predictions mystical and vague. Some of the other students fumbled in alarm for their quills and parchments, eager to scribble down this rare piece of unobscured information.
You remember that this night led you to write a whole research paper on the divinatory history of comets—how Halley's appeared in 1066 and foretold the downfall of King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, and how Rowena Ravenclaw herself had tried to warn him, but to no avail. Studying in the library, you traced your finger over the printed reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry, over the astonished soldiers pointing up at the delicately embroidered starburst of the comet. Your eyes passed over the title in its half-broken magical Latin: ISTI MIRANT STELLA. They are marvelling at the star.
Firenze's prediction was accurate, naturally. Just a few months later, Professor Dumbledore would be dead, the school would be overrun by the Death Eaters, and at last good and evil would clash on the very school grounds on which they'd so recently stood calmly stargazing. It all made perfect sense.
And yet, you found it difficult to forget that when Firenze spoke of a great battle foretold in the stars, he wasn't looking at Hogwarts.
He was looking at you.
When you are 81 years old, Halley's Comet makes its predicted reappearance, right on time. As it always does, as it always has, it returns from its long journey through the dark and lonely places of the solar system, and it visits the Earth to see what has gone on in its seventy-six-year absence—to see what battles have been fought, what kings have fallen, and what omens have been fulfilled.
You have fought your battles. Not just one, but many, and some over and over. The daily struggle, now a distant memory, to manage the unwieldy rolls of enchanted fabric that bound your chest flat—and your quest to master the permanent transfigurations that made that morning struggle, at last, unnecessary. The battle to be called by a new name. To be with men as a man, not a girl, and to learn with them what delights two men's bodies can bring. To be a son to your parents, and not a daughter. To be Padma's sister no longer, but her brother.
Sometimes you think it was Padma who made it obvious to you, in the end. Nothing she said—just seeing her face. Feeling that agitating, insistent knowledge that you were identical, and at the same time the implacable certainty that you were not. Watching her grow so effortlessly into the woman you could never be. Seeing how comfortable she was with her easy curves, while you clung in panic to the straight-lined body of your childhood, feeling you were being dragged forcibly into an unacceptable and monstrous transformation.
You love to see Padma now. She's always been there for you, and the more your faces diverged and the less identical you became, the closer you grew to one another. When you see her now, you see nothing troubling, no strange and twisted mirror, but only her: Your fraternal twin sister, as she was meant to be.
And when you see yourself in your own, real mirror, in robes of violet, with fabulously glittering rings on your fingers, dark eyeliner, long hair and a long grey beard, you see now that it is you, Professor Purab Patil—you are the star to be marvelled at.
While the comet was away, the world has turned and changed in ways that still astonish you. A far more welcoming world now, in 2061, than you ever could have imagined when you were a child. You still teach your Divination students that a comet is an omen of a great battle, but you are careful to make clear to them what is by now so clear to you: A battle need not mean catastrophe.
A battle can, in fact, be won.
You tuck your beard aside and out of the way as your gnarled hands manipulate the telescope, searching. Soon the comet will be visible to the naked eye, and then you will begin conducting night classes to observe it, but this first sighting will be just for you.
You're not alone, however. At the edge of the forest, a knot of centaurs also gaze up at the sky. As always, they have clearer vision for these things. Firenze himself could be among them, for all you know; he retired from teaching many years ago, but his people live for centuries.
At last you find the spot and bring it into focus. The comet indeed is there, and so much brighter this time. Far more impressive, already, than the faint, disappointing smudge that you could barely make out in that chill February sky in 1986.
And so, breathing in the night air, surrounded by peaceable cricket-song, you prove your mum's prediction half-right: You see the comet again, not as an old woman, but as an old and happy man.