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i.
It always smelled like tea in Dodona’s. Hints of sage, of plastic-wrapped incense tucked away. Dominique had long stopped smelling it. It would hit her when she first walked in to work, but then, by the time she had finished clocking in, the space would be neutral to her.
Dodona’s was, as a whole, neutral. Lavender and Parvati said it was something about the ley lines under Diagon Alley, but Dominique had seen the ley line maps in History of Magic, and they steered fairly clear of this part of London. It was better not to question their logic, she thought. They signed her paychecks, and, really, she couldn’t be arsed either way.
It was stuck in a backwater part of Diagon, in some side street that caught nice light in the mornings. It was neither too close nor too far from The Leaky Cauldron, neither too close nor too far from Knockturn Alley. Which is not to say that it was central, just that it was… there. Neutral. Palatable. Smelling of tea.
Lavender brought her a coffee sprinkled with cinnamon — sweet. The mug did not have a handle. It was hand-thrown, by the looks of it, glazed messily in pinks and purples.
“Big shipment in today,” said Lavender, equally tired and cheerful.
Dominique sipped, and her hands and her throat burned a little. “Isn’t it always?”
ii.
Dominique had not exactly foreseen herself working in an occult shop after Hogwarts. Parvati hated it when she called it that — it was a metaphysical shop, she insisted. Dominique had parried once with Divination Station, which had gotten her the cold shoulder for about half a day.
She’d taken Divination, of course. Divination, Ancient Runes, and Arithmancy — her parents had insisted. Curse breakers and bankers, they wanted Dominique to have some practical skills. But her mother was also superstitious, she believed in higher powers, and despite her father’s huffing and puffing, all three of their children were encouraged to take Divination.
Victoire had dropped it after one term. Louis lasted a week. But Dominique powered through until O.W.Ls, knowing her grade point average would, at the very least, be boosted by the easiest O of her life.
She had no third eye. No connection to the beyond, no hope of seeing any kind of omens, no possibility of seeing the future. In the end, she supposed what had drawn her to Dodona’s was the comfort in the idea that there were people who could.
iii.
At lunch, Lavender spread out a Tarot reading. It was comforting now for Dominique to stretch her hands across the spray of cards, waiting for a spark or a tingle, maybe a magnetic pull. This had nothing to do with her own magical capabilities. Maybe it was only static, maybe it was psychosomatic. It didn’t matter, not to her anyway — she spread her fingers wide above the cards and let the sparks in her palms guide her.
Dominique had little interest in understanding her future. She would figure it out soon enough, and it seemed like it might ruin the surprise of it all to figure out what was coming beforehand. What she really wanted was to understand her present with the wisdom of the past.
She was chasing hindsight.
Lavender smiled at the spread.
“But that’s impossible,” said Dominique, blinking. “You shuffled the deck.”
“Look at it, then, if you don’t believe me.”
In a small pyramid, the cards in front of her looked just the same as they had last week, when they’d found a slow moment in the day and pulled out the deck to amuse themselves. Dominique had been feeling introspective then. Maybe a bit lonely, but not overwhelmingly so. It was just good fun, and maybe — maybe — the chance to see the present a little more clearly.
Lavender leaned back in her chair, laughing. “They’re trying to tell you something, I think.”
iv.
Twenty-four was a stupid age, Dominique thought. She’d been thinking it since her birthday six months ago. A crisp, February morning. At twenty-three she was still allowed to be young; she was still allowed to not have it figured out. She did not have anything figured out.
Twenty four felt different. Like there was gravity attached to it, like maybe it was the first real year of being an adult.
There had been strings of adulthood she’d been tugging at for a while now, yanking them into something she’d hoped resembled a tapestry. The career string had been much shorter than she’d anticipated. She had started to think that the relationship string would never end, and how could she envision forever when she couldn’t even envision life at twenty-five?
And at twenty-four and a quarter, she’d started anew. Victoire accused her of burning bridges, but Dominique didn’t know if she believed that was true. She turned in her trainee badge back to the employee office of the Department of Mysteries; she moved out of the flat she’d shared with her then boyfriend for the past year; she walked empty handed into an occult shop in the most unfamiliar part of Diagon she could find.
She didn’t believe in Parvati’s ley line theory, but sometimes she thought they had led her straight here.
v.
Her flat was still pretty unfurnished. It was decorated mostly by her own laundry and the couch her ex insisted she take with her. (“Merlin, I’m not sending you off with nothing , take the bleeding sofa.”) There was a mattress on the floor in the bedroom, and a couple of dishes and pieces of flatware she and Louis had been systematically stealing from restaurants in London.
It did not smell of tea. (But it also didn’t smell like dirty laundry, so Dominique could not complain.) It smelled like the air through the window she left cracked: an empty, clean kind of smell.
Her ex-boyfriend was sitting on the couch.
“Did you want our rug?” he asked when she walked in. He craned his head around to watch her approach him. “I was thinking your place needs a rug.”
Dominique plopped into the overstuffed armchair some uncle or other had donated. Across from him, she could see him in almost complete detail. He was all legs. He always said he was malproportioned, some kind of freak magical thing, or maybe some tragic recessive gene. His legs stuck out like birch trees, capped at the bottom by large feet.
“I like our rug in your place, though,” she said.
He frowned, scratching on the corduroy fabric on the armrests. “You need a rug.”
It was quiet for a second, and Dominique had a brief, horrifying feeling that she might say something important.
She stood abruptly. “Can I get you water or something?”
He smiled soft. “Tea, if you don’t mind.”
She did not mind. He shuffled after her towards the kitchen, leaning against the wall by the fridge as she maneuvered around the space.
“Sofa looks nice,” he offered.
“I’m glad the custody arrangement is working out well. It misses you, I think.” She paused for a second, then saying: “I didn’t realize you’d be coming over today.”
“Oh, yeah…” He scratched at the back of his neck. His shirt lifted, and a small patch of pale and freckled skin appeared just above the line of his boxers, taught over muscle and the gentle protrusion of a hip bone. Dominique snapped her eyes back up to his face. He dropped his arm. “I was in the area. And I wanted to see if you had a rug or not.”
She lifted a brow. “I don’t.”
“I see that now, yes.”
Dominique plopped in two sugars, and began to stir them with perhaps more vigor than necessary.
She could feel his presence behind her in the quiet. He had not moved from his spot against the wall, but his energy reached out towards hers like something tangible. She felt as though her skin was warming and opening to receive it. She wondered if, for him, it still felt the same.
He cleared his throat. “So, er, how was work?”
She turned around, handing him his tea. “You know… it was actually quite weird. Can I tell you about it?”
vi.
“The exact same spread?” he asked, raising two blue eyebrows in surprise.
“Yeah.” She fiddled with the tag of her own teabag. “Lavender just started laughing.”
That made him smile. “I mean, it is sort of funny. The probability of that must be so low… Are you going to do it, then?”
“Do what?”
“Whatever the cards are telling you. I’m not super familiar with that stuff, but I assume the cards are suggesting something.”
“Not so much that…" She did not know how to explain it. "They’re very flexible. You can do spreads for past, present, or future. That’s the thing about divination, you’d be surprised how much overlap there is between it all.”
“Cause and effect, right? The future is predicated on something.”
“Yeah.”
He cocked his head at her. “That’s what you’d been doing in the DOM, right? Time magic stuff. Prophecies and that.”
She rolled her eyes, amused. “I was only a trainee. And I flunked out.”
“Not true. You quit with dignity, I remember.”
She let go of her teacup, leaning back in her chair. She ran the fringe of a throw pillow between her fingers, twisting the threads with every movement. “No, actually… I was about to flunk out. That’s why I quit.”
He watched her with an expression she could not quite place. Quiet, and then: “I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah.” She laughed awkwardly. “I wasn’t sure— I didn’t know how to tell you, so…”
He frowned. He opened his mouth like was going to say something, “I—“ but then he closed it again, staring at his shoes. Dominique watched, her bottom lip between her teeth.
“I would have helped you, you know,” he said, almost frustrated. “As much as I could have.”
Except they both knew it would not have mattered much. She had her bags packed two weeks after turning in her badge. She nodded vaguely and leaned forward to drink the last bit of her tea.
“What are the cards saying?” he asked. “Just out of curiosity.”
It rose in her again, the sharp urge to say something. She could feel it against the back of her throat. She coughed gently into her elbow. “It’s late. Are you crashing here?”
vii.
It had been a while since she’d seen him get ready for bed. He shed his trousers, folding them neatly and placing them on the floor in a pile with his folded shirt. In his pants, he looked remarkably the same. It had only been three months since they broke up. It made sense, but it was jarring.
She felt different now. Her clothes fit different (that was Parvati’s baking, though), she carried herself different. Life was not the same. But he still brushed his teeth the same way, humming as he did it. He slid into the same side of the bed he had always done, and Dominique on the other.
She wondered if it felt right because it was supposed to or because it had always felt that way. She wondered if there was a difference at all.
He flicked off the light by magic, and they lay side by side untouching.
Long quiet, and then: “How come you didn’t know how to tell me?”
The rustling of sheets. Then he was facing her, his hand propped up on his elbow.
She shrugged. “Why do you care so much whether or not I have a rug?”
“Deflecting, Weasley.”
“Yeah.” She shifted onto her side, mirroring his posture. The room was lit in pleasant shades of blue, brightest on his face and deepening into navy, black, in the edges of her vision. “Dunno, I guess it just felt like something I didn’t even want to admit to myself.”
“Does your family know?”
She scratched her cheek. “Not really. I think Louis has an idea, but I haven’t said anything.”
“I’m sorry, Minnie.”
She fell onto her back, closing her eyes peacefully. “You haven’t called me that in a while.”
“Do you not want me to?”
“No — no, I like it. I just haven’t heard it in a while.”
And it wasn’t like they hadn’t seen each other. He’d had a spare key to her flat this whole time. There was a very specific custody arrangement with the couch, and traditions involving their friends and wine and karaoke nights.
He cleared his throat. “I wondered if it might be too intimate.”
She turned to him, head against the pillow. “It’s just us.”
“Right,” he said, like this proved his point.
He was looking down at her with his head on his elbow, and it occurred to her that this must be beyond strange for him.
This was, she allowed, not conventional break-up behavior. Most exes sought to meet on neutral ground. Dominique had with all of hers.
This was not the bed they had shared, but these sheets — they were the spares for their old mattress. Thin and comfortable, a once-bright teal worn soft by time. Not neutral.
In fact, she was realizing now nothing about this flat was the neutral ground she’d hoped it to be when she thought to start anew. It was their couch in the living room. Her new mattress, but with his old sheets. His fingerprints were on a mug in the kitchen; there was evidence of him in the posters she hung on the wall. She bought him the shirt he had left folded at her bedside. No neutrality. They had been woven into each other for so long now.
“I guess,” he said, voice quiet and low, “I guess I wanted to know if you’d gotten a rug because that seems like the kind of thing that somebody who was settled would buy. And there is part of me — a big part, actually, and I can’t say I’m all that proud of it — that hopes you aren’t settled. That you haven’t bought a rug, and that if you really want one, you’ll take our old one, so I’ll have an excuse to come bring it here.”
“Teddy…” she said, flicking her eyes from his face to the tremble of his Adam’s apple and back up to his periwinkle eyelashes.
“Sorry,” he said, shaking his head.
She sat up completely, letting the blanket pool at her hips. He did the same, watching her apprehensively.
“I can go—“
“Don’t,” she said. And that feeling rose in her again. She channeled it this time, moving as though by puppeteer and straddling his hips.
“We’re broken up,” he reminded her absently.
“Yeah,” she agreed, burying her hands in the soft mess of blue hair at the nape of his neck. “We are.”
His eyes fluttered shut. She dragged her thumbs out of his hair, against the hard plate of bone behind his ear, following the chords of his neck. With ten fingers, she pressed into the muscled flesh of his shoulders. He was real, and here, and he probably had better places to be.
His hands rested on the swell of her hips, devoid of proprietary aggression.
“Can I kiss you?” she asked him in a whisper.
He leaned into her, pushing their foreheads together. “Yes — Merlin, please do—“
His hands felt so hot against her hips. She wondered if hers felt the same, now back in his hair as she held him against her. His kiss was a familiar thing. She didn’t feel electricity against his lips; she felt it beginning in her core, tingling outwards towards her extremities.
It was an unmistakable sensation, like she was hovering her hand above the perfect Tarot card.
“Minnie,” he mumbled against her mouth. He pulled away, pulling her into him and breathing deep. “You smell different.”
She laughed quietly. “Do I?”
“Yeah.” He nuzzled his head against hers, slipping his hands under her tee shirt, up the expanse of her back. “You smell like cinnamon and oranges.”
She pushed her forehead against his, breathing deep to calm her racing heart. “It’s tea.”
“It’s good,” he breathed. “Let me kiss you again?”
She laughed again, louder this time. “Okay.”
viii.
There was coffee waiting for her when she walked into work the next morning. Parvati and Lavender were waiting at her workstation, and a great smile appeared on Lavender’s scarred face the moment Dominique crossed the threshold.
“What?” asked Dominique self consciously.
Lavender shook her head. “Nothing. Just that we have a big order coming in today.”
Dominique looked over to Parvati, who was biting down on her own smile.
“Sure,” Dominique said, skeptical. She was fairly sure they’d gotten all their shipments for the week in. “I’ll just be in the back working on yesterday’s stock, then.”
“Great, great,” said Lavender, smiling still. “I’ll be right there.”
Coffee in hand, she pushed into the back room, and was met by the overwhelming mixture of smells. Tea, of course, that cinnamon and orange blend. Sage. Incense. The fading smell of a lit match, the raw smell of fire.
On the table by the kitchenette was a Tarot deck.
Lavender followed in the room as promised. She spotted Dominique looking over at the table. Surprisingly seriously, she asked, “Did you want to do another reading before we start?”
Dominique looked up at her, blinking. “What?”
“The cards.” Lavender smiled gently. “Your aura is absolutely pulsing. I think your reading would be different now.”
“Maybe,” she allowed.
Without commenting on the state of her aura, pulsating or otherwise, she had thought fleetingly about her cards as she was drifting to sleep. These were the sequences of events she might have studied in the DoM, in another life. Fate or coincidence. Divination or self-determination.
“The reading won’t take ten minutes, and I’d be happy to do it.”
For a long moment, Dominique stared at the deck.
She knew a few things for sure. That she had no way of knowing the how or the why of anything — not really. But she trusted that electricity in her palms.
The cards had always been clear. Dominique had known their meaning since the moment the spread laid out last week. Really, she had known it since the first night she spent alone on that couch three months ago in her new, lonely flat.
There were some things worth running away from, some things worth giving up on. Life was not a complete tapestry; some strings were meant to run out.
Others had infinite spools. Some things were meant to last. She believed that; she knew that.
She looked up at Lavender’s gentle face, a shy smile overtaking her own. “Let’s just get to work.”