"You're putting a little heart into this, right?” Aeri asks. 

Jimin’s brow twitches, but she manages to keep her eyes shut. 

"You have to direct magical intention on the tea or else it’s not going to work.”

“Shhh, I’m trying.” 

Jimin focuses on her breath, noticing where she feels it in her body - in her nostrils, in her chest and finally, in her abdomen. She sips the grassy decoction in her cup. When it’s nearly empty, she swirls the porcelain clockwise three times and inverts it over a saucer.

Now, she waits.

To be frank, Jimin only took Divination for the laughs. She was roped into the plan by Minjeong and Yizhuo - only for the spineless prats to bail on her at the last minute. They also had the audacity to go where they knew Jimin couldn’t follow; they signed up to tame a Hippogriff in Care of Magical Creatures and as much as Jimin was fascinated by most animals, she was deathly afraid of birds. So she grits her teeth in Divination, surely, she can do without a nine-foot tall, thousand-pound version of her phobia. 

"I think that's enough waiting." Aeri interjects across the round table. 

Enter Aeri Uchinaga. She and Jimin don’t see eye to eye about Divination (i.e. Aeri is an earnest enjoyer; Jimin is a skeptic), but the Hufflepuff is her best shot at scraping a passing grade in the subject without ever actually studying. So as per her instructions, the Gryffindor girl turns her teacup upright and sets it on the off-white lace table runner. 

Today, they were supposed to read tea leaves.

“This speck at 3 o’ clock...a fly?” Aeri begins tentatively, raising her teacup to Jimin’s eye level. She points at the figure on the rim of the ceramic with her free finger. “Oh...and...this is a dagger for sure - at the center of the base. Then...a crab in the middle section,  6 o’clock position …I think? It does have 10 legs…” 

“Erm…okay? It seems like you’re dealing with an annoying person...” Jimin underlines the word fly with her quill. She pauses, scanning the cryptic passages of Unfogging the Future for the words, crab and dagger. “....and uh - this is an admonition that you should be more direct in addressing the matter at hand while taking caution against sharp words."

“So.” Jimin peeks at her partner. “Thoughts?” 

Aeri hums, easing back on her chintz armchair, stare vacant. And as if she couldn’t be more odd, the blonde lifts her teacup to her lips again. 

“Uhm...you do know that’s empty, right?” 

Aeri freezes, and Jimin sees her florid ears, intensified by the crimson lighting of their North Tower classroom.  

“Man, that fly person must really be stressing you out.” The Gryffindor smirks, propping her head on her hand. "You're antsy."

“I-it’s not a big deal...” Aeri clears and rests her cup down with whatever’s left of her composure. “I just didn’t think it would show on my cup.”

“Is it the Slytherin boy in your Potions class?” Jimin hazards. “The one who asked you out to Hogsmeade weekend?”

Aeri her brow. "And you said you didn't have an Inner Eye."

Jimin shrugs. She didn’t need one to tell. Aeri’s class before Divination was morning Double Potions with the Slytherins, and Jimin herself had seen the boy in action when she and the Hufflepuff crammed pair work at last week’s lunch. For someone who was not-in-the-least attention-seeking, Aeri had quite a number of wizards under her love spell. Some of them were real tossers too - the type to think apologetic refusals and deflective answers were invitations to try harder. 

"Forget the tea dregs. If he's pissing you off, kick his arse." 

Aeri scoffs, dipping the nib of her quill in ink. 

"It's serious advice, Uchinaga-san."

“Yeah. Appreciated, Yoo.” Aeri cheekily replies, dismissing the Gryffindor with her signature kitten grin - nose scrunch, whisker dimples and everything. 

Jimin digresses at the sight of it. 

There’s just no way a face like that could ever hurt somebody on purpose.

The dark-haired girl rolls her gaze to her own teacup. Unlike Aeri's, hers is almost empty, and she would have joked about it implying she had no future, if not for the tiny clump of grains that hung under the handle. 

“What's in yours?" The Hufflepuff asks, penning a sentence in her transcript of today's tessomancy readings. 

"Nothing much actually, but it's got a plump shape. Maybe it's an acorn?" Jimin squints, tilting the cup at various angles. 

"Here, have a look." The Gryffindor slides the piece of porcelain halfway between the two of them. 

Aeri scoots at the edge of her seat. She takes one glance at Jimin's tea leaves and gapes open, as if she's seen something she isn't supposed to see. 

"This isn't an acorn, Jimin. It's a heart." She breathes out. 

"It means you're in love." 

At this point, Aeri should clap and crack into almost soundless laughter, except she doesn't. 

Because it isn't a prank. 

Jimin stares down at Cassandra Vablatsky’s illustration of a heart and then at her teacup. Indeed, at the rim near the handle, appeared the symbol of love so conspicuous, she wondered how she had missed it completely at first.

Nevertheless, the reading was ridiculous. It must have been a mistake on Jimin’s part. Maybe she should have poured less strength into her swirls or waited one less breath before turning her cup over. 

Anyway, she wasn’t in love, and her tea leaves had absolutely no business telling her she was. 

She’s making that clear. 

"It’s wrong. If I were in love, I would have known first." 

Jimin would have liked it if they closed at that, but akin to all their other arguments on the art of scrying, it’s Aeri who always gets the last word. 

"Not all the time, Jimin. You could be in love and not know." 

- end of lesson one -