Occlumency

Chapter 65: Occlumency

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

The strangest thing about starting a secret association was how little it seemed to matter. It made no difference to most of the student body, who still steered clear of Harry and by extension anyone seen with them; it certainly made no difference to Umbridge, whose presence infected the hallways with a tinge of anxious gloom even when it was only a possibility; but sometimes, someone passed in the hallway, and they would offer a tiny grin — and there would be a sting of relief and pleasure, knowing what secret that grin carried. A secret was something Umbridge could not touch.

The memory of a sun-filled Room of Requirement became somewhere to send his mind when the coldness of the world threatened to disappoint him.

Their lives fell into a slow promenade, as daylight grew scarce, and drafts chilled the hallways. Winter rains mowed seas of mud into the castle lawns, which had grown shaggy and wild in Hagrid’s absence.

Defense Club met twice more that October, and once in early November, each meeting longer and more successful than the last. Harry had found his stride as a teacher: it laid in doing as little actual instruction as possible, and instead offering exhortations of encouragement while dispatching others to issue critique. When someone needed a full deconstruction or a primer in spell theory, as Daphne and Neville often did, he would tap Hermione; for problems of confidence or aggression, he ushered them towards Ron; and to Draco’s disgruntlement, he found questions about technique and execution directed towards him, which obligated him to spend the better part of an afternoon trying to understand why Seamus’s Reparo blew up everything it touched.

“Neville said you were a good tutor,” said Seamus, blithely unapologetic.

“And if he’s lucky, I might someday forgive him for it,” said Draco, rolling up his sleeve to hide the singe marks.

Hermione oscillated between misery and fervent, overworked relish. Preparing lessons for several other years’ Defense curriculums compressed her preexisting homework routine so closely it should achieve fusion. Often she would stay in the library well after curfew, forcing Draco, as the other prefect with a curfew-exemption, to go fetch her.

“Draco,” she said, before he rounded the corner to her table.

He paused, and then stepped into view. She was alone in the lamplight, surrounded by rows of leatherbound Transfiguration textbooks. Her head remained bent over her notes, which she was color-coding with muggle highlighters.

The way she said his name was particular. It wasn’t a quick, clipped lilt from consonant to consonant, like Harry, or Ron’s drawl, which always carried a faint hint of aspersion in it, like he couldn’t quite believe it was a real name; she said his name with elegance and clarity, with the exacting pronunciation she used for incantations, like a mellifluous charm.

The last exhalation drew her lips into a soft moue, which lingered sometimes, as if she was holding it on her tongue.

“Did you cast a Detection Charm?” He lifted one of her scrolls to the light. Her handwriting degenerated in the places where she had become passionate about the material; she started to press down harder, and the quill blotted. His lip quirked.

She shook her head. “I recognized your footsteps,” she said, boxing a line in yellow.

“Do I have unusual footsteps?”

“No, but your legs are longer than Harry’s and shorter than Ron’s, and you walk quickly, like Harry, but he walks softly and you don’t. Ron shifts his weight more from side to side, which makes his steps heavier than yours. Also, it’s after curfew, and you’re the only one allowed to be here.” She glanced up at him, as if verifying her deduction, and returned to work.

He smiled. “Look who’s clever.”

“I spend most waking moments with you lot,” she said, mildly embarrassed. “We all know far too much about each other.”

“I wouldn’t say so.”

She capped her highlighter and reached for a quill. “Really? Of all people, I thought you’d be most jealous of your privacy.”

“I don’t have any to be jealous of. We live on top of each other. I haven’t had time alone with anyone in weeks.”

“We’re alone now,” she pointed out. A beat of silence followed.

She looked up in alarm, as if realizing for the first time that he was actually there, and she was having a real conversation with him. Possibly she had mistaken him for a stress-induced hallucination.

He braced his arms on the back of a chair, examining the spread on the table.

“I’ve been dispatched to pry you out of the library.”

“You’ll never take me alive,” she said, with a quirk of her lip.

“So this is to be a waiting game?”

“Exactly. We’re both waiting until you give up.”

“Or,” he suggested, “I could petrify you and carry you back to Gryffindor.”

“Go ahead,” she said, offensively unintimidated. “Yesterday I found a jinx that kills all the hair follicles on someone’s body. Do you think Parvati would still fancy you if you were bald?”

She placed her chin in her hands, smiling.

Horrible lovely girl. It would be more dignified if threatening him made her less attractive.

“Love alters not when it alteration finds.”

She snorted emphatically. An upraised finger leveled an objection. “One, it’s ‘love is not love which alters, et cetera,” she said, “and two, you are so ludicrously pretentious—”

“Says the girl who corrected me.”

“—as if, three, Shakespeare’s ‘ever-fixéd mark’ that ‘bears out to the edge of doom’ substitutes for ‘thinks the male chaser’s quite fit, actually,’ two things identical in import and fervor—”

“Well, she’s not wrong.”

“—and four — oh, get over yourself, would you please—”

“Not my forte.”

“—and, four: where did you read Sonnet 116?”

“We’ve a copy at home. Shakespeare was a wizard.” He drew his wand and twirled it through his fingers, idly wheeling its point through the air.

“He was not.”

“Edward de Vere was a wizard,” he amended.

She straightened. “Don’t even think about it.”

“There’s plenty of evidence.”

“You cannot be an Oxfordian. I’ll skin you.”

“Don’t be such an ideologue, Granger. The magic in Midsummer Night’s is entirely consistent with wizardry, down to the correct application of distilled wild pansy to brew what is, clearly, amortentia—”

“You’re mad. That’s completely coincidental, runs against a mountain of counterevidence, and they don’t even drink it, they dribble it in her eyes—”

“Artistic license.”

“That doesn’t make any sense!”

She leaned forward on the table, slack-jawed with disbelief and indignation. Notes forgotten, ink smearing the underside of her wrists. A smudge of ink on her cheek, evidencing a forgetful swipe of her hand. Her hair was twisted up into a knot on her head, and held in place with her wand. He imagined her wrestling it up out of frustration and impaling it on the nearest object.

There was ink on her cheek. Also, on her fingers. She had small hands, pretty ones. There were writing calluses on her knuckles and round short nails that she bit when she was anxious, or sometimes just held to her mouth, pressing a divot in her bottom lip. Pretty hands, and a pretty mouth.

She hadn’t pursued the argument. Her attention seemed preoccupied with the wand in his hand. She wasn’t even scowling anymore.

He stilled it, and her eyes moved.

She took a sharp breath. “You’re provoking me on purpose,” she decided. “You know you’re wrong about this. You just want to distract me.”

“Am I any good at it?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. He smiled guilelessly. Or with the intention of approximating guilelessness, anyway. He could not vouch for the total absence of guile.

“I’m warning you right now, if I don’t finish this because of you, you’re going to long for the days you had eyebrows.”

“Tant pis.” He rounded the table and leaned over her shoulder to peer at what she was writing. She stiffened and shifted away slightly.

“Is that French for ‘allow me to breathe down your neck’?”

“It’s French for ‘get over it,’” he said into her ear. “What are we doing?”

“What are we— we are invading personal space! Apparently!”

“In the essay, Granger. Did you decide if transfigured gold counts as legal tender?”

“Would y— no, but it’s ultimately more a question of law than of magic. For one, galleons aren’t solid gold, they’re a nickel-brass alloy with a gold coating, and the composition is a government secret, so all you could do is approximate volume and density. You could make something that looked like a galleon, but a simple charm would reveal it as a counterfeit.”

“How do you deal with the Duplication objection?”

“Oh, that’s simple! Duplication Charms can produce more of something, but they can’t replicate a magical signature, because those are unique to the object. And as to the question of whether you can transfigure a galleon into something else and still use it as tender — well, of course you can, but good luck convincing someone to take a tin cup instead of a gold coin.”

“That’s very good.”

“Thank you,” she said happily.

Her eyes were soft from surprise at the compliment, and she’d almost certainly come back to herself in a minute, but until then, it was a pleasure to hold the full radius of her attention, and drink in warmth.

What do you want? I’ll do it for you. Fight a dragon or run through a sewer or break the law.

There was nothing to be done about it. The feeling got worse every day, like tendrils of a trawling vine reaching deeper and deeper, twining around each vein and artery, a lattice of greed.

“What?” she said. “Is there something?”

The smudge on her cheek moved when she spoke.

She jumped when he touched her. His thumb glided across the ridge of her cheekbone, lifting the coloration from it, leaving her clear-faced and gaping.

“What are you doing?”

“There was a mark.”

She had short, delicate brown eyelashes. He could count them. “I see,” she said. “Is it — is it gone?”

“What?”

“The mark,” she said steadily. “Is it gone?”

It was.

“No,” he said. “Here.”

This time he drew the back of his knuckles across her cheek, and then touched the spot with the pad of his thumb, leaving a sort of brilliant tingling in his fingers. Her freckles sank into the heat of a blush like stars washing out in a sunrise.

“There is,” she said, “such a thing as a Scouring Charm.”

“There is.” He felt distant and outside of himself, and at the same time, intently, intensely present in his body, every nerve ending firing off some signal of pay attention. “You’re always telling me we needn’t use magic for everything.”

Her eyes skirted over the table, flitting from object to object without seeing them. “You’re not usually the touchy type.”

“I touch you.”

She started.

He had seen her in every kind of frustration known to man or Granger; her endeared irritation when friends begged for homework answers, her snarling vexation at students caught in reckless behavior, and most poignant of all, her hot, piercing, powerless frustration when she smashed herself up against something no amount of good or right could fix. But he had never seen her frustrated like this. It verged on pleasure, like satisfaction chafing on a collar.

“Yes, well. You’re used to me,” she said, a hopeless vye at flippancy. “I’ve worn you down. Most people lack the patience it takes to domesticate—”

“I assure you, it’s quite conscious.”

Her sentence crumbled off on a long exhale.

Her hand moved to her mouth and made a fist before it got there, catching herself.

“If you mean the thing on staircases, and the doors, then yes. Fine. You’re a gentleman. You get points.”

“Have you ever read the rules of etiquette?” he said. His voice was calm. “If you had, you might know that touching between boys and girls is actually rather discouraged, in general. Point of fact.”

She cleared her throat. She still was looking down at the table, her eyelashes brushing her cheeks. Her tongue darted faintly at her bottom lip. “And you’re telling me this: why?”

He shrugged. “What I said. It’s a choice.”

Her eyes slotted closed.

“Fine,” she said, in a clear, flat voice. “I’ll finish it in the morning. You can lay off the charm.”

She moved her chair back and stood up, and he shifted out of her way, watching as she vigorously corralled her notes.

Uncertainty shoved its awkward elbow in. “Granger,” he said, “are you… cross?”

“I’m not cross,” she said, still flat. “I need sleep. That’s all. And that was — crossing a line, by the way. It’s fine, just — so you know.”

“What line?”

“If you want me to do something, don’t ‘turn it on’ like that. I’m not Parvati, or Marietta, and I don’t want to be treated that way. And it’s fine, I’m not mad, and I know it’s probably fun, but I don’t want you to do it again. I’m telling you now because I’m trying to be respectful and clear.”

“I wasn’t ‘turning it on,’ it wasn’t manipulative—”

“Maybe it wasn’t meant that way,” she said brightly, clutching her textbooks to her chest, “but I wish you wouldn’t. Alright? That’s all. It isn’t a big deal. We can forget it.”

Absolutely he wouldn’t. For one thing, the promise not to flirt with her was one he had absolutely no intention of making nor keeping. For another, he hadn’t the first idea what she was so unhappy about; he’d never flirted with Parvati nor Marietta in his life, and the supposition was as baffling as her newfound standoffishness.

He knew she liked him. At least a little. She could say whatever she wanted, but she couldn’t take away the way she looked at him.

Still, he did know her. Knew her well enough to ease off when the cracks started showing, and to take an olive branch on the rare occasions she offered them.

“Granger.”

She turned around, eyes wide, face fixedly pleasant.

“It really was a very good argument,” he said, this time in a voice he’d use for class.

Her smile eased into something broader and sunnier, commingling pride and relief.

“Thank you,” she said, and perhaps as a show of goodwill, she talked about the Gringotts economy for the whole walk back to Gryffindor.

In retrospect, he didn’t know why he’d ever expected her to make it easy on him.

---

The next morning, Angelina sidled over at breakfast. “Alright, boys,” she announced, planting her elbow on Fred’s shoulder. “Results just went up, but I’ll save you the trip: Weasley, you’re keeper.”

Ron vented pumpkin juice through his nose.

“Ah, no,” said Fred gravely, “Johnson, I appreciate it, but it’s bad optics. Can’t have people thinking I slept my way to the top.”

“She was talking to me, dolt,” said George. “No one’s gonna look at you and think you’re sleeping your way anywhere.”

“Could too!”

“Could not.”

Angelina held up a finger to Ron. She appropriated Draco’s copy of the Prophet , folded it in half, and whacked each twin in the head.

“Ow!”

“Oi!”

“Ron, practices are six to eight, weekdays,” she announced. “See Hooch if you need a broom. Any of you seen Ginny, by the way? I’m putting her on reserve; she’s got a good arm, but she’s overeager.”

“She’s at the Ravenclaw table,” crooned George.

Fred leered. “With Miiiiiiiiiiichael.”

“Mickey Cee!”

“Brother Mike!”

“Michael Corndog.”

“McCornster.”

“The stallion.”

“The stud of Gryffindor Tower. Minerva McGonagall, lock up your girls—”

“Jesus Christ,” sighed Angelina.

“—because the ‘C’ stands for co—”

Fred yelped: this time, she’d hit him on the arse.

“Thanks for nothing,” she announced. “Ta.”

“I’m still your favorite player, yeah, Anj?” Fred shouted.

“You’re not even my favorite beater.”

He blew her a kiss.

Harry seized Ron and shook him, which he didn’t seem to register. “Ron, mate! Cracking! Keeper! Bang-on! Congratulations!”

“I’m done for,” he whispered hollowly.

“Good j— what?”

He seized Harry’s collar, eliciting a squawk. “I can’t play, Harry! I’ve never done it! I’ve only ever flown with my idiot brothers—”

“Thanks, Ronniekins!”

“—and I don’t even have a broom! I’ve buggered us! Oh my God. I’ve buggered us.”

Draco yawned and flicked his wand. Ron gagged, palpating his throat.

“Keep your prognostications to yourself, thank you. Despair all you like, but do it privately; I have enough of my own neuroses, and yours are comparatively boring.”

He dispelled the charm with another lazy flick.

“Twat!” said Ron clearly, with more composure.

“See? Much better.”

The morning post descended in a flurry of parchment and feathers, scattering parcels all along the table. Hedwig landed in front of Harry with an unmarked brown envelope. While he opened it, Draco caught one copy of the Prophet and tossed the other to Ron, who was still gaping at nothing in particular. It smacked him in the face. He didn’t move.

“It’s Padfoot,” said Harry. “I told him about Umbridge, and he says the Map has secret ways out of the castle, if it gets so bad we need to hide out. He thinks there’s still some food left in the Shack — ha! Guess he thinks we should sneak out and set up an underground camp or something—”

Hermione threw down her fork, staring at him. He startled.

“…What?”

“Well, that was stupid!” she snapped.

“It wasn’t stupid,” he said jaggedly, “it was — I was careful, I didn’t put anything important in it, I’m not an idiot—”

“Did you not listen to Mad-Eye? Scratch that. Did you not listen to Arthur? Do you not listen to me?”

“It’s a letter! It’s not a threat!”

“Taken by owl! A large, white, rare owl, which is registered to you!”

“Ron writes to Arthur!”

“I don’t have to explain why it’s different for Ron.”

“Sure. It’s different. Everyone gets to write their parents but me.”

“You could write to Arthur at the Burrow any time you liked,” she said crisply. “Any time. I’m sure the Weasleys would welcome it. Wouldn’t they, Ron?”

“Keep me out of this,” Ron said clearly.

“I sent the letter before we talked to Arthur, by the way,” said Harry, “and I wouldn’t have done, if I’d known. Not that anyone asked. I don’t want to get anyone arrested, actually. But just for the record, I reckon it’s pretty cruel what Mad-Eye’s doing to him, locking him in there. Even Moony gets to leave.”

“Moony’s face isn’t plastered over half Britain, for one, and for two—”

“For two, Moony has the liberties that come with being inessential,” said Draco. He turned a page of the Prophet. “For a place as old as Twelve, there are all sorts of household wards that don’t activate unless a member of the master’s household is physically present.”

“…Do you mean the wards break if Padfoot leaves?”

“Not all of them. But it’d be noticeable. My mother compared it to the difference between a castle moat and a fully armed battleship.”

“Does that extend to the Manor wards?” said Hermione curiously. “Since it’s technically yours?”

“It’s held by my mother until I come of age. My father’s will was carefully constructed so as to prevent an eight-year-old having sole legal ownership of a mansion. Anyway, the greatest threat to our borders at present are wandering sheep.”

“Change the subject,” muttered Ron. “Toad’s coming.”

Umbridge had sidled down from the faculty table and was swanning along the aisle, peering down at various children’s breakfasts, looking for all the world like she might snatch up a morsel at random and stuff it in her mouth.

A hand descended on his shoulder. Its grip was patentable.

“Hello, professor.”

“Draco.”

Snape loomed. It was one of his hobbies.

“I don’t suppose this is a social visit.”

“You are required in the headmaster’s office. As are you, Potter.”

Harry said warily, “Are we in trouble?” but this was dignified with no answer.

“As you were,” Snape informed the rest of the table coldly. Hermione half-rose to object, and Draco waved her off resignedly.

Harry hurried after them, using his sleeve to scrub gravy off his chin.

Snape wasted no time in steering them up the stairs. They were moving ruthlessly quick, particularly up flights of steps where a bit of caution might have saved Draco a near-hairy encounter with a trap stair. As per usual, Snape moved in silence, without a word of explanation or consideration for his godson’s comfort, but this was no great offense. Draco had resigned himself to a long life of being dragged around and ordered by people who never considered it necessary to explain where or why they were dragging him. It had started sometime around when he’d met Hermione.

He gradually recognized their route. It terminated in a golden griffin statue guarding an old oak door.

Panic kindled: a dumb hindbrain instinct. There was green light flickering in his periphery — it vanished when he turned his head, making his heart trip over itself, like it was always lurking behind him — but he gripped the feeling, throttled it, and shoved it down.

He was alive. And Hermione was downstairs. Probably in the same room where he’d last seen her, a big bright room full of students and teachers.

This was handled. He was handling it.

“Does Dumbledore want to see us?” Harry said.

“Refer to a standing policy on insipid questions,” said Snape, and forced them both through the door.

The headmaster’s office glittered with its celestial assortment of instruments, tinkling gently, while the smell of leather and sweet varnished wood commingled with smoke guttering pleasantly from a stick of incense at the far corner. The Sorting Hat, from its perch atop the far shelf, lifted its head and turned to peer at them as they came in. Snape shut the door behind them.

The headmaster’s desk was empty. Dumbledore was nowhere to be found in his office; the coterie of silver instruments twinkled, and wax dripped from low-guttering candles that floated among the rafters, casting yellow palls over the oil faces of ancient headmasters.

There was a woman sat across from him, and when she turned her head, Draco realized with a start that it was Narcissa.

He hadn’t heard from his mother since September. They were running out of things to talk about that weren’t under a gag order by one or both of them. She was intransigent on any political issue, and therefore a poor recipient for news of his life; she was unwilling to discuss her business with Dumbledore, and therefore incapable of making the reassurances he would have liked.

She was his mother, and he loved her, but he couldn’t talk to her. At one point in his life, that would have seemed like a contradiction in terms.

But no matter what the cadence of their last conversation had been — no matter how great the growing distance between them, no matter the friction between himself and a woman whose ideas about his friends, and possibly life, were disdainful at best — no matter how much he was certain, on some level or other, he disappointed her — something in him unknotted, a release of unexpected relief.

The last time he had been in this office, there had been a man ready to kill him, and she had electrocuted him unconscious. Relief was a psychosomatic response. It wasn’t sentimental. His heartbeat had returned to normal as a rational response to stimuli, and in any case couldn’t be helped.

“Mother?”

“Draco,” she murmured, rising from her chair. She opened her arms, and he stepped into them with a bewildered warmth. “Dreadfully sorry for the shock, darling, I didn’t mean to sneak. Sit. Drink something. Lord, you’re so thin. What have they fed you? Water and biscuits?”

“I’m fine—”

“And why aren’t your cuffs buttoned? Roll down your sleeves, dear, you’re not a paperboy.”

“Mother.”

“Hello,” said Harry. “This is nice. Why am I here?”

“I second that question,” said Draco forcefully. Narcissa hadn’t glanced at Harry except for a cursory once-over when he came in; her eyes were only for him, but they were tired and worried, and lacked the sort of twinkle that ought to greet a family reunion.

“Potter needs Occlumency lessons,” said Snape.

There was a pause.

“Gesundheit,” said Harry.

“A thousand pardons,” said Draco. “What he means to say is: ‘Thank you, professor, for answering my question; would it trouble you awfully to elaborate on the substance of your response?’”

“Occlumency is a form of mind magic,” Narcissa murmured. “It’s a defense against Legilimency.”

“Legilly… is that something to do with writing?”

“Laws, I’d think,” muttered Draco. No one laughed at his spectacular jest. Hermione would have, but she wasn’t here. His life was a series of unremitting miseries.

“A trained Legilimens,” she said, “wields the power to invade a mind, and can access the thoughts of an unprepared subject.”

“They can read minds?” said Harry. But Draco had a more specific concern.

He rounded on his mother. “Can you do it?”

She flicked her fingers dismissively. “A little.”

“Have you?”

A wry smile crossed her mouth. “Darling, if someone had been rooting around in your head, you would have noticed.”

He jerked his chin at Snape.

“I do not,” said Snape calmly.

“One cannot perform Legilimency without opening one’s mind to attack. Only a wizard of exceptional skill can maintain mental defenses while executing an assault.”

Draco drummed his fingers on the armrest. “Such as the Dark Lord. For example.”

“Quite.”

The world pressed in on the walls of the headmaster’s office, heavy and small.

“Alright,” said Harry, with unexpected calm. “So what now?”

“Dumbledore,” Snape said, with a taut, complicated inflection, “believes your scar has created a mental link between the Dark Lord and yourself. The episodes in which your scar causes pain tend to overlap with periods in which we believe he, the Dark Lord, feels something passionately. In the past year, I have… personally… seen cause to believe the bond is real.”

“You’ve been with the Dark Lord?” Draco said sharply. “Spying?”

Snape made a noncommittal gesture.

“Why in God’s name does he trust you?”

Snape twitched irritably. “I have submitted to onerous tests of my fidelity,” he said, touching his forearm. “And I offer him pieces of information that Dumbledore does not fear to lose.”

“Such as?”

Narcissa made a small quelling noise. Snape didn’t answer.

Draco rounded on her. “Fine. What about you?”

“No,” she said. “I have been spared that duty.”

“The Dark Lord requires only the strongest and bravest,” Snape said silkily. “A crumbling, infirm widow, mind rent asunder from the blow of her husband’s death, would merely disgrace his ranks.”

Narcissa gave a low laugh.

“And Dumbledore couldn’t tell me any of that himself?” said Harry pointedly. “Where is he, anyway? Can’t he teach me the Occlu-whatsit?”

“Entertaining your Defense Against the Dark Arts professor,” Snape sneered. “Or pretending to, in order to spare himself from the trials of dealing with thick-skulled cretins.”

Harry’s eyes glittered. Doom impended.

“But Professor Dumbledore always speaks so highly of you, sir.”

Snape moved sharply, and Draco instinctively stepped toward Harry. But he needn’t have bothered. Narcissa sighed and rose to her feet, and Snape drew back, his hands closing and unclosing restlessly near his wandsheath.

“We begin tonight,” she said. “I am not often free, and so we will work from my schedule. Severus will extract you from any activities may overlap with our lessons. It is paramount that few people know I am here.”

This might have been the most startling revelation yet.

“Mother, you’re not serious.”

“Dear heart, we’ve spoken about contradicting me in public. Besides which, Dumbledore has requested specifically that I offer my services, and it is a service easily rendered indeed, since the alternative is mucking around in the low country — have you any idea how many buggering caves there are in Cornwall, Severus?”

“What the hell are you doing in Cornwall?”

“Language, Draco.”

“You just said—”

“Hang on,” said Harry. “Both of us?”

“Yes. Draco will learn with you.”

Draco was surprised to learn this as the next person, that being a boy who was admittedly quite easy to surprise.

“And in what kind of situation, Mother, do you expect your son to need Occlumency?”

“None that I would permit,” she said. “But I should not allow anyone at this school to have an education superior to yours, my darling.”

Draco stared at her. The idea of his mother poking around in his mind raised a host of terrors.

“Why not Snape?”

“I assure you most confidently,” said Snape, “that neither of you desire prolonged exposure to my mind.”

“I don’t want prolonged exposure to anyone’s mind,” said Harry. “I’d rather not do this. If you’re asking me, which no one has.”

He was ignored. Draco was preoccupied, and the adults simply didn’t care.

“You have until curfew,” Snape told Narcissa, unfolding himself from the wall. “Good luck.”

Then he was gone.

Narcissa pointed her wand at the door. A deadbolt clicked.

She sheathed her wand up her sleeve and circled the desk. “Follow me.”

At the back of the room there was a vast oaken cabinet with a display of enormous colorful perfume bottles in hues as varied as a dandy’s pocket square collection. At the back of the cabinet there was a mirror, though it was smeared with brassy clouds of age, and dark shapes drifted sinisterly behind the warped outline of their reflections.

She unlocked the cabinet and unfolded the bottom drawers, which revealed a stone basin engraved with runes. It was shaped like a fountain, but the liquid inside wasn’t water; instead, it was an opaque silver fluid crowned with puffs of mist.

“This is a Pensieve,” she said.

“I know that. There’s one at the Manor,” he said impatiently; it sat in his father’s office, along with his grandfather’s collection of pixie wings and a portrait of a noisome great aunt.

“I’m sure you do, darling, but Mr. Potter was raised in squalor.”

“It wasn’t squalor,” said Harry. “We had a television.”

Narcissa glanced at him like a dog interrupting a conversation on Proust.

“A mind is a complicated object,” she continued. “It is not a library of memories; it is an interaction of impressions, perceptions, and recollections constantly changing in time. The chief instrument of the Occlumens is focus.” She drew her wand away, and a luminescent strand of silver came with it, emerging from the temple like she had unspooled part of her brain. When she flicked her wand, it sank into the Pensieve like a falling feather. “In a manner of speaking, this is the only thing an Occlumens must do.”

“That’s all?” said Harry. “I just try to not think about things?”

“Excellent, he’ll be a natural,” said Draco. Narcissa pinched his ear, and he whined, batting her away.

“You sound like you imagine it will be easy,” she warned Harry.

“Well, I dunno. Compared to Potions?”

She slotted the Pensieve into its berth, then turned and pointed her wand at him. “Do you have a lover?”

Harry’s jaw dropped. Then he socked Draco on the arm.

“You sneak—”

“Me? I didn’t tell her anything! I didn’t even want to know about it myself!”

“Good. You do,” said Narcissa evenly. “What’s the color of her hair?”

“What does that m—?”

“Legilimens.”

Harry gasped.

He staggered back, his hands flying up in front of his face, as if trying to shield himself from a searing light.

“Cut it. Stop that — cut it out—”

“Mother?”

“I’m n— no.” His voice was shrill, not with pain, but anxiety. “Stop. Don’t touch that. Please. C’mon.”

“Focus,” she suggested, and the corner of her mouth gave a calm, mean little twitch. “You said it was easy.”

“You’re making me think about it!”

“I’m not.”

“Stop!” Harry squirmed as if trying to wriggle out of his own skin. “That’s — that was private!”

“I’m sure it used to be.”

His mother let Harry wriggle for a while longer, making indecent sounds of embarrassment and rage, before her face slackened. Harry’s eyes snapped open on a gasp.

“Black,” she said coldly, and turned back to the Pensieve. “Her hair is black. And if she had been a double agent, you would have broken her cover.”

A chill skated down the back of his neck, peeling up the hairs there with cold fingers. Harry sagged to his knees, panting.

“So in a sense,” said Narcissa, her mouth curving unkindly, “I suppose one might consider it… almost as difficult as Potions.”

“That was Legilimency?” Harry rasped.

“An utterly mild form. I summoned a thought by association — I invoked it out loud — and then skimmed the surface of your thoughts. You could have resisted it by clearing your mind at any point.”

“It can get harder?” he croaked.

“It only gets harder. I gave you a beginner’s grace.”

“Why can’t I just throw you out?” he demanded. “Isn’t there anything I can do to just — close the door? Without having to do the mind-clearing stuff?”

Narcissa cocked her head. Draco recognized her expression as the masked patience of one condescending to the despairingly stupid.

It was one of his favorites, too.

“At the risk of unimaginable insult to five years of education at the finest wizarding institute in the world,” she said, “you have a wand.”

Draco laughed; Narcissa flashed him a thin smile.

“To wit,” she said, “you will have noticed that Legilimency begins with a spell. Severus tells me you have an uninspiring but serviceable Shield Charm. I trust you can limp through the rest of that idea on your own.”

“I can dodge the jinx?” Harry was much cheered. “That’s great — I’ll hardly need Occlumency at all, then—”

“If you find yourself in a situation where your opponent is easily disposed of, by all means, dispose away. But Albus has asked me to prepare you to face the Dark Lord.”

His glee snuffed out.

“Which I cannot do,” she added. “As I have told him, and though he is foolishly disinclined to believe it. Even Severus could not forge an Occlumens of the necessary skill from your mind as it is currently, in part because Severus himself cannot fully resist the Dark Lord.”

“But Professor Snape—”

“Maintains his cover through a combination of extraordinary Occlumenic skill and a decade-spanning history of unhesitating service,” she said curtly. “The first defense against Legilimency is not to inspire the need for it. The second is not to overburden yourself with valuable information. Severus knows precisely as much as is necessary. No more.”

“According to who?”

“The person to whom he answers,” she said, “is Albus Dumbledore. Take that as you will. Enough delay. Try once more; you may know in advance that I am going to seek the name of your owl. Be advised that this is a generosity the Dark Lord will not offer you.”

“Hang on,” said Harry desperately. “What if I can’t do it? Say if I’m stuck, and I can’t clear my mind, and I already know I know all the stuff that he’s looking for, and I can’t throw a jinx. Is there some trick? Like a shortcut? Can’t I Obliviate myself or something?”

Narcissa delicately braced her knuckles against her mouth. At length:

“Obliviated memories are inaccessible. Even to Legilimency.”

“So you’re saying if I—”

“However. Self-Obliviation is categorically discouraged by medical professionals. It tends to… take… much more than is intended.” Another pause. “And the memories, of course, become irretrievable. In nearly all cases.”

“But—”

“Of those who survive.”

Harry went still.

“That unsettles you? Good. I don’t want Albus to come whinging that I gave his pupil some funny ideas about lopping off pieces of his own mind.” She lifted her wand. “Prepare yourself. Legilimens.”

Harry’s writhing was more subdued the second go around, but inside a minute he still ended up hunched on the floor. Narcissa broke off with a sigh and massaged the bridge of her nose as if she had a headache. Draco folded his arms and shifted his weight, dreading his turn.

“Hedwig,” she said, slightly strained. “Peculiar. Do you have German blood?”

“No idea,” said Harry, pointedly, from the floor. “Funny thing happened to my parents, you mightn’t have heard.”

Draco gave a small snigger. Narcissa ignored it, blinking away some irritant; abruptly, she whirled on Harry with disbelief. “Why were you at Castle Lestrange?”

“I wasn’t. Where’s that?”

“Don’t lie. I saw it, remember. Did you grow up in Cumbria? In the hills, perhaps?”

“Close,” Harry said. “Surrey.”

“Your muggles took you on holiday, then. To Windermere. To Carlisle.”

“Vernon wouldn’t take me to the supermarket,” said Harry placidly. “He worried people might think I was his son, you see. Or maybe he was worried they wouldn’t. I’ve got Petunia’s nose, according to Marge, though she was trollied when she said it, so I’d honestly be surprised—”

“Never mind. I must’ve… it was my memory, I suppose, not yours. Draco, you’re next.”

Admittedly, in terms of plausible places to find Harry Potter, the seat of House Lestrange ranked somewhere between the Slytherin commons and the surface of the moon. Added to which, it had been empty ever since his aunt had been arrested, and with her died the family line. Both of the Lestrange brothers were in Azkaban, and the house would default to some cousin upon their death.

“I am going to seek the password to the Gryffindor common room,” she said. “Prepare yourself.”

He slid his left foot back, reflexively. She smiled.

“Legilimens.”

He didn’t feel his mother enter his mind. It wasn’t a physical sensation: it was as though someone had touched the face of his consciousness and moved it, gently redirecting the lens of his mind’s eye.

He concentrated instead on Slytherin. He thought of the dungeon wall, a door swelling out of the brick, a green vault peppered with reedy light from the lake.

The scene rippled, and changed: they were moving slowly up the stairs of the dungeons, sliding through narrow corridors rendered in the watercolor concept of memory. He caught them on the grand staircase and turned firmly away, directing his thoughts toward the Great Hall; he could feel the tension as the other presence in his mind tried to split off and peel upward, but he focused intently on remaining in the Entrance Hall, the double-doors, the movement of golden light on the flagstones.

The doors opened, and Hermione stepped into them, followed by a blurry pack of first years. It was the Opening Feast.

And she was crossing the hall, talking animatedly, but when she looked up and smiled, reflexively and warmly — there was a jolt of anxiety, and then he was flying up the stairs, soaring away from the scene.

He caught himself on the third floor and wrestled himself away from the route to Gryffindor. He could feel his mother’s pushing, now, and it presented not as pain but as temptation: fleeting thoughts of a familiar staircase, a soft featherbed after a long day’s work, a cat curled in the armchair.

Then they veered away, and there was a snippet of sound: a girl’s crying; they were outside the Hospital Wing, and the sunrise was brimming behind the windows.

No. That was private.

Firelight on stone walls. Hot chocolate and roasting chestnuts by the grate. Rain washing the old windows. Hermione’s prefect badge—

He scrambled for a distraction. Something significant, something his mother wouldn’t be able to sweep past.

It came to him by accident, a thought he didn’t even necessarily recognize as his own: his father’s face, gazing gravely from his portrait at the Manor. Steel gray eyes that moved sightlessly over the hallway before him, hair the dull white of fresh snow.

They stopped moving. Hogwarts vanished, shattering into a whirl of fragmented sensations around the still locus of his father’s face — and then there was a warm breeze, a stirring on his cheek, and he was looking at a young man with his father’s face in miniature, tall and dressed in Hogwarts uniform.

For a shocking heartbeat, he thought it was himself, but his tie was green and silver.

The other boy was taller, older, with short hair coiffed in an older style. Lucius.

Memory sketched the rest of the scene only in blurs of gold and green: they were outdoors, and everything smelled of freshly cut grass, and there was something sweet and lemony on his tongue. Lucius was saying something — his voice was familiar and unsettling, like hearing an echo in a silent room — but he was talking to someone beyond the boundary of the memory, his expression politely closed-off.

Somewhere, a woman laughed. It wasn’t his mother.

A low contralto spoke in a murmur: “Hello, Princess.”

There was a clatter of metal. He opened his eyes.

One of the headmaster’s instruments lay in pieces on the floor. Narcissa leaned on the wall beside it. Harry tried to help her up, but she waved him off.

He recovered his senses, and then started forward in alarm. “Mother— I’m sorry—”

“No,” she snapped. “That was — acceptable. Well done, Draco.”

“Don’t.” She lifted a hand. “That was… an acceptable strategy. I did not… find the password.”

“What happened?” murmured Harry, looking equally impressed and unnerved. “What did you do?”

“Draco,” said Narcissa thickly, “launched a counteroffensive.”

“I did Legilimency?”

“It was not a proper attack. You had the advantage of knowing in advance what memory would be likely to distract your assaulter. Such will not be the case often. Nevertheless, you made use of the tools available,” she said stiffly. “The parameters of your task were capacious. You took advantage. Well done.”

“I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

She ignored it, drawing herself upright, and smoothed her hair. Her expression was all manicured neutrality. “Potter, you may leave us,” she said abruptly. “Come back in two weeks. I don’t suppose I need to tell you that a lack of practice will be apparent.”

““Right,” Harry mumbled. He shouldered his bag and hurried toward the office door. He glanced back at Draco, faintly curious, and then left.

Draco lingered while his mother set about repairing the instrument she’d displaced.

“That was Father,” he ventured, at length. “When he was at Hogwarts.”

She revealed nothing. Her spine was as straight as an obelisk.

“He was talking to someone. And there was a woman’s voice. Near the end.”

“Memory is a strange thing. Association is difficult to predict and almost impossible to control.” She lifted one shoulder indifferently. “What you are describing could have been anything. I don’t know what you heard.”

He was being told to turn back, and he obeyed her, not because he for one moment believed her, but because he loved her enough that the truth mattered less than her comfort.

“Does Castle Lestrange have three towers?”

She stopped short.

“How do you know that?”

“Because Potter saw it in a vision.”

His mother did something she had never done before.

She put her hand on her head, then moved it to her mouth, then turned around. “Damn it. Alright.”

“Mother? What does it mean?”

“It means the Dark Lord is securing the whereabouts of his horcruxes.” She crossed to the pensieve and shoved her wand to her temple, sieving out a memory. “If Potter saw it, and he was never there… unless he lied… but he knew nothing of the place, how could he, not even the name…”

Understanding slipped into place like a socket, and a searingly unpleasant bulb flared to life.

“That was the Dark Lord’s memory.”

She nodded. “Castle Lestrange was the seat of two Knights of Walpurgis,” she said. “Three, by marriage. He would presume, as the diary was stored at the Manor, that they would keep their treasure in their ancestral seat. The warding would make it nigh-impregnable.”

“But no one’s there. It was abandoned after the war.”

“Worse,” she said grimly. “Inland revenue.”

“Pardon?”

“Asset seizure, darling, keep up. After the war, Death Eater assets reverted to the state. The Lestranges held quite a few items of value in their keeping, along with the gold. Most of it was cursed,” she added, flicking the bottle’s contents even with a fingernail, “but still.”

“So the Ministry took it?”

“Welcome to the common grave robbery known as the estate tax.”

He ignored his mother’s admittedly hilarious joke. “But if there was a horcrux in the vault,” he said, “that means there’s a horcrux in Ministry custody.”

“Yes.”

“Assuming they haven’t sold it,” she added, working strand after strand of silver from her temple. She pooled them in a bottle that was quickly filling up. “If they did, then Merlin knows where it is. These were valuable artifacts, significant ones. Regulus, apparently, received one of great historic import. Any collector would willingly part with an organ for them.”

“But if it wasn’t — if the Ministry still had it — I imagine it’d be hidden somewhere. Somewhere reasonably secure.”

“I know what you’re thinking. It wouldn’t be in Gringotts. No one really trusts the goblins — I mean the bank’s alright for cash, and jewelry, so long as it isn’t goblin-make, but an artifact of real power? In their greedy little fingers? No wizard in their right mind—”

“What about the Department of Mysteries?”

She hummed. “It’s possible. It would, at least, be secure.”

She turned back to the Pensieve.

“The Lestranges weren’t caught until years after the war ended,” he said, changing the subject. “How did the Ministry lay hands on their estate?”

“They fled abroad. To Romania, I believe, although by that point… I wouldn’t have known.”

Her tone was a closed door.

“It also happens to be the former residence of Quirinius Quirrell,” she said absently. “He was State Alchemist there before he transferred to Hogwarts. Which means the Dark Lord’s revenant was in Bucharest at some point in 1990.”

“And you thought he might have retreated there to find a horcrux.”

“So we thought. It turns out that he ended up there by coincidence; Quirrell was an amateur spiritualist, and he had a fascination with Dark magic. He wanted the prestige of being the one to locate the Dark Lord’s body. There wasn’t one, at the Potters’ home, you see… It was a running challenge among magical academics to locate it, or else explain what happened to it. I believe Quirrell’s approach was to summon the Dark Lord’s spirit and ask it, the arrogant fool… it’s a shame he never lived to publish.” She sighed. “The danger of the Dark Arts, Draco, is that they always give you precisely what you wish for.”

She spoke with familiar strain.

“It doesn’t seem safe. Concentrating so many valuable assets in one family.”

“On the contrary. You must understand the way the Dark Lord thought — thinks. A family as close as ours became each other’s collateral. We secured each other’s loyalties. For a time, anyway.”

It reminded him of something.

“Slytherin House is getting married.”

“Congratulations,” she said, descending from the dais. “To Ravenclaw, or Hufflepuff?”

“I’m serious.”

“You know, sometimes I fear you inherited your father’s sense of humor.”

“The whole cohort is engaged. Parkinson and Warrington. Bulstrode and Crabbe. Rosier and Selwyn, apparently, among others. Don’t you think that’s significant?”

“Probably, yes.”

“…Doesn’t it concern you?”

She snorted. “No. For one thing, I have bigger games to play. For another, even if I didn’t, it would demean me to care. None of those children hold a candle to what our family was, and breeding mediocrity with mediocrity cannot produce greatness.”

This relieved him, somewhat. His mother had forgotten more about Society intrigue than he had ever known; if she wasn’t concerned, he didn’t see any reason to be.

“Pansy’s fiancé is a cretin.”

“What a shame,” she said, with a cool and unsurprised sorrow. “Status?”

“Respectable.”

“Wealthy?”

“Very.”

“Then it could be worse.” She brushed off her hands. “My heart goes out to her, all the same. She’s a darling girl. She should have a wedding present from us. Maybe the house in Austria.”

He did not think darling girl was how many would describe Pansy.

“Why didn’t you tell me the Greengrasses made an offer?” he asked abruptly.

She arched an eyebrow, an expression dreadfully reminiscent of the mirror. “Would you have wanted it?”

“No!”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Is that why you turned them down?”

“Darling, you don’t even ask my permission to invite someone to my house. Where I’d find the confidence to betrothe you, I certainly don’t know.”

She was good at this kind of insult, the honeyed acid, the thorn sheltered by a blameless rose.

“Anyway,” she added, “I suspect I’d set her up for a jilting and a runaway groomsman, and we’ve problems aplenty without looking more foolish.”

It was a joke, but her tone carried a thread of weight.

“You didn’t answer my question. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because there wasn’t anything to say.”

“Are you sure? We don’t talk so much that one feels the need to cull potential subjects.”

He regretted it at once when she stiffened.

“I — apologize.”

“Quite alright.” But she didn’t apologize, either. “I understand that you must be frustrated with how little I will tell you. I hope you understand that most secrets I keep are not by choice, and the few secrets I do choose, I do not keep because they bring me pleasure.”

He paused. Her mood was gentle. Her guard was low. He wasn’t likely to get a better opportunity.

“Which kind is Andromeda?”

“No.”

It was a flat, hard word.

“Mother—”

“Never,” she said, quietly. “You are the dearest creature in the world, and for your sake I would prostrate on burning ordure. The answer to that question is ‘never.’”

“She’s my aunt. I’ve a right to know her. And here’s another thing, I don’t think it’s for you to decide which members of our house deserve acknowledgement—”

“I never decided.” Her voice was low. “I did not write our customs. I did not write our traditions. Understand that I would deny you nothing. I deny them the privilege of knowing you, of being known by you. That is what they have to suffer for their wrongs.”

“What was Andromeda’s wrong? What did her marriage have to do with you?”

“Draco!”

“And what about Sirius? What did he ever do that I haven’t?”

“Don’t say the names—”

“I will if I want to, I’m Lord Malfoy, and I’ll use their names if it pleases me. Andromeda Black. Alphard Black. Sirius Black: Sorted in Gryffindor, check — associating with muggle-borns and blood traitors, check — consorting with enemies of the House of Black, check — smoked cigarettes, check, sorry, Mother—”

“Have pity.”

“Name the difference. Name the difference, besides the fact that you love me.”

“I loved them all.”

He stopped. Silver instruments clinked sadly in the ceiling.

She leaned on the mantle.

“I loved them all,” she repeated, with a thin and acrid dignity. “Every one. And they left me. Do not ask me to say their names.”

“Alright, Mother.”

She screwed her eyes shut.

“You know, I hate it when you speak to me that way,” she snapped. “As if I require handling. I never cared for handling, not when I was well, and not now. I was — I am one of the finest witches of my generation.”

“I know, Mother.”

“They used to call me brilliant,” she whispered. “Did you know that? Do you know how good — do you ever imagine what I was, before I was this?”

There was nothing to say to that. He hadn’t.

“You don’t. That’s my punishment. You’ll remember me as mad. Even if I live to a hundred, you’ll remember me as your poor mad mother, and you’ll say — ‘she did her best, dear thing,’ but never…” She opened her eyes, distant. “Do you have any idea how a five-year-old child looks at you?”

“I can’t help not being five years old anymore.”

“You don’t know what I mean. But that’s alright,” she said, oddly calm. “It always happens this way. My mother said so, and I didn’t understand it, but now I do. I made my peace with it. She never could.”

“You’re not making sense.”

She didn’t seem to care. “The mistake was always being too afraid… You get your cowardice from me. It was never your father’s flaw.”

“I’m not a coward.”

“You are. I’m sorry. But I love you anyway. I love you beyond cowardice. Remember that, when we’re apart,” she said, and her premise froze the words on his lips. “Remember the love you carry with you, when you go.”

“I’m right here,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Oh, darling,” she said. Her smile was a terrible rictus of love. “They’re such pretty words, aren’t they? It’s a pleasure to hear them again.”

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-[slides in across the finish line like I’m making a home run] IT’S STILL FRIDAY!

-Fun fact: the end of this chapter approximately marks the halfway point of this fic, since I have an equal number of chapters planned before and after it. Of course, the later books have much longer chapters than the earlier ones, so it’s probably not an even split, but in terms of chapters, welcome to: THE MIDDLE PART!

-Please remember what I have said about pining and brain-rattling like a maraca. This is a fic written specifically to indulge my unique flavor of brain worms, and we will proceed as the brain worms direct us. Hold on. I know. Come here. Take my hand. We can do this. You and me. Together.

-For everyone who left a comment: My beloveds. Every week I think “people in the comments aren’t going to outdo themselves spectacularly.” And then everyone in the comments outdoes themselves spectacularly, and I am played for an absolute fool.

-This week’s gift: a really, really fresh bowl of strawberries, with vanilla ice cream and warm shortbread. The kind that’s come out of the oven thirty seconds ago. And champagne. The champagne’s assumed.

-Next week’s chapter goes up on you already know. It’s called “Gryffindor vs. Slytherin.” And it involves an impromptu choral performance.

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