lomonaaeren

*

“No, Dudley. Don’t touch him.”

Aunt Petunia had only needed one demonstration of Harry calling flame to his hand that he wasn’t hurt by and stepping towards Dudley before she decided that all contact between Harry and his cousin should just stop. Uncle Vernon had needed his own separate demonstration. What Harry did to him last summer had faded in the ten months since they saw each other.

But it didn’t matter. They left Harry alone now, and if they never offered him the food Aunt Petunia cooked or that they got as takeaway, they didn’t protest when Harry came down to the kitchen and claimed his fair share, either.

Harry still spent most of his time in his room. He wrote letters to his friends. He did his summer homework.

And he read and read the books Blaise had slipped to him, and he practiced and he practiced Occlumency.

As Blaise had warned, it wasn’t easy. Harry would think he’d achieved a perfect meditative state, and then his concentration would splinter and slide at a random yell from Dudley’s room or a hoot from Hedwig. But it didn’t matter. He would go back to it, and slowly, slowly, he hammered his mind into shape.

He started seeing visions of a vast dark plain, with only a few stars in the sky overhead. The plain seemed to glow with its own light, though, and Harry could make out thick grass growing on it, seeming to thrive even more in the darkness than it would in the sunlight.

When he touched the grass, he found it was woven of memories.

He watched himself get beaten up by Dudley, chased by Dudley’s gang, hit with Aunt Petunia’s frying pan, yelled at by Uncle Vernon. He watched himself go down into the Chamber of Secrets and despair that he had no real friends. And there were the disgusting moments when he’d thought he’d lost his friends and when he’d discovered Dumbledore and Snape had been reading his mind.

It was sort of the opposite of what Blaise’s Occlumency books said was supposed to happen. They said a Legilimens would try to find Harry’s worst memories and he had to hide them. He was supposed to use neutral or happy memories for that.

But after a while, Harry supposed that it didn’t matter. He could hide the most important memories in one blade of grass among millions on the plains, and fill the others with neutral ones or negative ones that he didn’t mind a Legilimens seeing.

It also solved another problem he’d been worrying about, which was how to deal with Dumbledore and Snape finding out he knew Occlumency. They would still see memories, after all. It should be enough to keep them from going looking.

Harry chose one particular blade of grass that was neither taller nor longer nor shorter than the others, in an area of the plain that was neither near the corners nor near the center. He laid his hand on that blade and poured in all the most disgusting moments of weakness, self-hatred, and self-delusion.

His thinking that he had lost his friends forever counted among those. He knew now that he’d misunderstood Theo calling him weird, and—

Well, maybe not misunderstood Hermione saying that he should be willing to take Snape’s punishment to cover up the theft of the Polyjuice ingredients, or Hermione and Ron getting upset because he was a Parselmouth. But he understood that this was just the way his friends were.

He had to put up with their limitations to have them as friends, the same way they had put up with his paranoia and weird reactions.

Harry wove the grass around that blade with some neutral memories of sitting in the park and attending Muggle primary and Hogwarts classes. Then there were more negative ones, more neutral ones, a few that approached happy, some that were confused like his arguments with the snake, and some laden with distrust. Anything Snape and Dumbledore already knew went near the tips of the grass blades.

It took hours. But what else did Harry have to do with those hours, trapped in a Muggle home as he was?

*

Well, he did do one other thing: finding food for the snake.

The snake had been content to accept the rats and mice that Hedwig brought back at first. But it seemed that she never hunted enough to feed it for long, and soon it was demanding eggs and baby birds and the like, things that Harry didn’t know how to give it.

“I can’t help you,” he finally snapped at the snake when it repeated the whining about baby birds for the fifth time. “I can’t leave the house, and I don’t even think that there are any baby birds like that around anymore. The summer is advanced enough that they’ve probably all grown up.”

“Why can’t you leave the house?”

Harry paused. He hadn’t actually tested it, he realized slowly. He’d just tried to stay out of his relatives’ way, and he knew that Dudley roamed around outside with his gang, so he was in the house.

“You smell foolish.”

“You don’t even know that that smells,” Harry said, but weakly.

Yes, he probably could go outside. And he could avoid Dudley and his gang easily enough. Even if he did get caught by them, Aunt Petunia’s terror of Harry was so extreme right now that she would probably punish Dudley instead.

“You can go and find me baby birds.”

“It’s still true what I said about the baby birds,” Harry muttered, but he swung his legs off the bed. “But I can find you eggs.”

“Eggs are somewhat acceptable.”

“They’ll have to be, because that’s all I can get you,” Harry said darkly. “Unless you want to go back to eating the mice and rats that Hedwig brings.”

“She resents me for eating them, and a resentful owl will take me in her claws.” The snake lifted its head abruptly and flicked a tongue like a gentle breeze across Harry’s cheek. “We will work together, and you will get me eggs, and I will teach you something.”

“What?”

“You have been calming and cooling your mind like one of my kind headed for hibernation. I will teach you how to bring yourself the rest of the way.”

*

Ron’s letters were frequent until about the middle of summer, when they stopped, but Hermione wrote Harry a letter that explained. Apparently Ron and his family had won a huge sum of money and gone to Egypt on holiday to visit his brother Bill.

Hermione had gone to France with her parents. Blaise had traveled around Italy with his mother. Theo had only sent one letter every fortnight, and he hadn’t said anything about traveling, but he hadn’t said anything about much in particular.

Wish I could go traveling, Harry thought, as he closed his eyes and slipped into the grassy black plain of his Occlumency.

But this would have to do.

Thanks to the snake’s teaching (and the careful use of some wandless magic and stolen money to get eggs from the shops), Harry could now enter a state that was sort of like hibernation. The snake didn’t think it was good enough, but the snake never thought anything Harry did was good enough. Besides, Harry didn’t want to go all the way into hibernation, tempting as it was to sleep through the summer. He wanted to walk around but with his mind calm and cool.

He was getting closer and closer to that.

Sometimes it seemed to him that something in his own brain was fighting against him. Harry didn’t know what it was, though. It would just strike like a bolt of black lightning and interrupt his Occlumency practice. But Harry had got good at pushing it to the edge of the dark plain and going on with his training.

He wondered if it was one of the difficulties of Occlumency that Blaise had warned him about. He wasn’t going to ask in a letter, so he supposed he would have to wait for the autumn.

But every night, every day, every morning, his vision of the black plain sharpened, and the snake hissed soft instructions that made more sense to Harry than some of the techniques in the books.

*

“And Marge is coming for a visit…”

That was the hardest test of Harry’s Occlumency yet. He had heard Vernon talking about it when he went down to the kitchen to get his breakfast of toast and bacon, and he froze for a long moment before he went back to packing his plate.

Unfortunately, Uncle Vernon turned around in time to see Harry pause, and it had been long enough since his last “lesson” that he’d recovered a little. He gave Harry a nasty smile. “And none of your freakishness while she’s here, do you hear me, boy?”

Harry looked calmly at Vernon from within the dark plain that had almost instantly snapped together around him. He saw the kitchen through a mass of dusk and starlight, and he was silent long enough to make his aunt swallow.

“If you have any sense,” he said at last, calmly, “you’ll keep her from bothering me.”

“Now, see here, you ugly little freak!” Uncle Vernon lurched to his feet. “I won’t have you dictating my sister’s behavior in my house! We’ve put up with you long enough, we’ll have no more of—”

He reached out, and the snake snapped out from under Harry’s collar with a threatening hiss.

“Touch him, Muggle! Try it!”

Granted, none of the Dursleys could understand the snake’s speech, but they reacted as if they could. Dudley cowered back in his chair with a frightened yell. Aunt Petunia shrieked and clutched at her throat as if she were going to faint. Uncle Vernon just froze in place the way Harry had a minute before, his hand almost within the snake’s reach.

“I’m going to tell it to bite you if you say anything else about me being a freak,” Harry said softly. “And if you allow Aunt Marge to taunt me. I’ll have it bite you. Not her. You.”

Harry understood exactly what motivated his uncle. He would never be as upset about the thought of a threat to his sister as he was to himself. Slowly, ever so slowly, Uncle Vernon pulled his hand back.

“We—can’t keep Marge from saying anything,” he said hoarsely.

“Sure you can,” Harry said cheerfully, and smiled at Vernon in a way that had him recoiling. “You’ve just never bothered. Do it, or remember what I said.”

“Vernon.”

Aunt Petunia was probably thinking that Harry might set his snake on Dudley if Marge said anything. Harry honestly didn’t know if he would or not. He was pretty bloody tired of everything to do with the Dursleys and staying here, but he didn’t really want to kill his cousin, and he thought the snake’s venom might do it.

“Yes, all right,” Vernon said hurriedly. “We’ll keep Marge from saying anything, keep her out of the way.”

“Good.”

“And you stay out of the way,” Uncle Vernon added, maybe thinking he could get some self-respect back like this.

Harry turned his head and stared into his uncle’s face with dead eyes, his mind almost fully in hibernation. Uncle Vernon recoiled.

“Don’t worry,” Harry said, when the kitchen had gone silent enough that he thought his relatives might have stopped breathing. “I will.”

He turned and walked back up the stairs with his plate of toast and bacon, while the snake hissed triumphantly on his shoulder.

“I stopped them. I would have bitten them. I made them afraid. They smelled so frightened!”

“Yeah,” Harry said absently. He sat down on his bed and ate his breakfast, while he thought about the expression on his uncle’s face.

It wasn’t really one he enjoyed causing. He thought about the way that he had made Malfoy look sometimes before they found a sort of truce and felt a little sick.

But it was better than Malfoy or Uncle Vernon attacking him. Or Aunt Marge saying terrible things that would break up Harry’s Occlumency.

He was doing what he had to do to survive. And he could depend on his friends, but none of them were here right now, except the snake.

So he would keep going.

*

“Where do you think you’re going, boy?”

Harry turned around slowly. So far, Uncle Vernon had kept his promise to separate Aunt Marge and Harry. And maybe Aunt Marge had still said awful things, but Harry was never in the room to hear them, so it didn’t matter.

Now, though, it seemed that none of the Dursleys were in the house. Harry had heard Dudley scream, and Aunt Petunia saying something about taking him for medical treatment. He hadn’t realized that Uncle Vernon had gone with them, though.

Now he stood outside the house, having been about to walk to the shops for eggs for the snake, and Aunt Marge stood in front of him.

“Speak when you’re spoken to, boy! Or don’t you understand what I’m saying?”

Harry felt his lips pull up into a cold smile. He doubted Marge would notice, or say anything if she did, but he reached into his collar and pulled out the snake.

Marge faltered. The snake was snapping at her with its fangs bared, which was undoubtedly part of the reason.

“Back off, Muggle! Leave my pet human alone!”

But Marge was even more stubborn than Uncle Vernon, and it wasn’t much of a surprise to Harry that she didn’t give up. Instead, she reached down and waved her hand at Ripper. “Ripper! Sic him!”

The dog dashed forwards with a bark. Harry thrust out a hand without even thinking about it. The same web of power that had trapped Dobby last summer descended on the dog and flipped him end over end. Ripper got up howling and holding his right front paw out as he limped on three legs.

Marge stared at the dog, then at Harry. Her face turned so red she looked like she might burst a blood vessel as she screamed, “What did you do?”

Harry was aware of the neighbors watching. They wouldn’t be sympathetic to him, but at least it was some satisfaction to know that the Dursleys would return and find out Marge had made a scene.

Harry just smiled at Marge and replied, “I think that he tripped.”

“No! You did something, you awful boy!”

Harry shrugged, tucked the snake back under his collar, and turned away. Marge might have tried to go after him when he was younger, but she had just seen that he had a snake and she had always been more than a bit of a coward. She stayed in place, yelling, as Harry walked away with the snake coiled back under his collar.

“You should have let me bite her.”

“Think of it this way. Do you really want that taste in your mouth?”

The snake weaved back and forth for a moment. Then it tucked its head down and said, “You have a point.”

Harry smiled a little. He felt very light and free, the anger distant from him. His Occlumency was probably doing something to hold it at bay.

“What are we going to do now?”

“I’ll sneak back and get my things out of my room. Then we’ll go to Diagon Alley and tell Hedwig to meet us there.”

“Why there?”

“Because it’s close to Knockturn Alley and we can find a room there without people paying attention to us. I think I still remember the train that took me back in my first year. And there’s no need to stay here any longer.”

“Why couldn’t you have remembered that during the part of the season when there were still baby birds for me to eat?”

Harry listened to the snake’s complaints, breathing in the air and exhaling it out. He turned around and made his way back to Privet Drive, ducking behind hedges and houses, as soon as he thought Marge would have exhausted herself and gone back inside.

All the time, the grass of his dark plain swayed in front of him, and he embraced it in silence.

Let them find out. Let them.