lomonaaeren | Chapter Nineteen of 'Inter Vivos'- Occlumency

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Chapter Nineteen—Occlumency

“Are you ready for something more extensive, then?” Draco took a step back and managed to smile at Harry, and it wasn’t even much of a strain. Since he had discovered he was in love with Harry, Draco’s violent emotions had calmed down. He enjoyed spending time with Harry more than before.

Of course, now he had a new source of anxiety, because he had no idea how or when to tell Harry the truth—especially since Harry showed no sign of realizing it himself.

Harry took a deep breath and nodded. “Yeah. You’ve been pretty gentle with the Legilimency so far. I need to see what else will happen if you probe harder.” He grinned at Draco, the sweat around his hairline showing how nervous he was—far more than he needed to be, Draco thought—and braced his feet.

Draco took a few steps back and composed himself. By now, it was almost instinctive to use Harry’s image to secure his mind behind shields stronger than anything Harry could manage. His mind drained and cleared, and his breathing relaxed until he felt as if he were ready to fall into a trance. This was the best way to teach Occlumency, he’d discovered. Be calm, and your student would have to be calm, too. It was no wonder that Professor Snape had failed to teach Harry, if they were both tense and angry.

Harry smiled back at him, his face open and trusting. And you did have to have a vast trust in someone, Draco had found out, for Occlumency to work. Another reason Snape had never been able to teach Harry.

And it’s time to use your magic on him before you start talking yourself out of this calmness.

“Legilimens,” he whispered.

His mind leaped forwards and began to play against Harry’s shields like waves trying to wear down rocks. Harry frowned in concentration, but so far his shields held. Draco smiled. That was better than he had expected Harry to be able to do at this stage, really.

On the other hand, he would have to hold against more determined attacks than this. So Draco said, “Legilimens,” again and sent his mind driving towards a weakness in the fortress of Harry’s mind. Professor Snape had praised him for having the gift to discover weaknesses like that, but Draco himself was not sure how he did it—only that he could sense the cracks and chinks and widen them by sliding his mind into them, like a wedge entering wood.

For a long moment, Harry struggled against him. Draco felt some sweat of his own break out, and his vision of Harry blurred. The pressure against his Legilimency grew until he felt he would have to pull out.

But that would only frustrate Harry, who had insisted before the session started that he needed to have Draco go harder on him if he was going to survive his next battle with the Dark Lord.

So Draco bore down, and, as he knew had to happen when he was so much better at this than Harry, the crack weakened and let him through.

He was whirling along on a flood of memories and information and ideas before he managed to master himself and pull back. His Legilimency was still less instinctive than his Occlumency, because he hadn’t practiced as much. He was supposed to shield himself, Snape had told him sternly, not try to read people’s minds.

But right now he had the chance to read Harry’s, and so he did his best to locate and isolate one memory. Preferably one of Harry and him together. It was possible that if Harry saw them from the outside, he would realize the same thing that was always clanging like a bell in the back of Draco’s head now.

Possible. But not likely.

Still, Draco wanted to try it anyway, and so he reached out and snared one memory from the flood as delicately as possible.

He was not prepared for what came from it.

Something obscure and writhing coiled around him like water-weed, and Draco cried out in more than surprise when he felt the pressure on his mind. Something sliding and smooth and subtle, something as powerful and deadly as a snake.

Legilimency more assured, and many times stronger, than his own.

Draco stumbled backwards, wondering, in a panic, if Harry had some instinctive defenses in his mind that would repel Draco and destroy him before he could pull himself free. Sometimes that happened, Professor Snape had told him, but not often, any more than some wizards and witches were allergic to certain kinds of spells. But Draco should still have been prepared, he always ought to be prepared for the strange and extraordinary to happen with Harry, and still he hadn’t considered it—

Then the thing winding around him snapped tight and laughed at him, and Draco knew, for sure and certain, that it was not and could not be Harry.

Harry did not possess that cold laughter, that arrogance that crushed down on Draco then like an avalanche and made him aware how much the possessor of the voice despised him. His panic redoubled, and he yanked himself free with a power that Professor Snape and Lucius both would have been proud of.

Then he opened his eyes. He was lying on the floor of their practice room, and Harry was striding towards him, leveling his wand at a Draco with reflexes that spoke of years of experience.

His eyes were red, his pupils vertical. All around him flowed a palpable aura of power that Draco, better than anyone after working so closely with Harry, knew Harry did not have.

Draco’s instincts saved him then. He might have frozen, and he probably would have died. But he flung himself sideways, and the curse that flew from Harry’s wand—a sizzling, hissing one that made the floor bubble and boil—just missed him.

The cold laughter spilled from Harry’s lips. Draco shuddered. It was much worse aloud. He knew that Harry had heard it more than once, and he wondered that Harry was sane after it.

“You,” whispered the Dark Lord’s voice, Harry’s head swaying from side to side as if it were the head of a cobra. “Lucius’s traitorous son. The one he was so proud of, the one he was sure would kneel to me someday. Are you, I wonder, actually Potter’s friend? Or are you pretending to be, so that you can serve your father? But no,” the voice continued, contemplative, slow, terrifying. “You have shown too much of yourself to Potter here. Typically, he notices almost nothing of it, but I do. I can use his eyes; I need not use his brain.”

Draco knew he was outmatched. He couldn’t lie to the Dark Lord, not with his Legilimency and with how much he might have seen—which was everything, if he’d really been living in Harry’s mind for months. And he couldn’t win in a battle against him. It seemed like the Dark Lord had all his knowledge and his magic with him, rather than being limited by Harry’s mind and body.

On the other hand, he didn’t think he would get out of the door if he tried to run.

He committed himself in a moment, as Professor Snape had said he would have to sometimes, and swished his wand in a spell that Snape had believed he wasn’t ready to perform. “Color mortis,” he whispered, so softly that he didn’t think the Dark Lord could hear him. At least, he would have to hope that the Dark Lord couldn’t hear him. Draco cast the spell during the last part of his bragging little speech, though, so he didn’t think so.

The spell spread soundlessly, invisibly, over him, but Draco could feel it passing, the tingle like a thousand cold spiders’ legs running up his skin. He shuddered, and then the Dark Lord turned his wand on him. Draco stood tall and faced it, trying to wear a haughty expression, the way that the Dark Lord would expect Lucius’s son to. He was breathing so fast that he swayed on his feet, but he knew he was brave, he knew he was strong, and this was for Harry’s sake.

He could only pray that the Dark Lord wouldn’t cast the Killing Curse, because this spell wasn’t a block to the Killing Curse; nothing was.

“Crucio!” the Dark Lord said, and Draco had a moment to be grateful for the rigidity of his mind and his lack of imagination before the pain spread over his body.

It lasted only a moment. Then Color mortis, the Feigned Death Spell, went into motion and made him slump, his heartbeat fading below detection levels in a moment, so it would look as if a heart attack had killed him. Draco’s eyes rolled back, his breath stopped on the surface but continued, suspended, in the lowest part of his lungs, and his body went slack and unresponsive.

He heard the Dark Lord make a hiss of surprise. Then he stepped towards Draco and jabbed the wand at his cheek, rolling his head to the side. Draco went with it, because he had no choice, and changed his prayer—this time, that the Dark Lord wouldn’t decide to jab the wand through his eye as a way of making sure he was truly dead. The Color mortis would sustain his silence and stillness even through that, but it wouldn’t lessen the pain.

“I will have to tell Lucius,” the Dark Lord said, with a little laugh, and then swept out of the room.

Draco forced himself to lie still and count to a hundred. It was the second hardest thing he had ever done in his life. The hardest was forcing himself to his feet and then turning in the direction of the dungeons and Snape’s private rooms.

He wanted to go after Harry so badly that his body felt tugged towards Harry’s side by invisible reins, but if he did, he would be in the same predicament he’d just got out of. Better to fetch Professor Snape, as the only one in the school who would believe Draco immediately and who might know what to do in the case of possession.

*

Harry’s brain was screaming and scrabbling like a mouse in a glass cage, and he couldn’t stop it.

He couldn’t stop anything. He still felt the motions of his own limbs, the weight of the wand in his hand, the brush of cloth and air against his skin as his body climbed the stairs, but he didn’t control any of it. His head turned and his eyes focused on stones hung with what looked like red tapestries—the haze of red that seemed to follow Voldemort everywhere—but it wasn’t what he wanted to look at, and the thoughts that rushed through his head weren’t his own.

And Draco was dead. Draco was dead, for trusting Harry, and trying to help him, even after Harry decided he didn’t trust him and wouldn’t tell him anything he wasn’t forced to.

It hurt so much. He struggled and he ran and he turned and he lashed out and he kept screaming, hoping that the fervor of everything might startle Voldemort into letting go.

But he knew he couldn’t do anything. Voldemort’s strength sat on him like a snake coiled on top of a rat, and he had never been any good at Occlumency.

The bitterness made all the nightmares he’d had so far, and his conviction that he was going to die in the war, seem like nothing. They had been nothing. If he’d worked harder, instead of giving up sometimes because he was so depressed—if he’d stuck with Occlumency when Snape first wanted him to perfect it—if he’d talked to Ginny, who’d been right after all, or told someone about the duel with Sirius where the world turned red—

Everything was lost, now, and Voldemort was laughing at him. And, because he had deliberately shared one of his thoughts with Harry, he knew where they were going.

Sirius was due for a dueling lesson with Harry this evening.

*

This time, Severus knew that something was wrong not due to a ward or Draco bursting into his office, but because his Mark had begun to burn just as he was contemplating retiring to bed. He laid down his ladle instead of dropping it this time, and sent a moment regarding his arm. His mind had already acted to put his fear into suspension and fill itself with clarity, the way it had during the battles that Severus actually fought against the Order of the Phoenix, before he changed sides.

The Dark Lord is in the castle.

And then someone was knocking frantically at the door to his private rooms. Severus moved towards the door, analyzing as he went. (Analysis was a way to keep himself from exploding with fear). Only Slytherins knew where the door to his private rooms lay; that was not knowledge he had ever seen necessary to trust to Harry, since they always met at his office or in the training room anyway. And if the Dark Lord was in the castle, he was probably trying to strike at Harry. And there was only one Slytherin who would be that intimately concerned in Harry’s problems.

So Severus opened the door without surprise, which itself lessened the dread, and nodded to Draco. “I need to know what has happened,” he said, before the boy could even open his mouth, “and I need to know where he has gone.”

“I don’t know the second,” Draco said. His breathing had slowed down a bit, Severus noted with approval, retreating from hyperventilation. He was used to listening to questions from someone else in that kind of calm, dry voice. “But the Dark Lord’s possessed him. He must have been in Harry’s mind a long time. I stirred him up during the Occlumency lesson, and—” He swallowed. “He must have been there a long time, to be that strong,” he repeated, and shook his head, turning away.

Severus seized his shoulder. He did not have the time to coddle Draco, and that meant he could not allow him to sink into despair. “Did he affect your mind in any way?”

“I don’t think so.” Draco shivered. “He drove me out of Harry’s mind, but I was trying to escape anyway. And then he tried to torture me with Crucio, but I’d cast Feigned Death and he thought I was dead. I think he’s gone upstairs, but I don’t know where.”

It did not take Severus long to make a guess. The Dark Lord would not have revealed himself, even if Draco had probed at him, unless he was ready to make a move. And, other than Draco and perhaps the Gryffindors—whom Potter had spent less time with this year than usual—there was only one person whose loss would cause Harry deep and personal pain instead of the impersonal grief that the boy seemed ready to take on his shoulders every time someone died.

“Up” could mean Gryffindor Tower. But “up” was also likely to mean the Room of Requirement, and if the Dark Lord had been around long enough to acquire some of Potter’s memories and see through his eyes, he must also realize that striking at Black now was an easier chance, before the news had had time to spread. Harry’s friends would be nodding off in their beds soon. They could be finished with ease once he had taken care of Black.

And if he knows that much, it is likely that my own life is forfeit.

Severus felt his heart beating strongly in his ears as he set off, for the second time, to rescue Sirius Black. It was louder than the footsteps of Draco behind him, whom Severus knew would not stay put no matter what he told him, and whose trust he did not fancy losing by casting a binding spell. And it was louder than the silent plea that he had guessed correctly and was not leaving the Gryffindor children to suffer.

He knows. He knows.

One way or another, this is an end to my spying.

An end to suspension, an end to uncertainties…

Severus felt his lips curl in a somewhat desperate smile. Strange as this circumstance was, there were ways that he thought he could regard it with relief.

*

The door to the Room of Requirement opened. Inside was the plain dueling chamber that Harry and Sirius always used, and Harry when he was training with the Army of Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff students. Of course it was, Harry thought, nearly crazed with despair. Voldemort had access to all his thoughts. He would know what the room should look like and how to summon it into being.

Voldemort did pause as the door opened, and Harry caught the edge of a thought that sounded something like insecure and tiara. But Harry caught no more than that, because Sirius was waiting, smiling, in the middle of the floor, and he needed to act now, with Draco’s weight in his mind like a stone, face pale-cold, if he didn’t want Sirius to end up like Draco had.

He lunged, throwing all his weight against Voldemort’s mind, hoping against hope that the prophecy—which Voldemort had to know, too, if he’d been listening to Harry’s thoughts—would take hold somehow, and ensure that he could defeat the bastard. He could die, and that was all right, that was what he’d been preparing for all along, just let him take Voldemort with him, all he asked, all he wanted—

And Voldemort crushed him down without even moving, without shifting. He laughed at Harry, and Harry screamed back, but his hope was gone, and nearly his mind. Voldemort did fling one coil over him, so that he had even less freedom of movement than he’d had up to that point, and then moved his lips in a smile at Sirius.

“Are you all right, Harry?” Sirius cocked his head to the side, his smile fading as he examined Harry with concern. “Something funny about your eyes…”

“I woke up with a fever this morning,” Voldemort said, and his voice was pitch-perfect, sheepish and apologetic for worrying Sirius, but of course it would be, why wouldn’t it be, it was Harry’s voice, and why couldn’t Harry do anything? “And it turned my eyes this color for some reason.” He laughed. “A burst blood vessel, maybe. But I won’t let it stop the duel! I have to know how to defeat him.”

And he raised his wand.

Sirius came forwards, laughing, to meet it, not knowing what would happen.

“Distorqueo!”

*

Draco raced after Professor Snape to the stairs, but when they got up them, he was ahead. He didn’t know how it happened. He didn’t plan it. What mattered was that they had to get there, and he knew where it was, because he’d waited outside the room more than once when Harry put an Occlumency lesson after the dueling lesson.

Professor Snape shouted for him to stop. Draco shut his ears and ran madly. He was breathing horribly by the time he got to the last set of stairs, but Quidditch had been good for something this year after all, although it hadn’t let him win the game against Harry; it kept him going long past the point where he would have been ready to drop if he wasn’t in better shape. And then he saw the door ahead, and he saw it was slightly ajar, and he wanted to whoop and shout and laugh, because the Dark Lord hadn’t taken the time to shut and ward it, but he didn’t have the time, and Professor Snape was still shouting for him to stop, and he might try to bind Draco at any moment.

Draco threw out his hand and pushed the door open.

And he saw Sirius Black twisting and hunching like an old tree under the Deforming Curse that the Dark Lord had cast at him, and his heart burned hot, and he aimed his wand and, because he couldn’t cast a spell that would hurt Harry if his life depended on it, he spoke another savage spell that came to mind instead.

“Dehisco!”

*

Harry had never known what suffering was until he saw the torture curse Voldemort was using cramp Sirius’s spine, turn his limbs weak and shaky, and start sucking the bones out of his chest. Sirius was screaming. Harry kept trying to go to him again and again. Voldemort held him down. He laughed at him.

Harry thought he could feel his mind bending, just like Sirius’s body, under the pressure. He almost welcomed it. If he was going to die, if he was going to be the one responsible for killing his godfather or hurting him beyond belief, then maybe it was for the best anyway—

“Dehisco!” came the yell from behind him, in Draco’s angry, beloved voice.

Beloved? Harry had time to think, the thought whirling past him like an arrow and spinning him around.

And then Draco’s curse struck and Harry’s wand split down the middle, forked into two halves that leaped away from each other as if hit by a thunderbolt. The phoenix feather inside puffed into a sad cascade of golden flecks and drifted towards the ground, settling like snow on the useless holly wood.

Sirius fell over, in what looked like unconsciousness, and which made Harry cry with relief.

Voldemort screamed like an angry Veela and turned around to confront Draco—alive, alive, oh my God, Draco—and Professor Snape, behind him. He must have seen at once that they were both armed and he wasn’t. Harry felt him tense, and the air around him briefly turned cold. He thought Voldemort was trying to summon his own magic through Harry’s body, but either the distance was too great or he wasn’t as good at wandless magic as Harry had always thought he was, after all.

He hissed angrily, either way, and then he closed his eyes.

And Harry felt pain travel through him beside which Umbridge’s Cruciatus was nothing, and he realized Voldemort did in fact have a victim in reach that he could still hurt.

*

Severus stepped forwards. Part of him was in shock, but far more was soaring with stunned pride. Draco, to think of something like that, rather than a spell that would hurt Harry’s body instead of his wand—

Oh, Draco. You are my favorite student for a reason.

But then those red, shining eyes closed, and Harry’s body began to shudder, and Severus understood that Draco’s not casting a torture spell might have been of small avail, since the Dark Lord could destroy Harry’s mind without moving.

And now it was his turn.

Legilimency against an unwilling mind was difficult, which was one reason Severus had always kept his abilities very quiet, so that his students wouldn’t start consciously resisting him. And Legilimency with the eyes shut was more difficult still; Severus usually preferred to wait until someone was looking him directly in the face even when he knew a person well. And this was the Dark Lord, whose abilities as a Legilimens were beyond compare, and who knew, now, that Severus had been deceiving him.

But still, this was the reason he had come here. Draco had done his part.

Now it was up to Severus to do his.

He never hesitated. He cast “Legilimens” aloud, which was not something he ordinarily needed to do, but he was not about to waste any power at the moment on nonverbal spells. And it wasn’t as if the Dark Lord didn’t realize exactly what he was going to do.

He leaped, and passed inside, using his mind like a battering ram, knocking at the shields and the traps that immediately sprang up to oppose him.

Only later, much later, did he realize this was the first action he had taken in years that was not a matter of either routine or atonement.

*

Draco wanted to do something, especially when Harry began to shudder as if someone was hitting him with lightning curses. But he had heard Professor Snape speak, and he knew that there was nothing he could do right now. He was a fairly good Occlumens, but nothing like on Snape’s level.

No, as useless as it made him feel, he had to—wait.

Draco sighed and let himself drop onto his heels. And then a groan echoed his sigh, and he looked around in surprise.

Sirius Black lay hunched and twisted on the floor, his head bent to the side, his eyes filled with terror.

There was something Draco could do, after all, and so he moved towards his cousin.

*

Harry knew he was shredding apart, in a process that not all the nightmares had managed, or even seeing Draco die—as he thought—or seeing the pain inflicted on Sirius. Voldemort had only done that to torture him. This time, he meant to kill.

He tore and tore and tore, and bits of Harry’s thoughts and memories and information spun away and were gone. And all the time, Voldemort kept up a steady chant of what he was destroying.

Wingardium Leviosa. The way that your friend Ron laughs. How your cousin tortured you. The moment when you realized your aunt would never love you, no matter what you did for her. The Body-Binding Spell. Your friend Hermione’s middle name. Your favorite foods. It will all go, Potter, it will all go, and I will annihilate you. You will become less than a name on the wind, less than a ghost bemoaning his unfair treatment. You are gone, and you will pay for defying me!

The one thing Harry knew how to do best, thanks to the training he’d received—from Snape, from Sirius, from Draco, from the Dursleys, from Seamus, from Umbridge—was how to endure pain. So he did what he could to cling to the core of his slowly diminishing sanity, and last to the end. If Voldemort wanted him to go, then the only victory Harry could steal from him was to stay as long as possible.

And then—

A slender beam of light, creeping into Harry’s mind the way that a line of light used to shine under the door of the cupboard. A rope ladder lowered to him.

You must trust me. Snape’s voice was all around him then, beating in his ears like wind or wings, stronger than Voldemort’s horrifying chant. I can strengthen you. This is still your mind. You have the advantage here, and you can fight him. But you must trust me.

Harry hesitated, agonized, remembering unfair moments in Potions class, pain that Snape as well as Voldemort had caused him—

And then he ran into the first holes in his memories, and he understood that perhaps he would never again know some of what Snape had done to him.

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to weep. He wanted to dance around in a circle and point out to Voldemort, who was now screaming at Snape and attacking him with rush after rush of power, that his own destruction had been the thing that caused Harry to trust Snape.

That, and some of the memories of the training sessions, and of the stories that Snape had told him.

Yes, Harry said, and reached out to clasp Snape’s hand.

*

Severus had not expected the maelstrom, because to expect something, one had to have a vague idea of what it was like, and Severus had never before been in the middle of a forest fire that was also a rockfall and an avalanche, lit with vivid flashes of green and purple lightning that would kill him if they landed.

But he fought his way through, along the tattered trails of thought and the rebounding rocks and the leaping water, and he felt Harry’s mind—familiar from their aborted Occlumency lessons—pressing up against his, and he reached out and offered help.

And Harry said, Yes, and Severus felt something shift around them, something that was not merely the change in Harry’s mind that the permission signaled.

But for the moment, that change was by far the most important one. Severus swept his power forwards like a pair of wings and, at the moment when the Dark Lord intensified his assault most and stood the most chance of hurting him, he poured his power and his knowledge into Harry, a possession of his own in some ways.

But more than that. A lending. A borrowing. Harry suddenly knew as much about Occlumency and Legilimency as Severus did, and so he had the knowledge to access the native strength of his mind.

More than that, because this was not a possession but a permission, Severus could hide himself entirely in Harry’s mind if he required. He moved his knowledge, but also himself, and vanished from in front of the Dark Lord, whose assault rained and hammered on empty ground.

Harry-Severus expanded himself downwards, sideways, forwards, up. He went everywhere the Dark Lord was not, and he grabbed things. He-they drew it in, that knowledge of his mind that remained, the memories that were years old and layered and not so easy as all that to be destroyed, the conviction of his death, the love of Sirius, the hatred of the horrid Muggles who had abused him, and together he-they drove it and built it and himself-themselves, and they shot up like a black building, and hit Voldemort-the Dark Lord in a single burst of indescribable power, as all Harry-Severus convulsed in a moment of rejection.

The Dark Lord-Voldemort had managed to build up so much power only because he’d hidden for so many months in the back of Harry’s mind—and his nightmares, as they both understood at the same moment, because Harry had the memories of those dreams and Severus recognized them as a sign of incipient possession. And now that mind was aware of him, and angry.

Ancient rage came boiling up, all the anger that Harry had at Finnigan and Umbridge and the Dursleys and felt he had to suppress. And it joined to the anger that Severus felt against James Potter and against Dumbledore, and with his hatred of the Dark Lord for the loss of Lily, and hit Voldemort like a shuttlecock, knocking him far, far away, out of Harry-Severus.

His diminishing cry haunted them for long moments, and then they broke apart, fell apart, and Severus swam to the surface of Harry’s mind, and opened his eyes to find Harry flinging himself into his arms.

*

Draco gasped as Professor Snape’s eyes opened. He’d been crouched beside Black, trying to murmur the most soothing words he could, and watching both Snape and Harry, who stood motionless. And then Snape’s eyes were open, and Harry jumped towards him and clutched his robes, sobbing.

Snape dropped to his knees—not, Draco thought, because he wanted to accommodate Harry but because he didn’t have the strength to stand up any longer—and caught him. He held him for a length of time that made Draco feel uncomfortably jealous.

“Well?” Draco demanded after a minute, unable to believe that no one had said anything. “Is he all right?”

Snape lifted his head. The look in his eyes was pure fire, and Draco had to shiver and fight the temptation to take a step backwards.

“He is far from all right,” Snape said in measured tones. “But the Dark Lord is gone. And from now on, things will be different. There will be—arrangements made, for healing and to ease the pain that should have been eased long since, by Dumbledore.” His hand rose and settled on Harry’s shoulder in a gesture that Draco recognized, having received it himself. Support. Possessiveness. Gladness.

And then Draco couldn’t stand it, and had to practically drag Black over to them so he could embrace as much of them as possible.

Chapter 20.