Disclaimer: Don't own. Don't care. Writing this for free.

AN: I hurried up as much as I could to write this chapter. I know the last one was a mean cliffhanger, but the mood of this part and the last one was too different.

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Chapter 10: Doeminded (part 2).

Harry Potter had been a lot of things during his long life, but a master Occlumens was not one of those things; in fact, he had sucked big time to the point not even Severus Snape in all his sneering glory had been unable to hammer the instinct of keeping a threatening wizard in front of you out of your head. And that was pretty much what the basics of the basics boiled to: One wizards attacked, another defended, and the most adept of the two got out with what they wanted.

Given that Harry could never top Voldemort in experience or power fast enough, Snape had focused on getting Harry to want to keep people hard enough to make up for the gap and give Lily's son a true fighting chance against experienced Legilimens'.

Of course, this fact was something Harry didn't get at the time, but well after the Greasy Git had become someone Harry respected a lot. And it was because Harry grew to respect, even admire, Severus Snape that Harry decided to honor the man by learning that which the Order's spy had once tried to teach him.

That Harry would go to Hermione for help was to be expected, as was that she wanted in on the opportunity to learn some arcane magic that had little chance of ever becoming useful to her. Ron simply rolled his eyes and left the room with the excuse of needing to make lunch (which was kind of true since Hermione could hardly cook anything more complicated than a Sandwich), and so 2/3 of the golden trio studied while the remaining 1/3 cooked and stuffed himself with whatever he could find. The more things changed, the more remained the same between them.

Hermione managed to create her first minds-cape after two weeks of trying... It took Harry 30 years. Of course, he didn't spend all that time meditating and trying to shape things or anything of the sort, but he did sit cross-legged most Sundays for about an hour to try and make the basic plate in which he could order his thoughts and memories and arm his defenses.

In a rare show academic support, Ron had eventually offered to study with Harry for old time's sake... only to make both Harry and Hermione frustrated when, after 4 days of half-assed effort, the redhead turned up with a mental defenses considerably more advanced than both Harry's (who was horrible at it) and Hermione's (who had 30 years to calmly work the finer details of her mindscape). It was that frustration that had Harry finally applying himself enough to manage the basics.

Now, Harry's ideal mindscape had been (shocker) Hogwarts castle, but he discovered the hiding something on the mental representation of a place every wizard on Great Britain had 7 years to memorize was not such a good idea. This discovery came to place when he was mentally assaulted by one of a newly rising Dark Lord when Harry was on his early fifties. Fortunately the man had back then been looking for the whereabouts of the Elder Wand (which Harry snapped at the end of the Battle of Hogwarts) so there was no harm done before Harry belatedly kicked the dark wizard out of his mind.

So Harry needed a new place to order his memories; problem was, dismantling the castle he had built would have been a lot harder than it was to build it. So Harry came up with the crazy idea of shrinking the castle and stuff it into a bottomless trunk. Now all that was in his mind was a endless expanse of white and a trunk: clearly nothing remotely inconspicuous. So Harry needed to fashion something to hid the trunk, and lazily settled for tossing a mental invisibility cloak over it and call it a day.

The battle with his new enemy took a lot of time out of him, if only because the dark wizard and his followers never did something as getting tattoos or manipulate the clouds to let people know about their evil deeds. No, instead this people the "Faceless Army" were as cunning and silent as Slytherin should have been... which is why the wizard world was deeply shocked to know that the main instigators had been Ravenclaws taking advantage of the historic suspicions on the house of snakes to further their anonymity.

When Harry, head Auror, eventually lead the forces to victory, he was begged by the masses to become the Minister of Magic. Harry did, if only to fix the power vacuum. The years under his rule short since he loathed politics, and he happily resigned as a minister and seriously considered taking a few sabbatical years to spend with his lovely wife and children... but then Headmaster McGonagall died when she tried to take on both the role as a director and take care of DADA curriculum. Sure, she managed to do so for a year with no harm to her health, but when she tried to do a repeat performance, the curse on that class kicked in. Harry's old head of the house died during a visit to Hagrid's hut, because the lovable groundskeeper had had the terrible idea of crossing one of his Blast-Ended Skrewts with an Acromantula.

Anyway. Harry took the position of headmaster with the intention of lasting only until his youngest was old enough to graduate... only to remain as a Headmaster for the next 100 years. Which allowed Harry to spend a lot of time with his grandchildren, great grandchildren, great great grandchildren -and so on and so forth- during their time abroad.

With constant distractions through his life: being a political figure, war hero, Auror-department consultant, Chief Mugwump (a job he was granted to and he could never turn down), the comeback of a couple more dark lords and that memorable season when he was 85 and Ron managed to convince him to play for the Chudley Cannons... it wasn't until Harry turned 176 that he had a passable Occlumency shield.

But as time went on and Harry outlived all his schoolmates and children and the fact that Occlumency allowed the master of the mental arts to deal with grief a lot better, meant Harry, now aged and a billion times more patient that he had been as a boy, could truly meditate on what he wanted his mind to look like.

It was a slowly but steady effort now. One he indulged it more as a search of peace than a useful defense against any evil Legilimens.

By the end of Harry's second century of life (incidentally his last year alive), his mind was a convoluted collection of layers to peel off before anyone could get anything useful from his extensive knowledge and life experience. To get even something as menial as the knowledge of Harry's favorite tea brand, a mind walker would first need to enter Harry's mind (which was no easy feat since there were a layers of vicious spells layered as a barrier to be overcome). If the mind walker managed to get in, he or she would appear on the outskirts of the Forbidden Forest, right besides Hagrid's hut. The hut was a bait, hidden by a Notice-me-not that any wizard worth their salt could dispel, and anyone who entered there would have to deal with a very angry Fluffy.

If the mind walker got the clue that the real path to follow was through the forest, the canopy of trees was a complex mess that could only be safely traveled by "Following the spiders". Then, whoever followed the spiders would find Aragog's nest. The mean arachnid was a guardian of sorts, and the only way to defeat it was to take Gryffindor's sword form the Sorting Hat, that was innocently sitting on a stool on a dark corned of the cave. There was also the added condition that the person to take the sword could only have been a Gryffindor student.

If by some miracle the intruder got as far as to kill the spider, said intruder would get a key to open Arthur Weasley's old flying car, which had gone native and moved near the Whomping Willow. The car would have to be coaxed to let the key-holder near. When you opened the trunk there was a Portkey to the ethereal King Cross Station that Harry had visited when the Horcrux in his head died.

The old train station was as empty as it was on that memory, and (since Harry could remember that memory with sharp clarity despite the years) he decided to hid the concealed trunk, in which Hogwarts was packed, under the bench where a the remains of Voldemort's soul had manifested.

It was a complete overkill of a mental defense, but Harry had worked on it more as a hobby than anything else... that and he had been bored out of his mind as his body deteriorated to the point he could hardly walk (which is why Harry made sure to sneak into his mental representation of Hogwarts' Quiddich pitch for a fly pretty much every day).

When Harry finally kicked the bucket, Rai the doe inherited the whole thing... even if Harry could not dive into it.

But then, as a mindwalker, with a hair that was a far cry from Malfoy-blond, Harry's new magic latched to the swirling foreign magic, finally getting Harry to become his mental self... which was, thank Merlin for small mercies, of the right species and of the gender with certain dangly something between the legs.

For a moment, Harry considered following around the blue-eyed blond around, but it had been a long time since he felt like himself, and he planned to use that time to walk, to jump, to fly a broom, to do anything and everything he could while his mind was getting probed.

He had a lot of confidence that his mind defenses would hold... and had no idea how long it would take for him to learn how to tap into his mindscape with his new doe-magic

...

"Why is he taking so long?" Ibiki asked as the minutes ticked by and the Yamanaka mind-walker remained still. Not that the regular memory extraction was a fast progress, since there were a lot of life experience to filter on top of whatever nasty measure the ninja under the Jutsu had designed to protect sensitive information; but this was a mind-probe to a 4 months old animal, one in which Inoichi was only supposed to find out whether or not the doe was a spy of Orochimaru. Even Jiraia, who had spent so little time around the Yamanaka method of information gathering caught up on the abnormality of such delay.

"I don't know," Shikaku admitted.

Three pensive ninja (plus Anko) watched with worry as Inoichi sweated and his chakra grew smaller and smaller as though it was been burned at an alarming speed. When the chakra grew of the Yamanaka was less than half his reserves, the blond opened his eyes. "Well, that was unexpected," Inoichi heaved, putting a hand on a wall to remain upright.

"Is that thing one of Orochimaru's pets or not?" Anko asked impatient, a kunai in hand was a clear sign that she would be more than happy to stab the doe right then and there if that was the case.

"I would't know. That doe has the most complex mind I have ever seen."

"Please elaborate," Jiraia asked, his usual goofy persona had turned into the serious veteran. It eyed the innocent doe that had looked so innocent tied up, it looked around with fright and confusion, but it wasn't trying to let itself loose by trashing like other animal did when trapped. Jiraia, along with Shikaku and everyone else in the room (minus Anko) had for sure known that the animal was pretending. They pretended not to notice and kept as if nothing was going on.

Inoichi, calmly continued with his explanation, "Well, usually when diving into someone's mind the memories would be floating and I only need to focus on the information I want to know about. If the shinobi's mind is protected by seals or mental defenses, then the memories don't come when called and there is a need to study the impressions of said memories and look for weakness. There are other methods of protecting Intel; like mixing lies with truths or to implant fake memories to lure enemy shinobi into an ambush...", now how to explain what he had seen inside the doe's head...

"This doe's mind is different. I felt some barriers -which would have been hard to pass by for anyone without experience-, but when I got past... there was a forest. I have never seen a mind with that looks like a tangible physical representation of a place."

The listening ninja (Anko included) looked at Inoichi with thoughtful expressions. They all had known the mind walker for a long time, it was quite unusual to see him both frustrated and exited about something.

"Did you learn something?" Ibiki asked.

Inoichi shook his head "I got lost. The forest was a maze of sorts, so I think it's based on a genjutsu, but I could't dispel it."

Teories were exchanged between the Nara, the Yamanaka, the Toad Sanin and the chief interrogator... that is, until Anko got fed of all the technical crap. "I have an idea!" She walked towards the tied doe, took a sharp kunai and pressed the pointy edge to the doe. "Look, bitch. If you are so smart then I bet you understand us; so tell me one good reason why I should't slit your throat?"

"Anko, I think you are been a bit drastic," Shikaku tired. Gods, his wife was going to kill him if he didn't do something to protect her Rai-chan.

Jiraia made a discrete hand-sign, and nobody stepped to prevent the crazy kunoichi from attacking the poor little animal with the very hurt nose.

"No, I think this is exactly what we need!" She rose the kunai, but before she could bring it down to stab, the doe sprung into action: one moment it was tied up looking at them with fearful confusion, the next the ropes vanished like smoke. Then it appeared with its back to a wall... which of course lead to all shinobi on the room to get on guard.

"Well, that was unexpected," Jiraia declared, and, while he thought there was no chance in hell of Orochimaru ever using the doe in front of him, there was still something fishy going on. And he would figure out what that was, he was The Great Spymaster of Konoha after all.

To Be Continued

AN: So... erm, plot moved a bit? Not much, but meh.

Also, I finally posted the fic that won the poll on my profile (the one with Game of Thrones x Harry Potter, called "The Rise of the Pale Dragon"; you can search for it on my profile). Please give me your opinions on this chapter, and if you can toss me an idea or two it would help me a lot to figure out what to do next. I still have no idea where this fic is going I'm afraid.