A/N: Here we go...

Chapter 10

The week passed quickly, despite how full Hermione's schedule was. Between her classes, her ongoing research, her long communiqués with Harry and Ron, and her careful scheduling of the DA members to keep the Room of the Requirement open, Hermione had almost no time to herself. What little time she did have was spent in the late evenings, in the Room itself.

Despite putting Occlumency aside as much as she could as per Snape's instructions, she found herself drawing upon her Mind's Eye unintentionally as her stress levels built, and especially in her most demanding classes; the Carrows were putting all of the students through their paces. She Occluded all through Muggle Studies in order to keep herself in line, but Alecto Carrow called on her frequently, usually to answer half-formed trick questions intended to incriminate Hermione as a Mudblood. The Ravenclaws, who took the class with the Gryffindors, scrupulously wrote their notes, and kept their heads down, but Hermione had to restrain Seamus Finnegan more than once when he tried to be smart with Professor Carrow. Amycus Carrow had backed off of having students duel during his classes. Instead, he fired questions at them seemingly at random, and demanded that they research Dark spells and methods for long essays, which he then read aloud to the class and commented on extensively. When it was not dull, it was difficult. The Slytherins seemed to delight in the material, while Neville ground his teeth. More than once, he had been required to give a detailed description of the damage Bellatrix Lestrange had inflicted on his parents. Hermione had to tap on his foot to remind him to stay calm in many of the lessons.

The DA was holding fast to their schedules and principles; Hermione had found the time to formally enrol over 50 new members throughout the week, usually during the evening after her rounds and before turning in. These new members consisted almost entirely of first and second years who came in groups of two, nervous and frightened. The roster in the Room of the Requirement was now crowded with names, and Hermione had flipped it over to add even more signatures.

She smiled now, looking at it during one of her spare periods. Several older students were using the Room to practice defensive magic while Neville looked on, giving tips and taking note of their progress. She was proud of the group they'd managed to put together in such a short amount of time, but there were still aspects of this brave new Hogwarts that hadn't quite been reckoned with. The Carrows did rounds many evenings of the week, and last night had beaten a set of fifth-year Hufflepuff prefects, Gladys Prescott and Philip Blagdon, black and blue for finding two Slytherin students who were out after curfew. They had required treatment from Madam Pomfrey, who had summoned Hermione to enrol them into the DA immediately after they had recovered.

She thought now of tacking the Marauder's Map to the wall alongside the register in order to counter future attacks, but quickly dismissed the idea; it was one of those tools that Harry had rarely shared, and she would follow his example. It would be far too easy for such a thing to fall into the hands of their enemies, and what would they do then?

The door to the Headmaster's office opened before Hermione could knock. Unnerved, she stepped inside Snape's office, expecting to see him behind the desk as usual, but he stood waiting for her. The desk, she saw, along with all the spindle-legged tables and their instruments, was pushed awkwardly up against the circular walls. Snape stood in the very centre of the room, his eyebrows raised, posture relaxed.

"Good evening, Miss Granger," he said mildly. "As amusing as it is to await the end of your dithering outside my door, I thought we might cut to the chase this evening in the interest of both practicality and sanity."

"Right," Hermione said, making firm eye contact with Snape and refusing to give him the upper hand despite the surprise he'd given her. "Let's get on with it, then."

"You look tired," he remarked.

She shrugged in response and looked away, remembering that he had caught sight of her that first night she'd spent in the Room of Requirement.

"I would like to begin by assessing your current mental status," Snape went on, and she stared at him. "I will thus ask that you put up no resistance so that I may use Legilimency to do a brief sweep of you mind."

Hermione felt her mouth open immediately to rebuff him, and to tell him where he could put his assessment, but Snape cut her off.

"Yes, Miss Granger, I know that I am an untrustworthy bastard who has clear designs on the most sensitive memories you possess," he said smoothly, "but I would remind you before you – ah – scold me that I am under pain of death to teach you Occlumency safely. I am therefore incapable of taking what I want without giving you plenty in return."

"And I'm just supposed to trust you?" she heard herself ask.

"No," Snape answered, stepping forward slowly. "You are supposed to trust the Vow I made, which will kill me if I betray you." He advanced another step or two and frowned down into her face. "We will have no success here, Granger, if you do not establish some form of confidence in this process, if not in me."

Hermione felt everything inside her raging beneath the surface, and she quickly stomped down on the impulse to pull up her Mind's Eye and hide behind it. She nodded slowly to herself, and then to the dark man before her.

"Again," he said, taking his wand out of his sleeve and pointing it into her face. Hermione fought the urge to draw her own wand, "I will not attempt to sift through any memories. I will examine the current state of your mind, and I will tell you everything I see afterwards. I ask that you share your experience of it as well."

She nodded again. Snape whispered the incantation.

It happened quickly. She was falling into his black eyes – or were they falling into her? – and then she could feel him inside her. One moment they were looking at one another, and the next she was somewhere dark with a slanting grey light, and she recognised the Mind's Eye she had constructed what seemed like forever ago now. She could not see herself, nor Snape, but she could feel his presence. He lingered and, true to his word, he did not try to open any of her drawers or files, he simply looked, his presence moving slowly through the front of her mind, over the bookshelves she'd set up and the filing cabinets and the drawers, until he found the area near the back, the one that held the hidden Intercision blade, and where the depth of what she suffered before he rescued her from Umbridge's custody oozed forward to taint the entire mindscape in a viscous, dark, fluid. She felt disgust and fear and hatred rile up inside her. She was suddenly raw and open – broken and beaten, like back then. Her Mind's Eye erupted, and suddenly her files and folders were flying about everywhere, and she was reeling.

He was gone as suddenly as he'd arrived, and she was staring into glinting eyes the colour of coal, and then she was falling forward, blinking stupidly in the muted candlelight of his office, and he was catching her by the shoulders as she hyperventilated. He spoke, but she could not hear him; she sat, his long hand on her back, holding her head down between her knees, a warm pressure against her spine and ribcage.

"… must calm yourself, Miss Granger," he was saying softly, rapidly. "That's it, deeper breaths now. Calm yourself."

Hermione blinked tears from her eyes and batted his hand away so that she could sit up in the chair. She wiped her face with the sleeve of her robes and tried to set herself more or less to rights before she looked up and glared at the man standing beside her. He looked calm, focused and – her stomach did a strange turn – concerned.

"What the hell did you just do to me?" she demanded.

Snape took a step back, and turned away from her.

"Precisely what I said I would," he answered as he walked in a slow circle around his office. "I explored the surface of your mind and did a cursory examination of the state of your psyche."

"You were looking for weakness," she hissed at him, remembering the holes he'd found, the horror he'd let out. "You wanted a good look at what can hurt me."

"Incorrect, Granger," he snapped, turning back to her abruptly. "I needed to see how you are healing from the psychic attacks of the Dementors, whether you have done the work to help yourself since then." He glared down his nose at her. "And, clearly, you have not."

"I walked," she snapped back. "I walked all over Devon. I walked until I ached."

"And what have you done since arriving here?" he demanded, his dark eyes boring into hers.

Hermione glared at him, and turned away, running both hands through her bushy hair. She could feel herself shaking.

"I haven't had time," she said. "It's been so –" she cut herself off.

"Make time."

She nodded stiffly, knowing he was right, but still hating to concede the point. Snape waved his wand and two chairs sailed over from where they'd been pushed up against the wall, and arranged themselves in the centre of the room. He took one and gestured for her to sit in the other.

"What did you see, Miss Granger?"

Hermione thought for a moment before answering.

"It was… odd. I saw the Mind's Eye I've been working with since…" she trailed off, gesturing vaguely. Snape nodded. "Right. I saw it, but it was off, somehow. Dim and… wrong."

"Did you see me?"

"No," Hermione shuddered, remembering how his presence had felt. "No, but I could tell you were there."

"Good," Snape shifted in the chair, and he was suddenly the Potions Master once more, erect and erudite. "What you saw was a mixture of what you have constructed and what you projected for me, tinged by whatever you were feeling at the time – in this instance, nervous trepidation." Hermione glared at him, but he continued as though he didn't notice. "My own presence within your psyche was not unnoticed, which means that you have developed some sensitivity to outsiders despite your unaccompanied training."

Hermione felt herself almost vibrating with her need to ask questions, and was relieved when Snape glanced at her and sighed before nodding.

"Thank you, sir," she said. "What do you mean by 'projected for me'? I wasn't aware of projecting anything, just of my Mind's Eye forming as usual."

"When a Legilimens enters the mind of a subject with no Occlumency training, they will usually have access to whatever normal thought processes are running at the time. There will be stream of consciousness, important or necessary memories and experiences on standby, emotional content, and so forth, but it is often jumbled, and almost always messy. When an Occlumens is the subject of Legilimency, their default interface is what appears as the mind automatically lines up a defense. Naturally, if I had been attempting to break into your memories themselves, the interface would have fallen away from your viewpoint, and you would have begun to view the memories themselves."

"So…" she thought for a moment. "Doesn't that mean it is easier to sort through an Occlumens's mind?"

Snape shook his head.

"Messy minds contain a number of… shortcuts to their most sensitive memories and experiences; those that inform the character and intentions of the person in question will be very easy to find within the chaos, and these are often the ones a Legilimens is seeking. An Occlumens worth his salt, however, would have organised his mind to re-route intruders away from sensitive information."

Hermione nodded thoughtfully before she caught Snape's eye. He was sitting upright in the chair, and studying her with an intensity that made her a little uncomfortable. She looked down at her hands before she continued with her questions.

"And what did you see in my mind?"

"A fussy little office full of shelves, drawers, and cabinets that could only belong to a complete swot."

He said it in a completely neutral tone, but that somehow made it worse.

"Oh," she retorted before she could stop herself. "And what's in your mind? A revolting museum of jars filled with decaying, putrid crap that could only belong to a complete bastard?"

To her surprise, he just raised his eyebrows.

"You know the incantation," he said, his tone mildly challenging.

Hermione stared at him for a moment. Does he really mean for me to – Snape interrupted her thought process by rolling his eyes and letting out an indignant huff.

"If you are going to be so squeamish about these lessons, Miss Granger, we may have to reconsider our respective missions here."

Hermione glared at him for a moment before she raised her wand.

"Legilimens!"

She was somewhere cool and dark. She felt oddly whole, oddly corporal. She looked down and saw that she stood in swampy grass; when she shifted, her feet squelched in the wet. Looking up, she saw a dark mass of sky with neither moon nor stars. The wet grass spread out as far as she could see. When she shifted to look around again, she saw that some sort of ghostly light shimmered across the turf: there were small pools interspersed all along the dark plain of Snape's mind, and light rose up in tendrils from these. She walked forward a step and peered down into the closest pool. She saw something that looked like a woman reflected in it and – is that me?

Suddenly, she was reeling backwards.

"Ouch!" she yelled as she hit the floor sideways.

"I did not give you permission to snoop, Granger."

Hermione took a moment to glare at Snape, who still sat in the chair with his perfect posture and his dark curtains of hair and his eyes blazing. She got up off the floor and stumbled back into her seat.

"I didn't mean to – I wanted to see… it just kind of happened…" she cut herself off.

Snape stared at her strangely for a moment before shrugging minutely.

"And what did you see?"

Hermione thought about it for a moment before answering. She described his mindscape as best she could, and he nodded slowly as she spoke.

"What you saw is my personal Mind's Eye," he said. "I have constructed it both consciously and subconsciously over the years."

"Subconsciously?" she demanded. "But how? And why? And how on earth does one – "

"Do attempt to restrain yourself, Granger. I can answer only one question at a time."

She found herself actually smiling a little at his sarcasm before she restrained herself once more.

"Ok," she said calmly. "How do you do anything with your subconscious?"

He answered that question. And then the next, and every single one afterwards. He told her about the slow, arduous construction of his Mind's Eye, which took years, and he described the ways he had tapped into his subconscious in order to assist the endeavour, and to strengthen his defenses with his own natural impulses. It was a fascinating discussion involving dream interpretation, exercises with Boggarts, and even Muggle yoga, and Hermione itched to take notes, but Snape forbade it as soon as she glanced at her backpack. They would leave no record of their lessons – except deep within their respective minds.

"Further questions, Miss Granger?" he asked. "It is getting late and some of us enjoy sleeping at night rather than peeping out of windows."

She felt herself blush a little, briefly cursing the openness of her current psyche.

"Sorry, sir," she said. "It's just so much more interesting than I thought it could be."

The professor's lips actually twitched at the corners at that remark, and Snape bowed his head in agreement.

"Now," he said briskly after a moment. "I require that you see to your psychic damage before we move on to practicing any of what we've been discussing this evening."

He waved his wand lazily. A door opened at the back of the room, and a book flew towards them both. Snape caught it and handed it to Hermione. She looked at the cover and smiled despite herself: Chakra Clearing by Doreen Virtue.

"Chakras, sir?"

"Indeed," he said, his tone shifting towards one of dismissal. "Ms. Virtue is a Muggle author who has some excellent insights on healing one's psyche. Read it over and try some of the exercises."

"I'll have it back to you for Monday – "

"No," he said, looking at her sharply. "You will not devour it. You will not memorise it. You will read it, consider it, and attempt to use the wisdom therein to heal yourself. And you will not use your Mind's Eye at all until our next meeting, unless there is some emergency."

Hermione opened her mouth to snap back at him, but he was already turning away, flicking a hand in dismissal as he made his way towards his desk.

"Goodnight, sir," she told him quietly.

A/N 2: There you have it, gentle readers. Please let me know what you think!