Scorpius yanked open the door to the basement.
"Don't drag me down the stairs," Rose said laughingly. "If I fall I might not bounce."
"Rosie?"
They turned to face Albus, who appeared to have just returned home. His hair stuck up in all directions.
"Al!" Rose said. "I didn't expect to see you. Is everything all right between you and Merry?"
"We're brilliant, actually. I came home because James has a team meeting—" He checked his watch. "—this afternoon, and Mum wants us to have a family breakfast before he goes." He walked toward them. "What are you two doing here?"
"We're having tea and discussing advanced Occlumency lessons," Scorpius said. Rose rewarded his honesty with a smile.
"Mind if I join you?" Albus asked.
Scorpius's gaze flickered to Rose. He would rather not discuss his need to be a more skilled Occlumens in front of an Auror Trainee.
She said, "Of course not, but if you act like a know-it-all I'm going to hex."
Albus grinned. "Get enough of that at home, do you?"
Scorpius said, "I'm not a—" before he realised that Albus referred to Rose's mother.
Albus blinked. His owlish expression very much resembled his father's. "Wait. That stuff about Mini-Crookshanks wasn't a joke? You two are actually living together?"
"Yes," Scorpius said. "And we don't want it to become public knowledge."
"Not everyone is as open-minded as my dad," Rose added wryly.
"Yeah, he was so jolly about it." The moment of shared humour ended abruptly when Albus asked, "Did you think I'd be narrow-minded? Is that why you didn't tell me?"
"No!"
Rose's stricken expression made Scorpius want to do something to alleviate it. He said, "We promised her parents not to tell anyone. Tonight, I . . . specified . . . that the promise didn't include your family."
"They had a man to man talk," Rose said.
Albus gaped at Scorpius. "I avoid Merry's father and he approves anything she does. How did you talk to Uncle Ron? He's scary!"
"He is not," Rose said.
"Is too. Remember the time we were playing in the back garden and Hugo set off a rocket and woke your father from his nap? He came charging out yelling that our ass was grass and he was the Muggle lawnmower. I almost pissed myself!" Albus looked ready to piss himself again, but with laughter.
"He does have a temper sometimes," Rose said.
"I've noticed," Scorpius replied.
Albus chuckled. "Wish I could've been there to see you going toe to toe with Uncle Ron."
Not a bad idea. Scorpius said, "We could try your Legilimency against my Occlumency."
The sound of a throat clearing carried up through the open doorway. Harry Potter's voice followed. "The tea is getting cold."
Rose startled. "And you call my dad scary," she whispered to Albus.
He shrugged and gestured for Scorpius to lead the way.
.
It was easy to imagine Grandmother Narcissa as a girl descending the same narrow stairs. The stone looked original to the house. The kitchen, with its modern furnishings and well lit, butterscotch-coloured walls, was nothing like the murky grey dungeon in his grandmother's stories. His gaze was drawn to a small door opposite the one he knew led to the pantry. His grandmother had told him:
If I was naughty when I came to visit, Aunt Walburga would lock me in the kitchen cupboard where Kreacher made his den. I sat on his nest of blankets, which was scarcely cleaner than the floor, and had to pass the time looking at the photographs he'd collected of our family.
Rose tugged his hand. He followed her to the end of the table nearest the cooker. Harry—Scorpius couldn't think of him as Uncle Harry if he was going to be an adult and call Rose's father Ron—sat at the head of the table. Albus sat in a chair to his father's left. Scorpius pulled out a chair for Rose to her uncle's right. Once they were all seated, Kreacher served tea, first to his master, and then to Scorpius.
"OK, I see how it is," Albus said.
"Don't tease Kreacher," Rose said. "He's displaying proper manners. Scorpius is a guest."
Cold fingers brushed Scorpius's wrist. "Does Miss Narcissa ever speak of Kreacher?"
"Yes. She told me you had a pet mouse." Not in those exact words. She'd said:
I always pretended to be traumatised when Auntie finally let me out, but when Kreacher brought a rodent into his den to give me the plague and ruin my looks, I screamed and screamed.
"Miss Narcissa does not care for mice," Kreacher said sadly.
The hysterics had probably been a giveaway. Scorpius said the first thing he could think of to change the subject. "I have a pet too. A Niffler."
"And an owl," Rose said.
"We have an owl," Scorpius replied.
Albus dropped his spoon into his teacup. "Hold on. You two are living together and bought an owl together and I'm still living at home?"
Scorpius glanced around. "It's a very nice home."
"Thank you," Harry said. He told Albus, "Don't forget that living here for free allows you to afford a social life."
Albus fished his spoon out of his cup. "Fine. I'm a low-paid Auror trainee with an expensive girlfriend. I should be grateful not to have to live in a bedsit like Aunt Hermione when she started Ministry training. Got it. Let's talk about something else, like Occlumency lessons."
Harry looked at Scorpius and Rose. "I'll admit I'm surprised that you two want my help. At school, Draco hid what he was doing from Snape, who was the most skilled Legilimens I've ever known. He's more than qualified to give advanced lessons."
Rose asked, "Is it because he's your father and it's easier to learn from others?"
Scorpius shook his head. "It's the way he was taught to perform Occlumency, the way he taught me. It's cold. You cut off all compassion." If Ron Weasley had tried to use Legilimency against him . . . . He didn't want to think about what he would have done. He looked at Harry and recalled the time he had blocked his father's Legilimency by bringing up a memory of Grandfather Lucius taking Draco to task for a poor business investment at the dinner table. His father had sent him to his room. Later, he'd come in and talked.
Your Great-Aunt Bellatrix used memories as weapons too. You have to be careful not to become a bully, son.
Harry's Legilimency was more subtle than Scorpius's father's, even when Draco was sober. There was only a faint, uneasy feeling. Scorpius broke eye contact.
"Once you start bullying with thoughts, it isn't long before you become a bully in deeds," Harry said, "That's a valid concern."
"My grandfather vowed never to use Legilimency on me." If he hadn't, Draco and Astoria would have moved out of Malfoy Manor. "I haven't had to use Occlumency outside my father's lessons."
"I didn't either until Auror training," Albus said. He told his father, "You didn't teach us to guard our minds by getting rid of emotion. You made us practice setting our thoughts and emotions apart. I used to imagine them in a box surrounded by a mound of packing chips, and only I could find the box in all those chips."
Harry smiled. "I used to call them mood chips because they'd change colours depending on whether you were happy or annoyed during the lesson."
Albus turned to Scorpius. "What colour are they now?"
Scorpius lifted his teacup to take a sip of tea and silently cast a Legilimency spell. "Blue," he said. In Albus's mind, he saw a piece of fabric sticking out of the packing chips. "Like Merry's . . . eyes." Albus threw him a grateful look. Scorpius could have said, "brassiere."
"Try Uncle Harry's method," Rose said.
Scorpius tried to imagine his private thoughts and memories as a box. A wooden box, not a cardboard posting box. Instead of packing chips, his box was buried in a snowbank. He glanced at Rose, and the calm expression on her face made him wonder if Hermione Weasley taught Occlumency as a form of mindfulness to be practiced like yoga. He could picture Rose casting a spell without words and a playful breeze blowing the snow from a corner of his hidden box. Scorpius decided to let her see a memory, not to painfully block her out, but to distract her from trying to see further inside his mind.
The Head Girl received a letter from home, and like a typical Gryffindor couldn't wait to open it. She stopped beside one of the massive Christmas trees in the Great Hall and ripped the envelope. One of the mistletoe balls floating around the Hall began to hover over her head. Grant, the Hufflepuff Team Captain, walked toward Rose with a stupid grin on his face. Suddenly, the mistletoe ball blew toward Grant. Four Hufflepuff girls jumped up from their table.
Rose's sharp intake of breath revealed her surprise.
"You should thank me," Scorpius said.
"For what?" Albus asked.
Scorpius looked across the table. A mistake. He had a mental image of a bold gust of wind toppling half the snowbank covering his box. He reacted instinctively, throwing a memory at Albus like an ice snowball.
The Plain Jane Potion version of Merry was dancing with Scorpius. She looked toward Albus, her eyes filling with tears.
"Low blow," Albus muttered.
Scorpius glanced at Rose. The playful breeze was back, trying to uncover another memory.
"I think that's enough for now," Harry said.
"No," Scorpius whispered. There wasn't enough snow covering his box. The breeze and the wind were blowing it away. He had to cover it with snow. An image rose in his mind of a wizard who could make snow. Control it. Use it against Super Wizard. Scorpius became the character, embraced the power of winter and called down an avalanche of snow.
The world turned white.
.
When he opened his eyes, Scorpius was lying in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room, unable to move his arms and legs. Someone had wrapped him like a mummy in blankets that radiated heat on his abdomen, under his armpits, and the area between his abdomen and his thighs.
"He's awake!" Rose shouted.
Scorpius turned his head and had the breath kissed out of him.
"Uncle Harry said if he hadn't used a Stunning Spell you would have given yourself hypothermia." Her eyes were dark with remembered fear. "What happened?"
"How is my patient?" Audrey Weasley, in a brown tracksuit with her hair pulled back as if she'd been exercising in the middle of the night, strode into the room followed by the entire Potter family, minus Lily, who had probably jolted out of a dead sleep at Hogwarts with the premonition that she was missing out on excitement at home.
Scorpius said, "I'm sorry to have disturbed everyone's sleep."
James, wearing striped pyjamas that matched his father's, said, "That was Dad's doing. He tried to sneak Aunt Audrey into the house and set off our Sneakoscopes."
"I was trying to be considerate," Harry said.
His wife and sons snorted in disbelief.
Audrey finished waving her wand over Scorpius. "The combination of passive and active external rewarming took care of your slight hypothermia. Rest for a few more hours and you should be good to go, Mr. Malfoy."
"Scorpius, please," he said.
She smiled ruefully. "I spoke out of habit. Healers always address patients formally."
A shout came from downstairs. "Audrey!"
Audrey said. "I'll go reassure Percy that no one is in mortal peril." As she walked out of the room, she said musingly, "I wonder why hiding the Sneakoscope in the sock drawer didn't work."
Harry broke the silence that followed by saying, "Percy must have exchanged it for one of the new, super-sensitive models."
Ginny Potter asked dryly, "Like the ones I picked up?"
"Yeah." Harry brought over a chair upholstered in an aqua floral pattern and sat in easy Legilimency range.
Scorpius looked around the room. The duvet and wallpaper had different, yet co-ordinating designs. "Someone likes flowers."
Rose said, "This is where Granny and Granddad Weasley stay when they visit." A tinge of pink washed over her cheeks when he raised his brows slightly. She shook her head over more than her Granny's questionable taste. She was saying, No, we're not having make up sex where my grandparents sleep. Maybe he could play it off as something other than sexual activity, like active external rewarming.
The bed dipped several times as the rest of the Potters sat wherever they felt like it on Rose's side of the bed. They reminded Scorpius of a pride of lions lounging together under a tree on the savannah. He wondered what that made him. A cheetah? He did have the urge to run. He tried to wiggle out of the blankets.
"Leave the blankets on for now," Rose said. "I had to, erm, remove your clothes."
"That was the passive rewarming," Harry said.
"Were his clothes wet?" Ginny asked. She held a hand over her mouth to stifle a yawn.
Rose said, "They were icy cold."
"Until Rosie cast a Warming Charm. Then they turned soggy," Albus said.
James asked, "What did you do to yourself, Malfoy?"
"His dad taught him to use cold to block Legilimency," Albus said.
"Weird," James replied.
Rose sat up against the headboard. "And imagining a box with packing chips is normal?"
"More normal than your mum's Zen Occlumency."
"Shut up, James," Albus said. "Shouldn't you be resting up for your team meeting? Why are you even here?"
Scorpius saw the resemblance between the brothers. They both had their mother's stubborn chin and challenging stare, although one brother had brown eyes and the other had green.
"Why are you here?" James shot back. "Are you and Malfoy mates?"
"Any friend of Rose is a friend of mine," Scorpius said.
"Stuff it," James said. He stood. "I'm going back to bed. Don't wake me up until there's a full English breakfast on the table."
"I'll ask Kreacher to give him black pudding," Albus muttered.
"James hates black pudding," Rose said.
"Then you'll never have to worry about him becoming a vampire." Scorpius didn't care for blood sausage either. Or tinned beans for that matter, although he'd only had them once, when Edgar's mother served cold beans on toast for their tea, and the sight of the dented can made Scorpius research an Anti-Botulism Charm when he returned home.
"We all need to get some rest," Harry said. "I have only one question. Scorpius, how did you counter both Rose and Albus's Legilimency? They both had the impression of your box buried so far beneath snow that they couldn't reach it."
He was already swaddled in blankets, it couldn't make him look more childish to admit, "I visualised becoming a character from a Wizard Comic."
Scorpius felt slightly less juvenile when Harry and Albus both said, "Jack Frost!"
.
.
A/N: Readers are so inspiring. Your comments made me think more deeply about Occlumency. I've always used what Snape told Harry as my basis for it, but looking into it further, Harry blocked out Voldemort when he was grieving Sirius and Dobby, and I agree with the theory that Draco blocked Snape by shutting down his compassion, and that led him bullying others. I started thinking that maybe Occlumency is a tailored to the user magic, not one specific swish and flick fits all spell. Wondering how Scorpius felt about his father's style of Occlumency, and how Harry and Hermione might have taught their children led to this chapter.
I used the description of Kreacher's den from the books, and Audrey hiding the Sneakoscope in the sock drawer was a reference to Harry hiding his in a pair of Vernon's old socks to keep it from going off.
Special thanks to my inspiring reviewers alix33, Arcoiris, fynnsmom, glassycry, HopeWithinDarkness, Mark, NeedleInAHaystack, nobodysperfect2133, Nocturna Mae, PencilCase, Siriusmunchkin, sunburnsed, (I hope you didn't forget what day it was last week! :D) VandyFNP, and yiota146.
P.S. If anyone wonders why I didn't post last week, it was because I was finishing up a Star Trek 2009 style reboot of my very first HP fan fic, which finished posting over ten years ago. It was a Snape/OC fic that I always wondered, "What if they'd met before Harry went to Hogwarts? What if I kept it to two povs and changed the plot in ways to make it work with canon and add conflict, humour and drama? I ended up with a 22 chapter half favorite parts, half all new material story called Somebody Like You. Since FF has a policy of not allowing multiple entries of the same material, and half the story is polished up favorite bits, I decided to post the story on fanfiction dot mugglenet dot (you know what...FF deleted my previous attempt because of the c.o.m) If you go to the site and click Search at the top and search for the title, you'll find the story. It's OK if you don't want to create an account to review. You'll see that most readers there are lurkers . . . or ghosts . . . . :)
