Chapter 12
It's Saturday morning, and Hermione is sitting between Harry and Neville at breakfast. Ron and Lav-Lav, mercifully, are engaging in their nauseating PDA further down the table. Hermione got to the Great Hall near the end of breakfast, and is just starting hers as the others are finishing theirs. She set her alarm for later than usual, wanting to be well rested before her first Occlumency lesson with Snape after breakfast.
He's at the staff table, looking well rested and freshly showered, and has so much food piled on his plate you'd think it was Ron's. Apparently, he had the same idea as she, being well rested and well fed before making his assault on her innermost thoughts.
Will he be gentle the first time? God, he looked as mortified as she felt when he said that. Now that she's spent as much time around him as she has, she's able to read him better, and she thinks he really was embarrassed. What she doesn't know is whether the embarrassment is just at the mention of sex, because he's an uptight prude who couldn't find a woman's clitoris with a Point Me spell, or whether it's because he's sorry he was such an insensitive ass on their wedding night.
Until she knows, she doesn't want him to see any of those memories.
"You coming to Hogsmeade today?" Harry asks.
Hermione shakes her head. "Those NEWTs won't pass themselves." While this isn't an outright lie, it isn't the reason she's not going to Hogsmeade either. Is an increasing level of comfort with sneaky half-truths something that just happens to people when they live with Slytherins?
"Have fun with your books," Harry says cheekily.
Hermione doesn't tell him to have fun with the Half Blood Prince's book for the last weekend he has it. Maybe she can see the memory of Snape taking it away from Harry on Monday during one of her Occlumency lessons. Now there's an incentive for her to practice and improve, as though she needed one.
She finishes her sausage and eggs, then drinks the last of her tea. As she stands and walks toward the door, she feels rather like she's walking toward the gallows. What made her think it would be a good idea to let a man so skilled at mind magic that he's been pulling the wool over the Dark Lord's eyes for years try to read her mind?
She focuses on her breathing as she walks toward the stairs that lead down to the dungeons. Long, slow breaths. Clear your mind. Focus.
When she reaches their quarters, she's calm. She's ready. Or as ready as she's going to be, anyway. She sits on the sofa in the sitting room and waits. Snape was still eating when she left the Great Hall. It would be just like him to delay unnecessarily in an attempt to make her nervous.
But he doesn't. He arrives in their quarters just a few minutes after she did. "Are you ready?" he asks.
She nods.
"This time, don't worry about trying to hide the fact that you're Occluding. We'll get to that later. For now, let me see your shields as they are."
She nods again.
He looks into her eyes, places his hand on her cheek and says, very softly, "Legilimens."
When she had Harry and Ron cast the spell, it was obvious when they entered her mind. When Snape does, she can barely feel it. It's like the shimmer of wards when someone who is keyed into them passes through, not the stumbling, fumbling tromping about that Ron and Harry did in there.
Her shields are set up like a library—of course, she feels Snape think, smirking. How can she feel his smirk? She doesn't know, but she can. He wanders the stacks, looking at the books on the shelves but not touching. He moves through the stacks of her mind-library as he does in the world, quiet and graceful and dangerous.
He reaches out to touch the one of the books, and she shivers. Instead of pulling the book off the shelf, he lets his fingertips trail along with spines of the books as he walks along the shelves. From some of the books, the ones containing innocuous memories, she can feel that he senses little or nothing. From some, he can sense strong emotions—anger, fear, joy, sadness.
His finger comes to rest on one of the books, black leather with a raised silver design. Shame. It radiates from the book. She pulls the book away from his hand, and the volumes on either side move to close the gap where it was. She reshelves it, deeper in the library, and he keeps walking.
Again, he stops. This time, the emotion is curiosity. He pauses, waiting to see if she will pull the book away, but she doesn't. He takes it from the shelf and opens it. Hermione is in the Gryffindor common room, where the prefects are telling her and the other first years where their rooms are, what the password is, what to do and not do. Hermione climbs the stairs to her room behind Lavender and Parvati, chattering excitedly. The two of them sit on one bed, continuing their conversation, while Hermione gets into her own four-poster and pulls the curtains.
"Lumos," she whispers, and the end of her wand emits a soft light. "Oh," she breathes. She opens her Charms book, the one she's read cover to cover at least twice already, and whispers, "Wingardium Leviosa" as she makes the wand movement perfectly and the textbook rises off the bed. "Finite incantatem," she whispers, and the book lowers.
After several more spells, Snape closes the book and the scene dissipates, replaced by the library stacks. And then he's gone, and she's on the sofa in their sitting room, looking at him.
"For having no formal instruction, you've done well," he says. It's the first time he's ever complimented her in any way, about anything she's done. She's not sure why she can't form the words thank you, but she can't, so she just nods in acknowledgement.
"The book you didn't want me to see," he says.
"You could have found it, if you had wanted to, couldn't you?"
"Yes."
"But you didn't try."
"I told you I wouldn't this time."
"Thank you for keeping your promise."
"I always keep my promises."
"Do you? Always?"
"No," he admits. "Not always. But I will as far as your Occlumency lessons are concerned. We'll get to the point where I'm not going to let you hide things you don't want me to see, where the only way for you to keep them hidden is to hide them where I can't find them." She tenses, and he continues, "But you're a long way from being able to do that now. While you're learning, I'll use restraint. And when it's time for me to stop using restraint, I'll tell you."
"I appreciate it."
"This time, I want you to hide one of the books from me, but I'm going to keep going after it."
"Not the same book?"
"Not if you don't want me to."
She averts her eyes. "No, not that one."
"A different emotion, then?"
She nods, and again he murmurs the incantation and slips in, begins touching the spines of the books. The one he chooses this time is red leather, and it manifests joy. She doesn't want him to see this one either, but it's nowhere near as bad as the black and silver book, which contains the memories of their wedding—and their wedding night. She pulls the red leather book back, away from his hand and reshelves it. She expects him to start walking through the library looking for the red leather book, but he doesn't. Instead, he trails his fingers along the other books nearby until he finds another one that contains joy. The cover of this one is blue.
He opens it, and Hermione is in her parents' house and Minerva McGonagall is sitting on the sofa, explaining to the Grangers that Hermione is a witch, that all of the strange things that confused and terrified her now make sense, that she isn't a freak of nature, that there is a place where others are like her, where she belongs.
The memory shifts, and the blue book is replaced by a green one, but the emotion is still joy. She's with Harry and Ron in the Gryffindor common room after the incident with the troll. Friends. After a rocky start at Hogwarts, where she thought she'd be as much an outcast as she was at her Muggle primary school, she finally has friends.
The green book gives way to an amber one, in which Hermione walks into the Yule Ball on Viktor Krum's arm, turning to see Ron Weasley staring at her, dumbfounded.
Snape rifles through book after book, quickly, never staying long in any of the joyous memories, until he reaches the red book, the one she hid from him earlier. She tries to pull it away again, but he's quicker than she is, and opens it. It's her and Snape, today, here in their sitting room. He says, "For having no formal instruction, you've done well."
He pulls out of her mind and watches her, waiting.
"You didn't look for the book, but you found it," she says. "By following that emotion. It doesn't matter which book you choose, as long as it's the same emotion, it can lead you to all the others."
"Yes."
"But there are so many of them. It could take ages to find the specific instance of the emotion that you're looking for."
"A skilled Legilimens can hone in on nuances of an emotion."
"Narrow the search parameters?"
"Precisely."
"Is that what the Dark Lord does?"
"The less we talk about the Dark Lord, the better."
"Why?"
He expels a breath, hesitates.
And then she understands. "Oh, God. If I can't learn to be as good as you are, you're going to have to Obliviate me. That's it, isn't it?"
He doesn't say anything, just looks grimmer than she's ever seen him look, and that's saying something.
"So, it's better if there isn't as much for you to go in and clean out, if you have to."
He still doesn't say anything.
"Then I guess we'd better get to work," she says.
