Author's Note: In Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince, chapter fifteen (The Unbreakable Vow), Snape notes that Draco has been taking lessons in Occlumancy from Bellatrix. This is a very brief missing moment between Books 5 and 6.
~BD
Occlumancy Lessons
He awoke suddenly, startled awake so violently that he physically jumped. Someone was hovering next to the bed in the dark - an eerie shadow, watching him.
"Get dressed and meet me in the garden," came a hissing whisper.
Her very voice sent chills down his spine. Unconsciously, blearily, he rubbed his face, wondering what the time was. It was pitch black outside.
He knew better than to argue, but he could not help whispering, "What the hell? It's the middle of the fucking night!"
"Just do it." Her voice held a tone of warning and he thought he saw a spark of red at the end of her wand; a surefire sign that her nonexistent temper was close to snapping. Without another word, she turned and slipped out of his bedroom, making hardly a sound.
Draco fell back into his pillow and stared up at the dark ceiling. A sharp twinge of fear coiled tightly in his stomach. He felt nauseated.
But he had no choice but to obey.
oOoOoOo
She was pacing the garden like a trapped beast when he arrived, her boots crunching on the fine white gravel. He pulled his robes tightly around him. The infernal mist that had persisted since the start of summer hovered over the ground and it was perpetually chilly. He hoped to hell she didn't intend to entertain dementors, because he had no earthly idea how to repel them. He had inquired one night at dinner recently, having heard rumors at school that there were ways to keep a dementor at bay. His aunt said, in her superior, maddening way, that there was no need to repel dementors when one controlled dementors. His mother merely remained silent, staring at the wall while sipping her wine, whether deep in thought or trying to block the conversation, it was impossible to tell.
"Took you long enough," Bellatrix snapped coldly, bringing him out of his thoughts. She stopped pacing to glare at him.
"I am not accustomed to be woken in the middle of the night!" he retorted in a haughty tone.
She cut him off scathingly. "Yes yes, we wouldn't want darling little Draco to lose any beauty sleep, now would we? Come!" She grabbed his arm and started pulling him along the path, glancing furtively about her. She was walking quickly, clearly intent on not being seen.
A few minutes later, in a secluded copse of trees, she released him and began casting spells in a wide circle. The fear crept up his neck, his hair standing on end. She was making it impossible for anyone to find them.
When she finished, she turned to face him. "Cissy," she spat his mother's name, "has spoken of the Dark Lord's plans for you with another."
The fear became tangible; he suddenly felt sick to his stomach. His mission was supposed to be a secret. His mother had known that - surely she would not have risked his life by speaking of the Dark Lord's plans. She had known it was imperative to keep this secret! He swallowed, trying to control the fear. No, his mother would not have endangered his life for anything. If she spoke of the plans to someone else, it was surely someone she trusted completely.
"Snape said he already knew of it," his aunt went on furiously. She began pacing again. "I find that hard to believe, but it must be true, because he knew details only the Dark Lord could have shared... but still, I don't trust him."
Anger replaced some of his fear. "Why the hell would Mother have told -?"
His aunt turned to face him, slashing her wand through the air with a bright light, and he stumbled backwards quickly, though no spell hit him. She snarled, "She was trying to protect you because she is weak! I told her you should be proud to serve the Dark Lord thus! However, since Snape knows of the plan, we must do what we can to ensure he does not steal your glory!"
She looked mad as she said it, and Draco felt torn. He didn't like Snape much at the moment, and he didn't want Snape taking his glory. But his mission was, in and of itself, practically impossible. The nights he had lain awake already, trying to figure out how he was supposed to achieve this impossible goal...!
Still, the most pressing, immediate question was not how to achieve the task the Dark Lord had set, but to block Snape from reading his thoughts and stealing his ideas. "And how, exactly, can I protect myself from Professor Snape?" he asked. It seemed as impossible a task as murdering Dumbledore.
"Occlumancy," she breathed. "You must learn to close your thoughts to Snape. This will also come in useful in many other ways of course, but particularly with Snape. He is an accomplished Legilimans, and so you will need to be just as accomplished at blocking him!"
He bit his tongue to avoid retorting that she was asking a lot of him, just as the Dark Lord was. He was only sixteen, damn it, didn't they realize that? He had never practiced Occlumancy before, and Snape had been doing it for years!
As if she had seen the thought flit through his mind, she sneered, "It is easy. You simply allow your mind to become a blank stretch of canvas, like a portrait that someone has left. Black and empty and cold. Nothing for anyone to see."
"Snape will know if I am doing it," Draco answered tersely.
"Of course he will!" Her voice rose to a shriek and silver sparks flashed from the tip of her wand in her anger. Then she calmed herself, tossing her hair behind her and straightening her back. "We must practice while everyone else is asleep. You can repel my attack any way you can think of," she went on, in a tone that was both bemused at the idea that he could possibly stop her, and excited that he might cause her some brief pain. "Are you ready?"
He wasn't ready at all, but he straightened as well and held his wand out, and his aunt smiled evilly.
"Then let us begin."
oOoOoOo
When he arrived at breakfast, it was after having healed multiple injuries from her cruel teaching lessons. Damned good thing she wasn't a professor, he thought bitterly, because she would probably kill half of her students. Every time he had failed to block her intrusion into his mind, her anger had flared and she had cut his cheeks or his arms with slashes from her wand. She had battered him, slapped him, punched him in the stomach, and twice used Crucio on him. The physical wounds had healed quickly enough, but he was still sore and shaky. To say nothing of his emotions.
His mother noticed immediately. "Did you not sleep well?" she asked with concern.
He sat down at the table and kept his eyes on his plate as a house elf emerged to serve his breakfast. "No," he responded quietly.
Then from across the table he felt the shift in energy; Bellatrix looked up from her breakfast and instantly, his mind was filled with images: he was six and flying over the manor without permission, much to his mother's fury as she screamed at him to get back on the ground; he was eight and having a birthday party with pureblood children who all ended up in Slytherin; he was ten and his father was beating a house elf for not properly cleaning the study; he was eleven and the Sorting Hat barely touched his head before shouting Slytherin...
Draco gritted his teeth and wrenched himself back to the present. He could cast no curses or defensive spells to protect himself at breakfast, which was what his aunt wanted - instead, he forced himself to think of a black, cold, blank wall.
As instantly as it began, the images stopped.
His aunt smiled across the table.
"Pass the jam, Draco," she said coolly. "The elderberry, if you would."
FIN