"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties." - Sir Francis Bacon

Chapter Seventeen: Brave and Beautiful Soul

Frank's absence became the main worry in the house - with everyone working together, Hermione and Draco managed to fit clothes, toiletries, supplies, and food into their bag. By nightfall, they were nearly ready for a sudden departure.

"I need a wand, Draco," Hermione whispered.

Draco was facing away from her, but he could hear everything in her voice - what could happen if he let her have one, why she wanted one. He had told her that she needed to earn the right to have a wand... but truth be told, that little power struggle wasn't worth the trouble anymore. They had bigger things to worry about, and if she used a new wand to incapacitate him and escape... he honestly didn't care. Having her help was the optimal choice, but things were too awkward for him to try and put her down constantly.

Besides, he would know how she really felt once she had the power of a wand on her side - a wand she could use against him. Whether she did or not would determine where her mind was at.

A whole minute passed before he answered her. "I've got you figured out, Granger," he whispered back.

"You think you do," she retorted, turning away from him.

Draco sat up suddenly. "Turn around," he whispered. "It's about time we did this."

Hermione's heart instinctively jumped into her throat. She laid completely still instead, waiting for him to make a move, and wondering what suddenly made him so interested.

Instead, he laughed. "Wow, Granger. That's not what I'm talking about. Relax."

Hermione tentatively sat up, mortified, scooting back and pulling the covers over her bare legs. She stopped, unsure of what to do now.

He chuckled again, hiding a slight excitement at the idea of what she was thinking. "Relax. We need to be able to communicate without words. I did that once earlier but it is not safe to do it that way. You need to be able to talk back to me when I talk to you."

"You mean... telepathy?"

"No, not mental telepathy. You communicate with feelings and emotions, not words. Mental telepathy is like talking without opening your mouth, like broadcasting; I'm talking about breaking the barriers of your mind so it can reach out."

"So, not legilimency."

"Legilimency is a one way street. Useful, for obtaining information... but not as effective for communicating."

Hermione nodded, understanding, but still slightly apprehensive. "That style of communication... it's really invasive."

Draco shook his head. He knew it was invasive, like someone in your personal space, because the mind is personal space. Pulling back the curtain of someone's mind was like pulling aside a shower curtain - there was no place to hide and everything was there to see.

"You won't be able to do this unless I let you in, right?"

Sweat broke over Draco's brow; he could certainly invade her mind without her consent. But it was no more moral than other things that were non-consensual.

He steadied the sudden shame he felt at threatening her with this magic in the beginning of their journey. Doing something like that to her was unthinkable.

He finally said, softly, "The more aware you are of the sensation, the easier it becomes to accept it and the easier it becomes to block it out and control it. But if you really want to, you can break in." He paused, gauging her reaction, and then followed with, "The barrier is mostly controlled by emotions - I could reach you earlier because you were overpowered by fear; it was sneaking my consciousness past the Death Eater that was hard."

Hermione considered this. "I need practice, basically."

He sighed, the color returning to his face. "Yes. I find it hard to believe that you don't know about this kind of magic, Granger."

"I know about emotional and mental magic. But isn't it illegal?"

Draco pointedly ignored her question. He closed his eyes and said, "Clear your mind and try to relax. The edge of your mind should feel like a curtain of water."

It was a few seconds before Hermione spoke. "I thought you said I couldn't trust you."

His face drained again. She was right - doing this required quite a bit of trust - otherwise it was just purely invasive and truly awful. If they wanted to make their objective as easy as possible however, they needed to be able to communicate like this.

"You shouldn't," he warned softly, and in his words she could feel something like contrition. "But we need this. I know it's hard to trust me - it's hard for me to trust you."

When he got no response, Draco tried again. "We need this."

Hermione sighed and nodded, closing her eyes out of habit. She was not used to feeling her mind this way, so it took her quite a while to feel the enclosure.

"It helps if you pretend you are floating. Let go of the strings that attach you to your body, and just feel your emotions - we'll just do that for now."

Hermione let her body fall back onto the pillow a bit and imagined it detaching from her mind and spirit. It wasn't working correctly though - she was too aware that she was relaxing her body when she should have been tense to have him so close. The fear she had felt earlier in this, where she was actually afraid of what he'd do to her, had morphed into fear of something else - perhaps a fear of getting too close, or a fear of feeling things that she shouldn't.

"You're not letting go."

Hermione opened her eyes, receiving a brief shock of more darkness, as usual, before she sat up. "I can't do this around you."

Draco was silent.

Hermione immediately mentally kicked herself - saying things like that usually pissed him off.

Instead, Draco felt a little spark in his heart; a month ago he would have chalked this up to her fear of him or her inability to stand being around him, but now her tone sounded different. He was great at reading people when they said things like this.

And something was telling him that she could feel the change in their relationship too. She had basically assumed he was going to kiss her earlier - he had brushed that away in the moment but it seemed even more exciting to him now.

He wouldn't dare acknowledge this, for fear of her rejection. He couldn't deny emotions anymore around her, and he'd done more than notice, but... he still had to be sure.

So if they were going to share this kind of magic, he'd have to be very careful about what emotions he showed.

"Okay," he said, shaking his mind clear. "Let me try first, then."

Hermione nodded and laid back again.

For a moment nothing was happening; she felt just the same as she had before. But a few seconds later, she felt movement.

At first she thought it was something out of the corner of her eye, but she squashed that quickly with a frown. This was in her own head - it was like curtains fluttering. Like there were dark shapes outside of her lit window.

She was getting impatient; she was starting to recognize the shape. It felt like him, smelled like him, and looked like him, all at the same time, though she could tell none of this from using her fingers, her nose or her eyes. It was almost indecent how much like him the shape was; it was a clear lake on a cloudy day, still and somber.

She relaxed a little more, and felt the liquid curtain thin out.

Floating through that grey area Draco called "soul space," he felt her mind barrier right in front of him. The form of her mind was very different from everyone he'd ever tried; he'd only seen a glimpse of it in the forest, being too on edge to focus in on how she looked.

Her mind was green, like a ripe pear, and settled around Draco like mist. As he got close, he could feel her clearly; she was completely different than when he saw her when his eyes were open, and yet, it was her. He saw her true form - hot like the sun, vibrating, her soul saturated with love - bearing the smell and feel that he recognized and could now attach to her physical self.

Suddenly her surprise and confusion at feeling him in her body rippled towards him. He could sense that in her blindness, with only what she felt physically and emotionally holding her to the ground, it was terrifying her to have someone else's emotions, someone else's feelings, wafting into her.

:Hermione - :

She launched out her mind and crashed into his.

Dark, thick emotions swelled over Draco's form and covered them like tar. Hermione gasped wildly as they filled the caves of her mind and body and suffocated her from the inside.

She was five years old, petting a kitten as it played with the edge of her rug; she was seven, running into her father's office with a drawing despite the pleas of her mother to leave him alone; she was twelve, sitting on a bench in the snow, throwing snowballs against the walls of one of the Hogwarts greenhouses; she was fifteen, trying to drown herself in a bath of hot water and lemon slices; she was eighteen, facing a dark street lit by a single lamp; there were running footsteps and flashes of light around the corner –

She blacked out.

"What the fuck, Granger!"

When she came to, with her only indication of her own existence the thumping of her heartbeat, he was breathing hard, right over her. His voice was dangerously low. "Don't do that again."

She closed her mouth, forcing herself to breathe out of her nose.

"Is everything okay in there?" asked a muffled voice from behind the door. "I heard yelling."

"Yes, we're fine," Hermione forced out, sitting up and involuntarily putting her face right next to his. She stopped jerkily.

He didn't move to give her space; if her depth perception was right, he was indecently close to her, practically leaning over her.

What had covered her were emotions, dark emotions like wet cement, heavy and unforgiving. They were feelings she had never felt so crushingly - intense loneliness, anger and resentment, even some emotions she couldn't recognize. And yet memories filled her body, memories that she knew now. She knew things about him now. They had been etched in her soul.

Neither of them moved as she shakily assessed the memories that floated under her skin like silk.

"What has made you feel like that?" she whispered.

She had somehow forced his pent up anger and depression open by launching herself at him like she had. They'd been the same person for a few seconds.

His lungs were bursting from the weight of what he had just felt, what she had just done; his body felt weak.

"No one should ever feel that."

Draco swallowed. She was barely more than an inch away from him; his eyes flew to her lips as her breath warmed his face. It made him even dizzier. "I know," he whispered back.

He forced himself to lean away from her, collapsing on the bed beside her. "I'm sorry."

Hermione shook her head. "Please don't be sorry."

He nodded, aimlessly clenching the covers, trying not to feel ashamed. He was not used to showing outward weakness. He could not face her right now, not after he had tried to hide, tried to control himself, only to have his walls completely demolished by her innocent mistake.

"Is this magic supposed to feel like that?"

"No."

"Then what… why is your mind like that?"

He shook his head, burrowing into the blankets, struggling to regain his composure.

"Draco…"

"Because I repress my emotions, okay?"

Hermione slid down and rested her head on her pillow, her breathing still unsteady. She was going to ask, but she felt that she already knew -

His unconscious mind was unstable from him forcing his emotions down.

Why had he considered doing this? He was maxed out. He tried to regain some control over his emotional walls, pressing his feelings down. But it was strenuous, like trying to ignore the pattern in a repetitive noise; his feelings of deep insecurity, of hatred and hopelessness, kept bubbling up to the surface of his mind.

Whatever she had done had also weakened his mental barriers; he was like an open book to any Death Eater that wanted to go prowling.

Draco started as he felt a little flutter outside of his mind - he briefly tensed up, but did not detect a Death Eater's familiar shape. All Death Eaters had much the same mind - they were inscrutable, only taking human characteristics once communication started. Death Eaters liked to hide themselves even while doing this, so instead of pulling back a curtain on their naked mind, he usually pulled back a curtain on their fully dressed, fully controlled mind.

Hermione's mind was so innocent, so positively bare, he'd been caught off-guard. He steadied his breathing and thinned the curtain, and she was there, again, her flaming form slightly weaker but still buzzing with compassion.

:I hate that we can never talk.: Hermione said faintly.

:What do you mean?:

It took a few seconds for her to respond; she was clumsy with this new magic. :We shut down around each other.:

Draco brought himself back to reality a bit - he was able to think normally and communicate mentally simultaneously and separately, since he'd been doing it for so long – and contemplated her thoughts.

He did shut down around her; constantly snapping, or deflecting, so that he didn't have to engage with her about anything real. And that felt so useless now.

It was strange, how quickly they were unraveling.

But despite the odd sense of nervousness she wafted to him, despite her assumption about his intentions earlier, he still felt strongly that he needed to hide from her, to keep himself safe. Keep his heart safe?

:It's okay to let people in.:

A little of Draco's original loneliness bubbled over, flowing into her. :They always disappoint you.:

:Then let the right people in.:

An accusatory smell flowed from him. :Who, you?:

She was trying to hide her emotions, but was useless for her, like trying to cover her entire naked form with one arm. It was easy to see that she was being sincere. :Yes.:

Urgh. This is exactly the type of thing that he didn't like people doing - getting all kindly and helpful. Whatever issues he had, he didn't need those people to help him.

:But that's exactly what you want.: She was still warm and sincere.

Oh shit. He'd forgotten to put his walls up.

Fatigue flowed from him. He didn't want to talk about it anymore - discussing it would make him unhappy, and possibly reopen the barriers to his darker emotions.

Understanding, Hermione quietly closed the connection, her acceptance of his request mingling with determination. It was not likely that she would let this lie.

"We have a problem," Rubinoff said to his Master.

"Hmm..." She flipped through images in his mind – various parchment rolls, colliding with each other, the Norwegian coast, a nod from their mole within the Ministry…

"Someone on Constable's team has registered a portkey to Bergen. They must have found her."

"Well, there's no problem with that, is there?" she replied. "But yes, let's restructure. We'll put on a show. Get ready."