Chapter 74 - Legilimency — Tears Unshed

The human brain is like a girl's bedroom. They have absolute possessiveness over their own territory. Even the most trusted person has a drawer they are not permitted to open.

Praeris was not afraid of the professor seeing exactly what kind of person she was. She felt no shame about her own nature. But she had no particular compulsion to lay her entire past bare, either.

She was not afraid of him punishing her. She was not afraid of him looking down on her. She was only afraid of him pitying her.

That fear was what drove her. Occlumency became the first subject Praeris threw herself into with full effort after Flying Lessons.

Her opponent was no ordinary person. It was Professor Snape himself — a master of both Legilimency and Occlumency.

They sat at opposite ends of the desk. What looked like a casual exchange of glances was, beneath the surface, a storm.

A knight's spear drove toward a soft shield; the defender bent with it, dissolving the thrust without a sound. A phalanx hammered through the breach, only to be drawn off course by the enemy commander, lost in a vast labyrinth built from worthless memories. The Minotaur's maze offered nothing of value. The invader retreated the way it came.

Praeris blinked at Professor Snape. Professor Snape exhaled slowly and said, "Passable."

It was not easy. Praeris's Occlumency had been taught by Snape himself. Any teacher knows their own students too well — where they go wrong, how they go wrong, and through what bizarre chain of reasoning they arrive at the wrong answer. All of it is transparent at a glance.

But this was nothing worth praising, Praeris thought.

She had natural advantages in Occlumency. The shortcuts aside, her years at the convent had accustomed her to suppressing herself, to wearing a face that was not her own. And then there was her mind — relentless, exhausting, exercising her willpower every hour of every day whether she wanted it to or not.

With every advantage stacked in her favor, if she still could not master Occlumency, she would deserve her own contempt.

There is a particular feeling that comes with learning a new skill. Before you learn it, it seems absolutely essential. Once you have it, you start to wonder if you will ever use it at all, as if the whole effort was wasted.

Praeris knew that feeling well. She had learned many spells over the years, and the moment of learning was, in all likelihood, the last time she would ever cast most of them.

Professor Snape's theory about information leaks was entirely reasonable. It made her feel that failing to learn Occlumency would mean putting him at risk. But once the lessons were done, she could not help wondering: did anyone actually go around casting Legilimency at Hogwarts?

As it turned out, someone did.

The day after Divination class, the Slytherin students were walking down the corridor from one end to the other. At the far end, Praeris watched with her own eyes as Professor Snape and Moody passed each other. The professor sidestepped Moody's magical eye without breaking stride, the motion exactly as he had taught her. A casual shift, as though nothing had caught his attention at all.

Praeris quietly withdrew her own gaze.

Had Moody used Legilimency on Professor Snape?

She had been turning this question over in her mind for a while now: why had Professor Snape suddenly decided she needed to learn Occlumency?

Everything that happens leaves a trace. Professor Snape was not a man who acted on whims. This was not her first year at Hogwarts, and she had demonstrated her unusual abilities more than once. Yet it was only now that he had made his move.

Even over the summer holidays, he had given no indication he intended to teach her this particular skill. Then Moody arrived, made contact with her, and Professor Snape's mind was made up almost immediately.

It was also completely out of character. Professor Snape's usual teaching bore the hallmarks of Professor McGonagall's influence, methodical, step by step, no rushing ahead. But with Occlumency, he had proactively handed her a shortcut, told her to take it, and said they would sort out the foundations later.

Professor Snape detested nothing more than students cutting corners. It was practically a personal philosophy.

Praeris stared at the painted mural in the common room, her brow slowly creasing.

"Moody has completely lost his mind!" Millicent dropped into her seat with barely contained fury. "He makes us resist the Imperius Curse by casting it on us? Why doesn't he help Potter build a resistance to the Dark Lord by casting the Killing Curse on him?!"

"Shh—"

Pansy nearly choked. She looked left, looked right, confirmed that no one had caught Millicent's outburst, and finally exhaled.

"What is wrong with you this year?" Pansy said, with the tone of someone watching a person they care about walk into a wall repeatedly. "At this rate, we're putting a lock on your mouth."

Between Mrs. Bulstrode and Mad-Eye Moody, something had clearly been knocked loose in Millicent. Nothing was off-limits anymore.

Praeris was different. It was not that she objected to Moody's teaching method. She objected to Moody being the one casting the Imperius Curse on her.

Professor Snape had used the same approach to teach her Occlumency. If she had a problem with this style of training, she would have said so long ago.

She trusted Professor Snape's judgment, and she trusted her own immediate instincts. She did not trust Moody as a person. She simply had not yet caught him by the tail.

She had considered finding an excuse to skip the class. The idea did not survive long.

If she dropped the course, it would contradict everything about how she had conducted herself. The probability of drawing Moody's attention was high. She had faced him one-on-one in the entrance hall without flinching, and now she was suddenly retreating? That would be very hard to explain away.

So Praeris settled for telling herself this was live combat training. Resisting the Imperius Curse and Occlumency had something in common: both came down to willpower. Professor Snape had held back when he trained her. Moody would not.

The only real problem was that while she was under the Imperius Curse, she would have no way to unobtrusively avoid Moody's direct gaze.

It might have seemed like she was worrying over nothing. Moody was an Auror. Would he truly make a move against her?

But Praeris did not underestimate any opponent. Before class, she spent time placing urgent locks over anything that could not be disclosed, then filled those spaces with useless but plausible memories.

If other people's minds were a lake, hers was an ocean. Fortunately, she only needed to make the stretch of shore near the waterline look presentable. That would be more than enough to deceive Moody, that ill-intentioned tourist.

In Defense Against the Dark Arts, Moody banged the desks aside with his wand and lined the students up to be hit with the Imperius Curse one by one.

The Slytherins were practiced at reading the room. Dumbledore was tolerating Moody's behavior to an extraordinary degree, and they all understood what that meant. They had no choice but to endure.

Not that mere endurance was the Slytherin way.

Stella, as the house's unofficial intelligence source, had quietly let it be known that the stack of complaint letters the Slytherins had dispatched to the Education Department under the International Confederation of Wizards was now tall enough to cover an entire desk.

Regrettably, those letters had accomplished nothing.

The head of the International Confederation of Wizards was Dumbledore. He never exercised the power personally, but the complaints were buried all the same.

Back in the classroom: Moody started with Daphne. She spread her arms as wings and flapped around the center of the room, cooing.

Then Zabini — a tap dance.

Then Pansy, who launched herself off the floor and landed cleanly on top of a desk. The absolute ceiling of her jumping ability.

Draco was made to act out a white ferret bounding through snow. It appeared Moody had not forgotten the incident with the transfiguration.

None of them threw off the spell. Every single one stayed under until Moody chose to release them.

"Prince." Moody fixed her with a look that carried no goodwill. "Your turn."

Praeris stepped out from the group and walked to the center of the room.

Moody raised his wand. His voice came out rough and flat: "Imperio!"

She found it difficult to describe the sensation. If she had to put words to it, it was like being hit with an overdose of Cheering Charm. Her whole body felt light, euphoric, untethered. The constant effort of managing her own mind went quiet. Every difficulty she had ever lived through became impossible to recall.

She felt as though she had returned to the womb, her entire self floating, weightless, adrift in a happiness that had nothing to do with reason.

So this was what it felt like to live without a brain running at full speed. This blissful.

If being controlled by the Imperius Curse felt like this, it was no mystery that so many people never broke free.

Praeris let herself enjoy it, briefly. Then she pulled herself out.

Professor Snape's training had raised the threshold of her willpower further than Moody had accounted for. The gap between her and her peers was apparently wider than he had expected. Breaking free from his control was not even as difficult as resisting Professor Snape's intrusions.

Praeris held her face carefully, doing her best to keep it floating and dazed.

She heard the command: imitate a cat. Imitate a cat.

This was really asking a lot.

Praeris crouched down obediently. She licked the back of her hand, wiped it over her head, rubbed it across her cheek. Then she lowered herself slowly to the floor, propped her upper body up on her arms the way a cat would, and looked around with alert eyes.

When she felt Moody's hold leave her, she stood up, expression perfectly shocked, exactly like everyone else.

She turned to Millicent and murmured, "What just happened? That was terrifying!"

Then, as if she could not quite stop herself, she raised the back of her hand toward her mouth. She caught what she was doing. Let herself look thoroughly unsettled by it.

Even after they left the classroom, Praeris kept up the performance. She maintained the act all the way to the Great Hall, letting the frequency of each small gesture taper off naturally, until she settled into her seat at the long table.

She blinked. Face cold, head down, mechanically sawing through her steak.

Her eyes were on the plate. Her thoughts were somewhere else entirely.

Moody had used Legilimency on her — in the instant the Imperius Curse ended.

Under Praeris's deliberate control, what Moody would have seen was this: attending classes, self-studying in the library, learning Potions from Snape during free periods, revision sessions with classmates and older students during exam week, writing essays at the Leaky Cauldron over the holidays, all of it interspersed with the ordinary entertainments of a Hogwarts student: the Duelling Club, Quidditch matches, and sitting nearby while Slytherin classmates delivered their usual mean boy and mean girl commentary.

An impressively full life for a Slytherin top student.

The background noise, for Moody's benefit, was her inner monologue screaming. Pure panic. The horror of the Imperius Curse. A spiraling fear that she might retain cat habits permanently and never fully return to herself.

Then, very quickly, Praeris turned her head, leaned toward Millicent with a frightened expression, and murmured something, breaking Moody's intrusion as lightly as a hand brushing aside a curtain.

Her suspicion of Moody was no longer borrowed from Professor Snape. It was her own.

Before today, learning Occlumency had felt like preparation for a threat that might never materialize. Now that Moody had actually used Legilimency on her, everything was different.

She kept turning the question over: what exactly was Moody looking for, from her and from Professor Snape?

If he were simply targeting Death Eater families, he should have gone after students with obvious connections, Draco, for instance. If he believed Snape had deceived Dumbledore, manipulated his way into Hogwarts on a foundation of lies, then a liar as skilled as Snape would be the last person to leave evidence sitting in a student's memories.

Targeting Death Eaters did not fit. What fit was this: Moody had a specific problem with Professor Snape, could not find the evidence he wanted from the source, and was trying to dig it out through her instead.

Praeris lifted her dinner knife. The blade reflected her narrow black eyes back at her.

There was another possibility. Perhaps he had been an Auror too long. Paranoia was an occupational hazard. Maybe he was casting Legilimency on anyone who looked at him sideways.

But certain things she had noticed earlier pointed somewhere else. Praeris had a quiet but growing sense that the professor did not truly stand with the Dark Lord. And Dumbledore was not a man who failed to read the people closest to him.

An Auror. An experienced Auror. And yet he had used Transfiguration on a student as punishment, used the Imperius Curse on children in a classroom, and now Legilimency on a student, all, apparently, because her behavior had provoked him.

Was that really it?

"Didn't realize," Draco said, drawing the words out, "you were this narcissistic. Admiring yourself in the knife during dinner."

Praeris gave him a level look. "Draco, even Millie doesn't care what I look at while I'm eating."

Theodore Nott couldn't quite suppress a laugh. He had a particular appreciation for watching Draco get put in his place, a privilege reserved for people who had grown up together.

Praeris shifted her gaze. "Nott. Heard something funny? Feel free to share."

Pansy frowned, glancing at Praeris, then at Draco and Theodore.

Nott said, flat, "Nothing. I was thinking about Defense Against the Dark Arts."

"Thinking about that?" Draco's tone was mocking. "Not being able to fight off the Imperius Curse isn't such a big deal. Isn't that what Moody said? For all we know, we'll be the ones casting it."

A ripple of disgruntled laughter ran through the nearby Slytherins. None of it warm.

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