Occlumency in Azkaban

"What d'you mean, making the Floo go to Grimmauld?" she asked, a little annoyed. "I know the Headmaster's Office is on the Floo Network, we were just there yesterday. Why can't we go direct?"

"Because your personal items are not going to Hogwarts," Snape said. He had been favoring a tone of voice which was between "icy" and "furious" ever since the ill-fated Portkey incident. "Your personal items are going to the house on Grimmauld Place."

"But why? You can't mean I'm not going -"

"You are going to Hogwarts. They are not. Hadn't you wondered why my things were so carefully packed away in the attic?"

As a matter of fact, Tonks had, but she didn't want to admit it. Instead, she stayed silent, intending to force him to explain himself further. She almost thought her tactic had failed before he continued. "As a gesture of loyalty, I have placed monitoring devices that feed back to Lord Voldemort in my rooms and given him my passwords. Theoretically, one of the Death Eaters could search them, provided they found some excuse to go to Hogwarts. Therefore, I prefer caution when it comes to items that might pique his interest. You must, as well."

"But my rooms won't be open to him."

"Yes, they will, once he is through with you," Snape said curtly.

The knicknacks I always have aren't here. It doesn't look lived-in, even though I'm all moved in, she decided. Then, slipping back into her usual narrative: Tonks sighed, looking at the lifeless room. Without even a photograph of her parents, she felt disassociated from what had come before, in limbo, caught between two worlds. The play of light coming in from the picture window behind her - enchanted to show the world two floors above her head - did nothing to ground her. This was a part of Hogwarts she had avoided as much as possible in her school days; there were no memories here that might bring her back to earth, either innate or imported with her things.

"Wotcher, Snape," she said to her own reflection in the mirror that hung over her fireplace, deciding to fend off the uncomfortable feeling by finding a familiar face. She knocked a small table over on her way out. That's one good thing about no knicknacks: nothing to break. The thought cheered her up a little, and she righted the table before leaving, even though the house-elves would have done it anyway.

Snape was in his laboratory, as he said he would be. Tonks had never been there before, but he had given precise directions: stand before the statue of Ahearn the Adamant (three statues down from the entrance to her chambers - which, incidentally, was opened by speaking a password to a bust of an unknown, but undeniably beautiful, witch), clap three times, then snap with both fingers. When the statue swiveled out of the way, a small, cramped room was revealed, rather dark and cluttered but scrupulously clean. There were only two doors, one of which clearly led to his storeroom and the Potions classroom. "Rather tiny, isn't it?"

"Do not break anything," he answered, "or I shall put a full Body-Bind on you, and we shall see if you can be a good lab assistant whilst lying motionless on the floor."

"Naff off," she said amiably. "So I'm to be the assistant. Rather like fetching your coffee and giving you back rubs? Going to be the pretty intern, am I?"

"You're no intern - you are being paid and you are not losing your job as an Auror, which you should be thankful for. And I will most emphatically not be requesting a back rub, although coffee is not out of the question. Make yourself useful and make some Calming Elixir. You may work there."

It was a perfectly reasonable request. Calming Elixir required aging for a month before it was effective, so if Madame Pomfrey required some, it made sense to brew it early. She tried not to think about what students would need to be calmed; images of the Dark Mark floated in her mind. All the same, the task was nothing but busywork. As long as she broke nothing, she could have brewed the potion in her sleep.

She was just adding the final ingredient, strong peppermint oil, when she realized she was changing. Quickly, she clamped down her self-control; her hair retreated into her scalp, her hips slimmed, and she was once again compact, androgynous and identifiably Nymphadora Tonks. If there was any doubt as to her identity, it would have disappeared when the vial of oil suddenly slipped out of her hand, shattering into a thousand pieces on the floor.

"Scourgify!" she said, pointing her wand at the mess without thinking. It was only when everything had been cleared away by magic that she realized Snape had turned at the sudden sound and was watching. "Well, Body-Bind me, then," she muttered.

He made an unidentifiable sound and turned back to his work.

After the potion had been bottled and put away to age - none of the spilled oil had contaminated the actual brew - Tonks sat on her stool and watched Snape read. He was not, in fact, brewing; she couldn't read over his shoulder, either. She lost track of time, focusing on the hypnotic pattern of fingers skimming each line and then turning the heavy pages. To occupy herself, she changed her eyebrows from shape to shape.

"Finished, I see." Snape's voice shocked her out of her daze. She quickly changed the thick unibrow she was trying out back to her usual straight, dark lines. "If you are to be summoned to the Dark Lord, you must know some Occlumency. There is time before supper is served to begin study."

Occlumency, she thought, as she followed him into the Potions classroom, where there was less delicate instrumentation to break.. He was teaching Harry Potter Occlumency. It failed Harry in the end. Perhaps it will fail me. But they were idle thoughts, easily dismissed. More troubling was the fact that she had attempted Occlumency before, in Auror training, and gotten nowhere with it. Her teacher there had suspected it had something to do with her Metamorphmagus powers; Tonks suspected that everything she could or could not do would inevitably be ascribed to her Metamorphmagus powers, and took what the teacher said with a grain of salt.

Snape, however, was not that teacher, knew nothing of her previous forays into Occlumency, and therefore was not inclined to cut her any slack. "Legilimens," he said, almost the instant she had seated herself at a student desk.

She was two years old, changing faces to match her mother and father. She was sixteen, flipping through magazines as she lay on her bed at Hogwarts, not bothering to keep control of her powers. She was four, and her crazy aunt Bellatrix had written a Howler, and she could hear it scream through the window. She was twenty-two, standing in her new rooms in the dungeons, considering the bare spots where her knicknacks should have gone. Something within her was trying to stop Snape, but it was too small to end the torrent of memories. She was twelve, in Potions, and Snape was shouting at her.

"I never did!" she exclaimed. "If you'd waited, I'd have told you I tried in Auror training and I couldn't do it."

"Anyone can become an Occlumens, if they have a Legilimens to guide them," he said repressively. "Do not allow yourself to become caught in your memories. Clear your mind of any feeling, and I will be blocked."

She was still seething when he shouted "Legilimens," but as soon as she heard his voice, she clamped down on her feelings. Tonks repelled his attack, she thought. It didn't help. When her vision cleared, she found Snape smirking at her.

"A little better," he allowed, "but still far poorer than most. Again."

Tonks's feet slapped against the stone floor, and her hand ran along the rough stone wall as she jogged past portrait after portrait, she thought to herself, on her way back inside. She decided that nobody could possibly miss just one book from the library in the middle of the summer. Following her narrative, she staggered into the library, breathing heavily, and picked a book at random. The spine read Women of Legend and Mythology: the Truth Behind the Mystery; it looked like the sort of nonfiction Muggle book intended for children.

Ah, well, she thought, and walked more sedately down to the dungeons and her quarters. The dungeons were dreary and grey, apart from the paintings and statues placed at intervals around the corridors. She would not have chosen to live here, even for her family, even for the world -

The instant her thoughts drifted close to that insufferable contradiction, her family, she clamped down on them as hard as she could, just as she had when she was practicing Occlumency. She looked around for something, anything, to attract her attention - and it was her distraction, far more than any Auror training, that caused her to smell the faint tang of blood in the air and catch a glimpse of red out of the corner of her eye. She turned, and there on the statue that led to Snape's workroom was a shining handprint.

Almost without thinking she set down her book, clapped three times and snapped her fingers. The section of the wall swiveled noiselessly on unseen hinges, and beyond it she could see the workroom. Past that, one of the two doors was open, allowing light into the room. Through it she could see Snape, silhouetted in the magic-made windows, bent over a cauldron.

He was wearing robes of such a luminous white that they nearly glowed. A hood, discarded and sullied with the same crimson color that stained the statue, lay on a rickety chair near the door.

Tonks pressed the panel on the wall that made the door slide back. He hadn't seen her. He hadn't seen her, she repeated to herself over and over again, retreating into the third-person storytelling of her thoughts. She moved off down the passageway, one foot over another. But the bloody handprint on Ahearn the Adamant's face accused her of deserting him, somehow. Was he scraping blood off his hand? He was scraping blood off his hand into the cauldron, she decided.

His own blood? Or someone else's?

Despite the fact that she didn't want to know - not really - she felt an urge to clap and snap again, to go in and ask him what he was doing and whose blood was on his hands. He hadn't told her there would be a Death Eater meeting that night (although why would he? He certainly didn't like her, and if he trusted her, it was only for Dumbledore's sake). She stood, wondering what to do, for a full ten minutes. When Snape did not appear in the corridor, she picked up the book and returned to her quarters.