Occlumency in Azkaban

Chapter 4: On The Attack

The next day was extremely bright and hot - not that Tonks could feel it, stranded as she was in the dungeons. Snape had decided to continue with Occlumency lessons at intervals; every hour or so he would stand up, march her into his classroom, and try to pry into her mind. She wasn’t getting much better - in fact, the only thing she was getting was a headache.

She turned around to tell him so, feeling righteously indignant, but stopped. He was pouring a tiny vial of something red into a cauldron. It looked like blood. “What’s that?”

“The activation agent for the Wiltshire stone,” he replied. “Or didn’t you pay attention to your aunt?”

Which aunt? Tonks wanted to say, but she restrained herself. “I meant that.” She pointed at the vial.

“Blood.”

“Whose?”

“Not yours and not mine. What else would you like to know? What my middle name is? Why I became a Death Eater?”

Tonks paused. She had learned enough in her short life to know when not to start talking without thinking, but she did want to know. The memory in the Pensieve came back to her: an attic, a newspaper. It isn’t the right time, Tonks told herself, she thought. Not now and maybe not ever. There’s a potion to be made and meetings to plan, Occlumency to master.

The next task she had been given was to beat eggs, eggs upon eggs upon eggs. She knew that they formed the base for many more advanced potions. The stifled potential for life, the unfertilized sac in which a baby bird might grow, was powerful magic: the magic of what might have been. Her arm felt as though it was about to fall off from the beating. She let herself transform into someone a little stronger, but that made her tired in other ways, tired of changing. It was a feeling she got sometimes, something her mother had studied and discovered was only normal. “A Metamorphmagus will experience mental exhaustion of a sort few can understand, save perhaps those most advanced in mind-magic. They will occasionally try to wish their powers away. Unfortunately - or fortunately - this cannot be done.” The book ended it there. It tried to sum up such a vast emotion in so few words that when she first read it, Tonks had wanted to rip it out.

She kept beating. There was no reason not to. Her arm still worked, however bad it felt, and so did her mind, and her powers were a gift and not a curse. Furthermore, they were a gift that couldn’t be given back.

Looking at Snape as he mixed and bottled solutions and decoctions, measuring each of the components of what would ultimately be the activation agent, the desire to be just another witch was renewed. The finesse with which he handled the vials could never be hers, when she changed bodies so regularly; her muscles were forever reconfiguring themselves, readjusting to new heights and strengths and ways of moving. More, his approval could never be hers, or anyone’s approval, really. Her powers were inborn and therefore not really hers, Tonks decided, looking at herself as a specimen or a psychological study, prying at the sore spots of her mind and examining them under a magnifying glass. Her selection for Auror training, her initiation into the Order of the Phoenix, any slight abilities she might possess in terms of being a double agent could all be put down to a roll of a pair of some cosmic dice. She didn’t like believing it, but it was true.

The day she became a Hufflepuff - she remembered it clearly, remembered the feeling of immense surprise. She had fancied herself for Gryffindor or Slytherin, one of the two. She hadn’t thought of going into her father’s House. But the Sorting Hat had decided quickly. “Ah yes, a Metamorphmagus. Well, that settles where you go.” And it had shouted “HUFFLEPUFF!” before she could get a word in edgewise.

Well, that was the way it had to be; later she had read that every Metamorphmagus in the history of Hogwarts had been a Hufflepuff. It was cold comfort at the time - still was, in fact. If she had truly been significant, someone valuable for anything other than an odd power, she would have broken the routine, changed the records.

Clearly she wasn’t. Clearly she didn’t. And ever so clearly, she would never reach the glory anyone else had, never get the respect of most of the members of the Order of the Phoenix. After all, she was just a Hufflepuff.

The eggs were beaten and would have been bloodied and bruised if that were possible by the time she broke out of her reverie and found that the tired, sickening feeling had gone away. “I’m going to go back to my rooms now,” she said.

“No. You will remain here.” He turned, hawklike. “You are weak now. You will be weak. What happens when you lapse before your aunts - when you are tired - when you take the Dark Mark -”

“I won’t!” Tonks said frantically, feeling her resignation turn to despair and fear. Was this what her clumsiness brought her - a tattoo and a promise she never intended to give?

Snape said nothing, and she thought he had given up. Standing, Tonks made her way to the door, careful that her hair didn’t dip into the potions - it was long today, the very pale blond that looks like cornsilk. She pushed it away from her face impatiently as she fumbled with the door, her mind really not on what she was doing.

It was lucky, in a way, that she was turned inward. She felt the Legilimency beginning first in her ear, a quiet buzzing she would normally dismiss. It was one of the signs. Then tears began to well up in her eyes without warning, and she knew that Snape was being unfair, taking her by surprise when she was already weak.

Instead of surrendering to the pressure, though, Tonks pushed back. She clenched the doorknob so tightly that her knuckles turned white and fought, imagining herself struggling with a hand that tried to pluck her memories out one by one. The world faded away, like it did when she had been overcome before, but this time she was the one in charge, the one calling the shots. Snape’s mind was filled with surprise and anger, but deep beneath it was fear, a panic that belonged not only to the moment but also far back in the annals of his childhood. There, she said to herself, and reached out. The only way she could describe her action was touching the fear, touching the memory, but it wasn’t literal. Her magic was doing the work, and she was only along for the ride.

Suddenly she was in a room, very large, very comfortable. It could have been almost anywhere, but it was Malfoy Manor; she could not say how she knew, but she did. The only other person in it, though, was Severus Snape.

He pressed his wand to his pale, bare arm and said, “Morsmordre.”

Tonks had never seen the Dark Mark applied. She had never known that the spell to conjure it in the sky also could impress it onto people. But it had to: the younger Snape looked like he was about to scream and sat down, heavily, on a chaise longue. The wand fell out of his hand. Ever-so-slowly, the skull and snake began to appear, burning darker and darker on his forearm.

The world flickered, and Tonks reeled from the suddenness of it. The room she found herself in was a small one, damp and dark, a dungeon perhaps. If she had been less disoriented, she might have been more horrified by what she saw: a tangle of white limbs, smeared with blood. It was not recognizable as people but only as parts.

In the darkness beyond the circle of candles that lit the bodies stood three Death Eaters, barely visible. They were all laughing. Through her connection to Snape’s mind, Tonks felt an overriding sense of anger, of shame - but also a deep, abiding lust.

He isn’t sorry, she thought, withdrawing herself from his mind as quickly as she could. It was poison. He isn’t sorry one bit. He knows it’s wrong but he still wants it. He still enjoys it!

When she opened her eyes, Snape was working on the activation agent. He seemed calm, but she saw the tense set of the muscles around his mouth. Not as calm as he seems, she decided. I wonder if that’s because of my breakthrough, or - or something else?

“You’re going to say that I don’t deserve to live. Might I just step in for you? I’m a horrible bastard, et cetera. I haven’t a good bone in my body. I haven’t any kind of sense. Now that we’re done with that bit of unpleasantness, sit down and mix the eggs with the dehydrated dragon liver.” Had it been anyone else, Tonks would have taken his statement as a plea for pity. Something about Snape’s tone, though, something about his cold sharpness, made her consider it in quite a different light. He expected pity, but he equally expected condemnation. Either would damn her in his eyes; either was useless to him.

You are a difficult man, Snape, Tonks thought, before slipping into her comfortable mask of third-person narrative. If it hadn’t been for the night before, she would have given up on him completely. A sentimental impulse made her want to pry him open and pull out his secrets, nothing but a sick sentimentality. She didn’t vocalize her thoughts, though. Instead, she said, “Oh, you’re a bastard, a sadistic bastard and a minger on top of it. And a berk, can’t forget berk, and I know what it actually means, too, so don’t ask, berk. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t a useful bastard.”

Snape stopped what he was doing for a moment, severing one toe from a frog’s leg and stopping the knife before it could cut the rest of them. Most likely it was her tone of voice that surprised him: cheery, undaunted. “That would be my reasoning, yes.”

“And don’t forget Dumbledore’s too,” she reminded him. “Right then. Three grams of the dragon liver?”

“Indeed,” Snape replied, but there didn’t seem to be much else to say.

It was not until later that night that she read the news of the Death Eater raid on the Isle of Skye, and it was not until even later that she began reading Women of Legend and Mythology: The Truth Behind the Mystery. For some reason, neither or them made much impression on her. In the morning, however, the tactical importance of the Isle of Skye was made suddenly and brutally clear.