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Chancing the Walls	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 2235 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Chancing the Walls
- 2-Part Two
- 1
- 2
Title: Chancing the Walls
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst
Wordcount: This part 4000
Summary: Harry knows he has to improve his Occlumency if he’s going to stay in the Aurors. He just thinks someone could have found him a better teacher than Draco Malfoy.
Author’s Notes: Another of my July Celebration fics, for birdsofshore’s prompt about Harry, in the Aurors, learning Occlumency and being taught by Draco. This has been split into two parts since it’s long; the second part will be posted tomorrow.

Chancing the Walls

            “I’m your Occlumency teacher.”

            Harry only nodded. He’d walked into this room in the bowels of the Ministry, found Malfoy waiting for him, and tried to walk right back out again. Only to find that the Locking Charms on the door wouldn’t let him leave. So he stood looking out over the bare stone room—well, bare except for two couches, one green and one silver—and let Malfoy’s words pass around him.

            Kingsley had said he would assign a competent teacher. Harry would wait out the introduction and then go find Kingsley and explain what he thought of the competence of this arrangement.

            “My mind is the only one compatible enough with yours to teach you the Art, at least among Ministry-trusted Occlumens.”

            “And how do you know that? Whoever told you that must have been as mental as you are—”

            Malfoy took out a small tile without speaking and passed it to Harry. The moment it settled into his hand, Harry could feel the power, enough to make the hair on the back of his neck almost rustle with how fast it stood. He shivered and handed the tile back to Malfoy. It was bright blue, with a single green spot.

            “They dipped this tile in a Pensieve filled with memories of you attempting to learn Occlumency at the start of your training,” said Malfoy, still in that strange, empty voice. “They hoped it would bring one memory to the surface that would show the prospective teacher exactly what kind of mistakes your last teacher made.”

            Not trusting me and trying to rape my mind were some of them, Harry thought, almost beyond irritation at this point.

            “But while that failed, they did imbue the tile with enough of the feeling of your mind that a master Occlumens could touch it and feel his own shields react to it. Mine were the shields that opened and stayed open.”

            Harry cocked his head. He remembered Hermione talking about that kind of test once upon a time, although she had never said it could be used to find an Occlumency teacher. “Then that means you feel comfortable with my mind?”

            Malfoy’s eyes widened a little, losing a touch of their frost. That pleased Harry. He didn’t want to converse with an emotionless adult who had the power to reduce him to a squalling child. “Yes. Although I would not put it that way. I knew that I was the one who could be of most use to you.”

            “Comfortable,” Harry repeated. “And I know exactly what went wrong with my last attempt to learn Occlumency, if you’re interested in learning about that.”

            “I am very interested.” Malfoy leaned forwards, as if he thought that Harry would bolt in the opposite direction despite the locking spells on the door.

            “He rummaged through my memories and tried to find sexual ones that he could sell to the Daily Prophet,” Harry said bluntly. “Before that I had Snape, who pushed into my mind and inflicted pain on me until I couldn’t stand up, all the while yelling at me to clear my mind. So excuse me if I don’t exactly trust you.”

            Malfoy stared with his lips parted. It was a good mouth, Harry noticed, and abruptly looked away, hoping his blush was less fiery than Ron’s hair, no matter what it felt like.

            This was the sort of thing Arnold Pewsey had dug through his mind in hopes of finding. Harry would tell people that he was gay when he wanted to, and not before. He could only hope that Malfoy hadn’t noticed, since he seemed a little stunned and not in contact with Harry’s mind yet.

            Malfoy had recovered, though. “If true,” he said quietly, “that is reprehensible and they should have been prosecuted. I promise that a good Occlumens and his pupil have trust between them, Potter. I won’t betray anything I see in this room. In return, I expect the same courtesy from you.”

            Harry shuddered a little. At least he was convinced for now by the seeming sincerity in Malfoy’s tone, although he would have to work with him a little more before he began to trust him. “How could I even get into your mind? Your shields are probably stronger than Snape’s.”

            “You actually saw into Professor Snape’s mind?”

            Harry shrugged. “Only once. In flashes.”

            Malfoy looked thoughtful. “Even that is more than most students would get in a glimpse from a Master Occlumens,” he said, and leaned forwards as if he thought he could see the truth behind Harry’s eyes. “Very well. I accept the terms. And I am going to assign you some exercises that should help in actually clearing your mind.”

            Harry nodded shortly and decided that he probably wasn’t getting out of this, since Kingsley had been the one to approve Malfoy as his teacher. If he couldn’t, he couldn’t. He would take the instruction and do with it what he could.

            “To clear your mind, it is first necessary to find the compatible colors for your mind.” Malfoy held up the tile again. “The colors on this tool strongly suggest that your compatible shades are blue and green.”

            “Why would they be?” Harry asked skeptically. “They’re not my favorite colors, or ones I like to dress in or have a strong association with. They weren’t even my House colors at school.”

            Malfoy might have smiled slightly. “Not everything goes back to Houses at Hogwarts, Harry.”

            “I know,” Harry conceded, deciding to ignore the fact that Malfoy had called him by his first name. He’d had to work with former Slytherins now, and Hufflepuffs, and every other combination of the Houses he could think of. “But why blue and green?”

            “That’s what we have to find out.” Malfoy gestured, and Harry sighed and started to sit down on the floor. Malfoy waved his wand, and the green couch slid over and slithered under Harry’s arse. Harry decided not to say anything about the gesture or the couch or the colors, because they would be here all day if he did. He folded his hands under his chin and gave Malfoy a patient look.

            “Relax.”

            “My body or my mind?” Harry muttered, but Malfoy heard him.

            “Ideally, both.” Malfoy lounged on the silver couch, so boneless suddenly that Harry had to stare at him and wonder if he had a bit of feline in his ancestry. “But lie down first, and try to work knots out of your back and neck. I can help you if you need that.”

            “No thanks,” said Harry hastily, shuddering a little as he thought of the capital Malfoy would make out of that, and let his head fall back and his muscles flow into the limp idleness he used when he would be in one place setting up an ambush for a long time. When his breath was a soft whisper of air in and out of his lungs, he murmured, “Now what?”

            “Now you begin the process of opening your eyes. Pretend that you’re waking up after a night’s deep sleep and about to begin a holiday.”

            Harry wanted to say that he didn’t have enough experience of that since he began an Auror, but he understood what Malfoy meant, and at least it was more instruction than Snape had ever given him. He rotated his head a little on the pillow Malfoy had conjured when Harry wasn’t looking and let his eyes tremble slowly open.

            His relaxation had been to some good effect. He didn’t even flinch when he found Malfoy pointing his wand at him.

            “Legilimens,” Malfoy breathed, and flowed into Harry’s head like the air was flowing into his lungs.

*

            Harry remembered, just in time, not to steady himself and fight against the intrusion. He let Malfoy touch and seek and find, and even when it got to private memories and brushed past things he barely wanted to look at himself, he gritted his teeth and held still.

            Don’t do that, Potter. You want to be relaxed, so I can find colors that link to contemplation and serenity somehow, and the memories that produced them. Don’t tense.

            You could do anything you wanted, Harry replied, despite not knowing if Malfoy could hear him. You could harm me. You could rip my mind to shreds the way Snape tried to do.

            But I wouldn’t do that.

            And the hell of it was, with someone this deeply inside him—Harry flushed and tried to ignore the other implications of that thought—he knew Malfoy was telling him the truth. You couldn’t lie when you were this deeply linked. It was the reason Harry had eventually figured out that his last Legilimency teacher was lying to him, when he began to see glimpses of his real motivations.

            Okay, he whispered, and tried to let go and drift.

            There is one source of the blue.

            A memory that felt old and misty swam to the top of Harry’s mind. He stared at it. It was blue. Just blue. Nothing but that, spread over him. Then he realized he had other faint memories to go along with it, a scratchiness and the sense of being completely covered, and shook his head.

            It’s a blanket.

            That you must have had when you were a child. It was probably old and well-beloved. No wonder you find blue soothing.

            Can all the compatible colors of my mind come down to just one memory, though?

            They can be planted by one memory. But I only need the one.

            Before Harry could ask what he planned to do with it, that memory unspooled—it was the only word Harry could think of for the way the blanket just seemed to come apart—and they went on to the next one. This was a bright flash of green that made Harry open his mouth to tell Malfoy that he was mad if he thought the Killing Curse was going to be a comforting memory.

            But then the sensation of warmth surrounded him, and the sound of a soft voice, and the green glowed above him.

            Harry closed his eyes. He had no need of Malfoy’s words to tell him which memory this was. This was about being held close in his mother’s arms and sung to with a lullaby—and loved. The green came from her eyes.

            Remarkable, even at that age, Malfoy said, which could have meant anything, and Harry didn’t really want him to explain. But, being Malfoy, he did. That that color would stand out that way. Your mother must have had beautiful eyes.

            She did. Harry was sure of that, even if he only had photographs and, now, this one precious memory to tell him so.

            He drifted slowly back to the surface of his mind, cradling the notion of the lullaby and the green eyes to himself. That was a better, earlier memory than the one of his mother dying in front of him while she screamed.

            When he opened his eyes, he saw Malfoy clear his throat and look away. Maybe he’d heard Harry’s final thought about that. Harry couldn’t be angry. He wouldn’t have that new knowledge if not for the Legilimency.

            “Good,” said Malfoy. “Now I know the blue and green are indeed your true compatible colors, and that means I can give you a series of exercises. Look at this tile and meditate on it.” He held out the blue tile with the spot of green that he’d been waving around before.

            Harry accepted it and studied him in silence. Malfoy still had his eyes averted, and there was a flush to his cheeks Harry couldn’t explain. Unless—

            “It was okay for me to be naked in that memory, you know,” he said. “Or those memories. I was a baby.”

            Malfoy only shook his head and flicked his wand. The locking spells on the doors dissolved, and Harry knew he was free to go.

            He only did it while looking over his shoulder at Malfoy, though. He hadn’t moved. He was still sitting in one place and staring at the floor.

            Harry rolled his eyes a little. If he’s uncomfortable with me being gay and having seen me naked when I was a baby, this Occlumency training isn’t going to be a success. And it won’t be my fault.

*

            “Did you meditate on the tile?”

            “As much as I can.” Harry took the seat on the couch that Malfoy gestured at, wincing. He’d chased down a murderer this morning, and although he hadn’t really twisted his ankle—so said the Healers who’d glanced at it, anyway—it felt as if he had. “It’s hard to stare at something that long and not have it be boring, you know? My mind was always wandering off to other things.”

            “Those recovered memories of yours?”

            “Sometimes. But also whether I would be able to accomplish my mission today.” Harry had known about the planned ambush last night, and his thoughts had been jittery with nerves, as they always were before he entered a planned battle. Sometimes he thought he was lucky that he’d mostly jumped into situations feet-first when he was younger.

            “All right.” Malfoy leaned slowly back and steepled his fingers. “I’m going to talk you into a meditative state, then.”

            “How does that work? If I’m focusing on your voice and not this stupid tile or whatever I’m supposed to be thinking about—”

            “My voice is going to be soothing. And the tile is not stupid. Honestly, Potter.” Malfoy’s voice was a little sharper now. “I’ve never trained anyone else in Occlumency who was this—this childish.”

            “Excuse me if my ankle hurts and I want to do something that will help my future in the Aurors more than talking to you will,” Harry snapped, and raised his foot so that it was stretched out along the couch, wincing as that jostled it again.

            “Does your ankle hurt?”

            “The Healers say it’s nothing.”

            “But that doesn’t mean it is.” Malfoy cast a spell that made a soft silver swirl surround Harry’s ankle, and he gasped as heat started to work its way into his skin. It also seemed to offer support, the way a Muggle bandage would, and Harry began to relax for the first time all day.

            “Thanks, Malfoy.”

            “I did it so that you could clear your mind and we could accomplish what we both came here for. Not because I wanted to be thanked.”

            Harry opened his left eye lazily. Pure-bloods were touchy about debts, he knew that. Plenty of them had insisted on doing strange things after the war to repay him for the life-debts they didn’t want to owe him—debts Harry had never thought about or would have claimed. But this was the first time he’d had one act like a favor owed to him was a problem.

            “I don’t think the same way you do. It’s thanks, nothing else.”

            “But you can repay me by focusing on my voice. If I’m someone you trust, that will make the meditation easier.”

            Harry snorted, because of course Malfoy would think like that, and did his best to listen. Malfoy was talking soft nonsense about Occlumency and how different people’s minds built their defenses, some soft and yielding, some like nets, some like wild beasts, some like walls…

            That was something Harry’s attention snagged on. He would like to build walls in his mind, he decided. Ones that were soft and flexible, but which he could part any time he wanted to, and invite someone in. He’d like to watch them smile and reach out and touch the inner part of his thoughts, and he wouldn’t have to be afraid, the way he always had been of Legilimency after Snape.

            Professor Snape never should have done that to you. It was wrong.

            Harry blinked. Yes, there was Malfoy drifting along in his thoughts. I didn’t even hear you say the spell!

            When you’re this close to me and focusing on my voice as the channel to let you go under, then I don’t have to.

            Harry shifted uneasily for a moment, then decided he didn’t mind. Malfoy had been gentle in his thoughts so far. Why did you say it was wrong for Snape to do that, though? He was the one who Dumbledore chose to teach me Legilimency.

            And Dumbledore was so infallible on everything else?

            Harry winced. He had spent weeks defending Dumbledore to Ron and Hermione when the full extent of his plan to have Harry sacrifice himself had come out, and he didn’t really want to do it with Malfoy, who he was just getting to really know. That’s not a subject I want to discuss. Let’s talk about something else.

            All right. Those walls you want to build need to be made of some kind of material.

            How? They’re mental!

            A sigh that Harry couldn’t help picturing as the sigh of a peacock when some impudent wind came along and ruffled his feathers. He grinned. Malfoy continued with careful precision, What you imagine is what controls the action around your walls. So pick some material that has qualities you can appreciate, qualities you feel comfortable with.

            Harry could see the good sense of that, whether or not he would have walls literally made of that material in his mind, so he nodded and closed his eyes more tightly. He thought of wool, silk, blankets like the kind he had apparently been wrapped in when he was a child…

            But none of them seemed right. And neither did the stone walls that automatically sprang to mind from Hogwarts, where he had been loved and defended, but never safe. And anyway, stone walls weren’t the flexible ones that he said he wanted.

            Frustrated, Harry burrowed deeper into his memory, looking at all the materials he could think of from his life, including the Muggle world, to try and find one that was suitable. Cardboard and newspaper were both too flimsy. Wood wasn’t flexible enough. Steel and iron got discarded for the same reason, and stone was right out. What…

            And then he found it. The memory, or the impression, of something soft and flexible touched him. It was the velvet of a robe he’d once had to wear to a Ministry gala. Not something he remembered that fondly, but on the other hand, there was a lot of give to it, and he could imagine crumpling it up to get it out of the way.

            Do you want to use something you don’t have positive feelings towards?

            It’s not velvet I hate. It’s the parties I have to wear it to.

            There was a sensation of movement through his mind like Malfoy was laughing to himself, but he coughed and cleared his throat before Harry could get angry. Very well. Then imagine that there’s velvet surrounding and cradling your mind. It might help to imagine it as the inside of a jewelry box instead of robes. That would make it more natural.

            Just to show that he could do things his own way, Harry pictured blue and green curtains of velvet shielding his mind. They could be whisked aside in a minute. When he wanted to invite someone into his mind, that was the way he would do it. They probably wouldn’t even see the colors, but imagining them that way made him feel better.

            Yes! That’s the way to do it!

            Harry jumped. He hadn’t thought Malfoy would be so pleased, or that he was even still there.

            But of course he would be. He would want to spy on Harry’s beginning Occlumency and only leave when he was sure Harry was doing things to his specifications.

            That’s not true. Malfoy was bristling with indignation that struck Harry’s mind like sparks from stroking cat fur. I’m here because I assumed you would need my support and help. I can leave if you’d like.

            Harry reached out instinctively, because he didn’t want anyone to sound like that. No, wait. I’m sorry. I only meant—

            There was a rippling movement like the one when Malfoy had laughed, and then Harry was abruptly somewhere else. He found himself freezing and staring around defensively. He was inside something, he knew that, but he couldn’t see what it was. There was simply soft, swirling darkness around him, and it confused his sense of direction.

            You’re inside my mind, Potter. Trapped inside my Occlumency shields. Not trapped there forever only because I’m here to let you out.

            Malfoy’s voice was brittle. Harry sighed. From some of the things Malfoy had said, he reckoned that it was really rude to step into someone’s mind when you hadn’t been invited. Sorry. I’m always messing up.

            You have more strength than you know, if you can push past barriers that should keep a master Legilimens out just because you’re a bit upset.

            Harry was still trying to decide if that was a compliment or an insult when the darkness parted. He saw something brightly lit and violent, heard the screams of someone being tortured, before he was abruptly back in his own mind.

            Was that the memory of Voldemort having you torture someone? Harry asked, before his good sense caught up with his thoughts.

            Malfoy went still in his mind. Harry winced again. Not only had he probably committed a faux pas, but there was a difference between having someone watchful in his mind and having a predator like a coiled snake.

            How did you know about that?

            Malfoy’s voice was deadly, and Harry found himself adopting the calm tone that he’d been trained to use when negotiating with people who had hostages. I saw it during the war. My connection with Voldemort in my scar—I saw things sometimes through his eyes. Sometimes I saw him commanding you to torture Death Eaters.

            Malfoy was silent so long that Harry went back to imagining velvet walls, because it seemed like something that would be useful, which demanding answers from Malfoy wasn’t. And then Malfoy said, I’m too tired to continue today, and withdrew from Harry’s mind.

            Harry worked in silence on his Occlumency barriers for a while, because he didn’t really want to open his eyes and see what would probably be the expression on Malfoy’s face. By the time he did, Malfoy was turned away from him, smoothing one hand down his arms over and over again.

            “Malfoy?”

            Malfoy tilted his head in acknowledgment of his presence, but said only, “Occlumency requires a great degree of calm on the part of the teacher, and trust between teacher and student. It’s one reason that Professor Snape’s attempts to train you failed so spectacularly.”

            Harry rolled his eyes, familiar with those accusations if only because he had turned fifth year around and around in his mind so many times, trying to see if he could have saved Sirius. “I had reason not to trust him. And why does he get to be excused for his hatred of me? He was the adult! I was only fifteen!”

            He stopped breathing abruptly as Malfoy turned his head to look at him. His hands were still and his eyes narrowed.

            “I am stating a fact, not blaming either one of you,” Malfoy said. “And right now, I don’t trust myself not to try and make a weapon of what I would find in your thoughts.” He whipped around to face the door and removed the locking charms. “Go home and practice meditation.”

            “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable,” Harry said, and stood and walked through the door. He wasn’t going to apologize for more than that. He’d done something by accident, and it wasn’t the crime of the century.

            But he was sorry for making Malfoy uncomfortable.
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Chancing the Walls