A Lesson In Nuance

Harry's tree was well-used this summer. He'd wake up, leave the house, and walk to the park. Some days, he'd feel the presence of his tail as he went, and they'd stick with him the entire day. He'd grit his teeth and bear the presence until it got dark, and then he'd walk home.

Most of the time, the presence of his watcher would suddenly fade about halfway through his walk, and Voldemort would appear by his side. Then, she'd follow him to the park and take the one that he was infuriatingly beginning to subconsciously recognize as her tree. Whatever she did to the Order members to get rid of them, it was something they never remembered the next day. Well, he hoped that was the case, considering it worked every time without a hitch.

Today was one of those days, and he was trying to zone out like he always did. As much as he enjoyed not being constantly stared at by whatever member Dumbledore assigned to him, Voldemort being the one he was stuck with instead was hardly an even trade. Since cursing her was out of the question, he ideally preferred to act like she didn't exist. 

Unfortunately, she made that extremelyhard to do.

To put it bluntly, the woman was mind bogglingly frustrating in the strangest way. Her wit was sharp, her tongue was sharper, and she was so shockingly casual that it was almost possible to forget who she was if he wasn't careful. Right now, she was actually allowing him to be aloof without trying to gibe him into a heated conversation, but she was doing it while reading the Daily Prophet with a smirk on her face that told him she knew exactly what she was doing.

His own face stared back at him from the front page, and it wasn't a flattering look in the slightest. She was on the second page, and both of them knew it was covered with devastatingly libelous articles about yours truly. The reason he knew this was because he’d been absolutely fuming over it just that morning, and she probably knew how much it pissed him off the same way she seemed to know everything else.

And fuck him if her method wasn't a god damn mystery.

He tried to get his eyes to stick on the playground, but they almost involuntarily twitched to look at the paper in Voldemort's hand once and then a second time as he fidgeted angrily. After the third time of trying and failing to ignore her attempt at provoking him, he bit like the dumbass he was.

"What're you reading over there?" He asked through his gritted teeth.

"Oh, I'm just learning all about this scandalous Post-Triwizard love triangle," and her smile only grew when she saw how not happy he was about this. "To think Granger has the audacity to lead you on, all while romancing Mister Krum behind your back, even after the way he dueled against you in the final task. I wonder why he excites her so much more than you do. Maybe it's the danger. Sometimes, the bookish ones are the freakiest."

Insults to Hermione, more than pretty much anything else, really got to him. People could call him crazy, throw his name in the trash, and he'd keep chugging along through the anger. Bringing his best friend down with him, though, was something he couldn't deal with. Someone like her repeating the things coming from the prophet made him want to start a fight, but he had to remember that he was dealing with an infuriating type of person. 

Voldemort wanted him to fight. Getting angry and confrontational was only playing into her hands. The way to handle her was to strike back as casually as she did. Not getting angry and acting as if she didn't get to him was the path to victory, and he'd found the perfect way to respond this time.

"Aren't you one of the most well-studied magicals on the planet?" He pointedly asked.

Instead of the vindication he wanted to feel, though, he was instead greeted with a light, carefree laugh. It was annoyingly contagious, turning his scowl into what was almost a straight face. Even when he wanted her dead, she was still so strikingly charismatic and easygoing that it was off-puttingly simple to see how so many people adored her in her youth. Her tinkling laughter died down soon enough, and she looked devastatingly entertained as her smile turned into something more conniving.

“Oh, I promise you, Potter, nobody on God’s green earth wants to know exactly how studied I am."

That marked the second time he’d been caught so off guard that he couldn't stop a sharp laugh. Unlike the first time, though, when he was so incapacitated that he could just barely manage to think straight, his laugh was quickly followed by a stomach roiling level of disgust that he just barely kept off of his face. 

Seemingly sensing the turn in his emotions, her smile went away, and she tossed the paper somewhere off to the side along with the direction of their conversation. “Are you hungry?"

The strange question stopped his dipping mood. "What?"

"I asked if you want food, Potter.”

"Why do you care?"

"Christ.” She lightheartedly groaned as she leaned her head against the tree. “It's like I'm being interrogated by an auror everytime I talk to you, and I'm pretty sure I indoctrinated people to handle the magical bobbies for me decades ago. I asked because I want food, brat, so I'd like to know if you do too."

"Do you even get hungry?"

With a smirk, she extended one of her hands in front of her to mockingly examine nails that he just realized were painted red. "I know it might seem like I'm a Goddess sometimes, with my astounding power and heavenly appearance, but I do still need to eat, yes."

"But you were made out of a big ball of sludge! You've got to be more golem than human at this point, right?"

Her already pale face got even lighter, like she was about to be sick. "Unless you want to see proof of my eating habits all over your ratty clothes, we're going to try our best to forget that ever happened."

"Well, I've got shit for money right now, even if I did want to eat with you.”

"Your great grandfather invented one of the most popular hair potions in the UK. Your family vault has to have gold from the floor to the ceiling.”

A pang shot through his chest. These things pissed him off possibly even more than her flippant personality. She took his family away from him. Then, to rub salt into the wound, she seemed to know way more about them than he did.

"How do you even know something like that?"

"How do you think I controlled this mess before I learned enough magic to do it myself?" She rhetorically asked back, flicking a loose strand of hair from her face.

Feeling sick at the thought of her using anything made by his family, he tried to forget that he’d ever heard it. “The money in my vault doesn’t matter. I don't trust keeping money around my relatives. I tried it back during the summer before my second year. Apparently, hating magic only extends to things that aren’t valuable because they took it while they were finding a way to secure my room."

"Secure?"

"Yeah, they had an important guest over, and Dobby used magic in the house. They thought it was me, so they barred my windows, bolted my door, and gave me food once a day through a metal flap."

She gave him a wan smile. "It gets way worse once schooling starts, doesn't it? Accidental magic came less often to me, and wands weren't much help until I figured out how to get around the Ministry's charms."

"Maybe it got worse for you, " he said with a sardonic chuckle, not really thinking. "At least when Dobby pissed them off, I got locked in an actual room. Back before I had my wand, they'd just shove me in their cupboard and call it a da-"

He almost choked on his words.

Nobody knew about the cupboard he used to live in. He'd never told a single soul, not his friends, not his teachers, not even the man who’d probably seen the words plastered onto his hundreds of Hogwarts invitations. No, he’d never felt comfortable enough to say it even a single time before. That meant the first person who knew about it outside of his own relatives was her because the fact that she actually seemed to understand just made it slip out like it was the most natural thing in the world. 

She didn’t even look shocked. There wasn't the horror he dreaded to see on someone else's face if they ever found out. She seemed sad, maybe, but she wasn’t overtly reacting either, simply accepting what he'd said as factual truth and letting it stay as it was. She wasn’t offering support, not necessarily, but she wasn’t pitying him either. The camaraderie in that easy acceptance was… comforting… and it made him want to burn the entire park down and take both of them with it.

“Fuck it,” Harry spat as he clumsily scrambled to his feet, almost slipping on the slick grass in his desperate rush. “This isn’t worth it.”

He only made it a few steps away until her voice, so quiet he almost couldn't hear it, had his feet stopping against his better judgment.

“The muggles tried to institutionalize me a few times before Hogwarts” she confessed, and it made his head snap back around. “Ms. Cole, my dear caretaker, couldn’t seem to decide between whether I was insane or possessed most days, so she’d call someone every once in a while to take a look at me. I guess I wasn’t convincing enough the first time. It was hell. I’m not exactly sure how long I was there before my accidental magic kicked in. When it did, their eyes glazed over, and they just let me out. I didn’t know where to go, so I wandered around until I found myself in front of the orphanage, and everyone else forgot I’d ever left.

“... You didn’t deserve what they did to you, Potter, and you don’t deserve what they’re doing to you now. Nothing anyone can say will change that or make it better, but you aren’t alone. Stories like ours aren’t as uncommon as you’d think.”

Harry didn’t know what to say. What was there to say? A variety of insults meant to break her down through the crack she’d voluntarily given him came to mind, but he depressingly found that, even after everything she’d done to him, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it, not about something like that.

Inhaling deeply and letting out a long, drawn out breath, he instead decided to say, “I still don’t have any money.”

“Just come along, kid,” she responded with something resembling a smile, seeing the words for what they were. “I’ve got plenty.”

With that, she stood from her tree, and they walked back into town. As they got closer to civilization, people started walking by them. He wasn’t sure why he felt so abnormally comfortable walking around everyone until he realized that he wasn’t getting the stares he used to. For whatever reason, be it Voldemort’s magic or the presence of a seemingly amicable adult with him, the muggles weren’t sending him those horrid, veiled glares or poorly disguising their attempts to cross the street before they got too close to the local freak.

“You mentioned Dobby just now,” she said out of the blue, thankfully taking his thoughts away from gloomier territory. “Is that the elf?”

Harry freely smiled at the mention of his ever-joyful companion because, unlike most of the things she brought up, Dobby was something very much pure in his mind. There wasn’t any betrayal or murder with Dobby besides the bludger incident. All that existed with the small elf was a friend who had helped him more than he could possibly repay.

“You mean the one who kicked your arse?”

“He didn’t kick anything on me, let alone my arse,” she told him, her eyebrow twitching just a smidge. Her ego, at least, was something that remained consistent in every single memory Harry had of the woman. “At best, he held me off long enough to escape, and that was when I’d just been revived.”

“Yeah, that just sounds like a lot of excuses for losing to me.”

“He was a very impressive elf,” Voldemort admitted, purposefully ignoring his insult. “Where did you find him?”

“I didn’t find him anywhere; he found me . Dobby used to be enslaved to Lucius Malfoy. I tricked the git into giving him a sock because Dobby tried to help me out of a tight spot."

“You didn’t!” She sounded practically giddy.

“I did. He’s a right bastard, and his son isn’t far behind. I don’t know how you survived being around him everyday.”

“Lots of alcohol and constantly reminding myself of the massive amounts of money he contributed on a weekly basis. Well, that and the political clout.” She sounded deadly serious about her methods of coping. 

“You seem like you hate him.”

“Oh, I can’t stand the man. He’s an obnoxious, privileged prick who never had to work for a single thing in his entire life. I don’t kid you when I say that literal torture was far more enjoyable than enduring his long-winded rants about muggleborns and how many jobs they steal from respectable folk.”

“... but he says all of those things in your name, right?”

“I’m sure he does.” Voldemort physically waved it away as if trying to swat an annoying gnat. “Among my followers were countless swathes of creatures and wizards of all statuses. I hardly agreed with all of them on everything. Lucius was only made an important member because of his money and governmental ties. Loyalty was never something I expected from him. He wasn’t the first to use my name for his own ends, and he won’t be the last. I stopped caring about that years before my defeat. As long as he continues to do as I tell him, it doesn’t matter to me how he feels about anyone’s blood status.”

“His entire family makes life miserable for anyone not as pure as them! He sees you as lesser too!”

“Yet he bowed his head every single time he spoke a word to me,” she said with a vicious grin. “He couldn’t bring himself to look me in the eyes, not unless I demanded it of him. Every moment he spent in my presence was proof that he didn’t really believe what he spouted. Lucius lies to himself just as much as he does to everyone else. That’s what power is, Potter: to stand in front of people who think you’re trash and watch them bend their knee because they know you’re better than them.”

He could kind of see that… kind of…

The first time he’d ever felt it was when he walked into the kitchen the day after he came back from his first year at Hogwarts. His wand handle was sticking out of his pocket, and he only had it on him because he wanted to keep something so special to him close to his person in such a potentially hostile environment. He was expecting the normal shouting of demands and insults as he approached the stove, but they never came, and he realized what the difference was when he delivered a plate to his uncle and saw the man glance at his wand before averting his eyes. Eleven years of being the rat under the fucking stairs, and the man who used to lord over him wasn’t even capable of looking at him. Power wasn’t something he reveled in, not like her, but he couldn’t deny that it was a very nice change of pace from his previous years at Privet Drive.

It was then that they arrived at some random diner Harry had never been to before. They walked in through the door, and Voldemort flashed two fingers at the hostess, leaving Harry to think about what she’d said while the pair of them were led to a booth in the corner of the restaurant. Absentmindedly ordering a cup of water, he found himself at a loss. Nothing made sense anymore, and he was ironically discovering that this was directly because so much was suddenly making a lot more sense than he thought it ever would.

He’d grown up thinking that Voldemort was a monster, someone who killed everything in front of her that wasn’t directly under her heel. She wasn’t supposed to have a sense of humor, empathy, or reasons . She wasn’t allowed to have things like that. The world was wrong for giving them to her; It was blasphemous, irreconcilably flawed.

Yet it was…

“And for you, dear?” their waitress asked him.

Blinking, he realized that he’d been paying such little attention that someone had already come over to take their food order, and he didn’t even notice them until he was directly addressed. Instead of fumbling with a menu, he simply banked on the hope that the other person with him had already put in her order.

“I’ll have the same as her,” Harry told the waitress, gesturing toward the person he loathed to call his temporary companion.

With a nod, the waitress scribbled down whatever he’d just ordered and walked away. After she was gone, he glanced at Voldemort and saw her amusement as she took a sip of her soda. He rolled his eyes at her expression but took the bait anyway. 

“What?” 

“Your confusion is amusing," she told him, not realizing at all how it made his insides freeze. "This isn't the first time you've zoned out like that. I wouldn't have thought you'd be so… contemplative."

"How do you know I was confused?"

"Legilimency, Potter," she said with a tilt of her head. "Listening to you think is like someone shouting in my ear with a megaphone."

… Think?

"What the hell is Legilimency?"

She frowned just a little, seemingly annoyed by something. "You've been tapping on my skull every day I've been here. Turnabout is fair play. Just because you haven't gotten in doesn't mean I haven't."

That wasn't possible.

The second he’d learned that there were others like him, he’d searched through every book he could find for some mention of his abilities. Using his magic to read people and the things around him was extremely important to him. He'd even checked the restricted section once he'd gotten his cloak from Dumbledore. He was relieved when he found nothing, and he happily assumed that it was a skill like Parseltongue or metamorphmagic, something that was unique to a person or family.

"You didn't answer my question," he said as his hand unconsciously twitched in the direction of his wand, something she didn't miss in the slightest. "What the hell is Legilimency?"

"Come on, Potter, you can't play dumb with me! I know Dumbledore taught you to reach into the minds of others. It's just a shame he didn't teach you humility at the same time. It was foolish to try it on me and think it would actually work."

"B-but that's not…"

"What, are you just now realizing it?" she asked with a self-satisfied, malicious smirk. "Are you truly so arrogant as to believe that Lord Voldemort couldn't break into the mind of a schoolboy without making them aware? You might be Dumbledore's protégé, but I am the most accomplished Legilemancer to ever live."

"Dumbledore didn't teach me shit!" Harry growled, and his eyes almost started to glow with his terrified rage. "He hasn't shown me a single thing in four years! I just go to school like everyone else. The only thing that makes me different from them is the fact that you're always after me!”

She was about to scoff. In fact, she was moments away from it when she felt the way his magic was frantically pulsing beneath his skin like it was about to blow. It seemed afraid, panicked, and undeniably brazen in the way it felt. Either he was telling the truth, or he was disgustingly good at lying, something she wouldn’t put past him if she wasn’t so sure that he was currently in the middle of staving off a panic attack.

“You’re a natural one too?”

“What did you see?” he demanded, ignoring her completely, and she thought the building was seconds away from shuddering under the pressure of his barely suppressed power. “What did you take from me!?”

“You need to take a breath, Potter.” Her words were only agitating him further. “We’ve both been using something called Legilimency. Yes, I could’ve taken whatever I wanted, just like you could’ve from most anyone else, but I didn’t. I assumed you'd learned a few tricks from Dumbledore and thought yourself good enough to play games with me. It was more amusing than threatening. There wasn’t any reason for me to go deeper than the surface.”

He wasn’t calming down. A lot was going on right now, most of which she didn’t have a solid grasp on yet. It was obvious to her now that he had no idea what he was doing, and that wasn't exclusive to his skill with Legilimency. Nothing was adding up, not since she’d arrived at Privet Drive around the start of summer.

More important than her confusion was the fact that his magic was only escalating. One thing she did know was that natural talent with Legilimency didn’t come out of nowhere. It was nurtured within certain types of people who were placed in very specific situations. It was quite a shock to her when she’d found out her ability wasn’t as private as she’d thought it was too, and she had the luxury of finding out on her own instead of learning about it through a stronger enemy revealing the fact that they’d been using it on her for the better part of multiple weeks. 

“Look around you,” she tried instead. “The muggles are starting to get edgy, and things are very close to getting out of hand if even they can feel it. I don’t know what you were or weren’t told, but I can tell you now that you’d at least feel it if I really started digging. Naturals have a higher awareness of their own magic than most. Since I wasn’t accounting for that when I went looking, you would’ve known, even if you couldn’t have stopped me.”

Harry’s eyes flicked away from her for less than a second, and he discovered that she was right. There weren’t many muggles in the diner right now, but the ones who were present looked agitated, nervous, like an invisible predator was looming over their shoulders with drool dripping from its open maw. He didn’t believe she refrained from digging; he didn’t know what to believe about anything now, but he did know that he was getting very close to letting his magic loose on this entire place. 

If that happened, Voldemort was surely the only person here who would survive, himself included.

With that in mind, he fought to reign himself in. It was much harder than it sounded to reel his leaking magic into himself and keep it from lashing out. Only once it simmered down did he see the way Voldemort was looking at him. It made him feel like he was some sort of intriguing puzzle. It didn’t take a genius to figure out how little he liked that.

“What’s Legilimency?” Harry tried once more, this time without almost blowing the roof off of some poor muggle’s diner.

“It’s one of the two mind arts.” She leaned back in her seat and let her seriousness fade now that things were back under control. “The one we’ve both been using focuses on reaching out with your magic and interpreting what it encounters. The one I’ve been using to keep you from doing that is called Occlumency, which involves internalizing your magic and using it to keep your mind safe from foreign intrusions.” Once she was done with her explanation, she tacked on, “Most wizards probably wouldn’t notice a natural tapping about, but the headmaster would. Did Dumbledore really not tell you any of this?”

The question made Harry give her a truly impressive glare. He knew who he wanted to be glaring at right now, but Dumbledore's current absence meant that he only really had a single target for his anger. It was lucky that the only person left to get mad at was such a good option. 

"Oh, come on!" Voldemort jokingly exclaimed. "I gave you an answer, and we both know you wouldn't have found it anywhere else while you're sequestered away in a place like this… not to mention, I'm currently letting your magical temper tantrum go without making fun of it even once, which is a leniency that’s quickly fading."

The dash of teasing made him feel a little better despite himself, but the answer to her question managed to drag him back down. "Dumbledore doesn't tell me much of anything apparently."

What he sullenly admitted sent the two of them into silence for many reasons. Letters stopped leaving Privet Drive on Hedwig's leg weeks ago. There wasn't a point in begging for something he knew they wouldn't provide. He’d learned that lesson long ago in the muggle world. At the same time, the letters he received from everyone else were immediately thrown in the trash where they belonged because he was going to go insane if he was told to sit tight and wait in the dark with his relatives even one more time. 

The waitress came with their food to the quiet thanks of Lord Voldemort, and hearing her thank a muggle made him consider the possibility of having gone insane without the insultingly pitiful letters he'd been getting from his friends all summer. She ordered fish and chips, one of the most mundane foods imaginable. It screamed muggle, and she was eyeing it in a way that made him think the food wasn't going to be there very long. 

"You know," Voldemort said as she looked up from her food and into his eyes, seeming - damn him - as earnest as a person like her could be. "I developed Legilimency during my time in muggle London too. The ability is different for people it comes to naturally; it develops out of necessity and becomes a part of us. I know how uncomfortable it is to have that and still feel like something's missing. I could teach you if you wanted. It would help with a lot of things, your anxiety especially."

Words couldn't possibly describe how intensely Harry's pupils burned as he stared at her. It was so close to a glare that it might as well have been one, and he desperately wished his magic would find purchase on her mind like it did with everyone else. It was his only safeguard around people he didn't understand, the way he knew he was safe. Now realizing exactly what he was doing and what it meant when someone could stop him, the fact that he couldn't get a reading was even more important than it was before.

Perhaps seeing that, Harry very suddenly found his magic invading something it couldn't before. He couldn't dive as deep as he usually would've in such situations, but he could go far enough to tell that she was being sincere. Maybe that was enough; it was certainly more than he'd been given by others before, people he trusted completely, people who, for some reason, didn't trust him . 

"I'm not letting you brand me with your fucking mark," he said because there was no way he'd say anything kinder to her.

"I only brand the people who believe in my cause, Potter," she amusedly said back, and Harry had no idea what cause she spoke of because all anyone ever said about her was how everything she touched turned to ash . "I'm offering to help you in a way I wish someone would’ve helped me. There isn’t a price tag on that."

But this wasn't destruction, and he didn't know what to do with that. She was honestly offering to help him with something that was very important to him with zero prompting and no strings attached. There were more than a million things running through his head as he thought about everything that'd gone wrong since the last task of that damn tournament, and every one of them accumulated into a gigantic, chaotic pile until he responded with a single word that could've said an uncountable amount of things.

"... okay."