Virgil adjusted the strap of his satchel as he checked his watch for the time. It was five to ten in the morning, the agreed upon hour for their session, and he was making his way between the towering shelves of the Magical Library. His memory of first meeting Athena Marrowbone at St.Mungo's[1] was a vague one as he'd been in shock that evening, though he recalled a sense of competence and concern. It was strange, trying to picture himself as anyone's tutor, much less of an older witch.

But Yavin had good faith in the notion. So perhaps everything would work out.

He sauntered into the open space of long reading tables, with their dark green lamps glowing overhead. It was a weekday and only a few other readers scattered about. His shift on nine was later in the evening. Virgil selected an empty table in the middle, settling down with ease.

To him, the library was full of comfort and nostalgia. His mother had brought him here, at his request, when he was a boy. Like many other wizarding children, it was where he had seen his first actual Sphinx and touched books older than any person he knew. He was calm in its dusty  atmosphere and nonsensical order. Virgil took a slim notebook out of his bag and plucked a quill out from behind his ear.

Not unlike a little boy waiting for his mum to come collect him, he began sketching shapes in the book.

1.	4th December - And For My Next Act

Athena arrived in trousers that made her legs look a mile long, a flowing navy caftan, and a wide-brimmed witches hat of grey wool. Coming back here to the teetering stacks made her feel her age, and feel it happily. There was a time she'd become a fixture here along with other learning Healers of her cohort. They poured over massive tomes of sketchy anatomies and astronomical charts at all hours between long shifts. Then it had been hard to imagine she'd ever be able to know it all, but it had happened. In all good time, they said, things that meant to be would come to be. 

Unencumbered to day, just a wand in her sleeve, she walked at a pace as if she had no timetable. The sphinx at the desk across the way looked to be napping but a flicking of her tail indicated differently. Athena wondered if she was the same one who'd sent them scampering when their foggy studious minds couldn't bend around her riddle.

In a bit, Athena spotted him across the room alone at a long table and the recognition came along with the details of his chart. Or lack of it. Their visit had been off the books at strange Yavin Morgenthau's strange request. It had seemed harmless enough, treating the kid and the little girl and nothing else had come of it. She smiled and split off to approach him from the other side of the table.

"Now then," Athena said with the air of meeting a young thing like Virgil for the first time. Confidentiality extended beyond details of ails; it included a kind of anonymity or a switching of hats. She wouldn't remind them of their meeting unless he did. It was better that way. Certainly better for their task today.

She extended her hand across the space, still standing. "Athena, sweetheart. Good day yet?"

Upon Athena's approach, he lifted his eyes from the sketchbook and vigilantly observed the witch across from him. He had been looking forward to this, in a fashion. Virgil was typically lucid when he met new people but the Healer had eluded him the night of the vampire bite - she was still someone new to discover.

           "Athena, sweetheart. Good day yet?"

Direct, casually affectionate, unconventionally beautiful. Because he couldn't help responding in the same spirit, Virgil smiled pleasantly: "It is now," he replied as he reached up to take her hand. "Virgil. Very good to see you again."

The young wizard wasn't going to pretend that they hadn't met before. It would feel disingenuous and if Yavin was going to make him do this, he at least wanted the connection with Athena to be of an open and easygoing nature. They were going to be dealing with the very matter that made up their minds. This wasn't a place for much duplicity - not even consensually.

"I have a few ideas about how we could begin," Virgil pressed on in quiet voice, feeling suddenly diffident, "if you'd like to hear them? Or maybe you have a preferred approach?" he could only imagine that Athena's experience with Legilimency was at least more varied than his own.

It intimidated Virgil a bit but he'd told himself not to think of the disparity in age. They were simply two people, sharing their knowledge of mind magic to mutual benefit. At least he knew this wasn't going to be dull. Merlin forbid.

'Again', he'd said. Her face warmed a moment in subtle acknowledgement. Brave lad, he was.  Virgil looked well; she only had the one night to go on, but there were no signs or symptoms that seemed to linger on him that would show he'd been attacked recently by a vampire.  No mark - maybe he'd had it fixed up. She'd been wary to let him and the girl go off with Yavin, but here he was among the mortal and living throngs same as her.

Merlin, he was young, though, wasn't he? Athena began to get comfortable. She pushed up the loose caftan sleeves and her tattoos - insects, alchemical patterns - stirred at the touch and movement. She took off her hat and set it down and ran her fingers through her short platinum blonde hair, putting its thick locks back into a state of messy coordination.

"Your meeting," she said sitting back and opening her shoulders.

"What's our Yavvy told tha bout me, then?" 

If Athena hadn't already mastered the rigors of destruction, trauma, and the vulnerability of it all she might have been nervous. Mostly she was curious and eager to get good at her new objective.

            "What's our Yavvy told tha bout me, then?" 

He was exercising the restraint of a fellow Legilimens, purposely and strictly keeping his sphere of awareness away from Athena's mind. When Virgil wasn't doing this the world around him had the additional audial quality of background static - thoughts distant and near tumbling in or out of hearing. When he'd been sick last month, the noise was bilssfully non-existent. Virgil turned a page over in his notebook.

"Only that you're not skilled at Occlumency but you would like to be," he turned the book upside down and slid it over to her with the blank page waiting. "And I'm to help however I can. Here you go."

The young wizard handed his quill over as well before crossing his arms over the table. He was starting to enjoy the frank tone of their exchange. It felt honest and natural, which made it easier for him to speak with her the way he would with an Unspeakable on nine. Casual, just a hint of deference.

"Before we begin, I want to get a sense of how you personally understand the mindscape. Like how Ankgatell visualises his as having doors, you know." Virgil referred to the awful (awful) text Yavin had made him read years ago. "Might be easier to just draw it?"

He nodded at the notebook. "I'll show you my understanding as well, after, of course."

It was easy to believe Yavin had kept things brief with his squire, and easier still to believe that Virgil would keep his secrets, so there was little fun in pressing. As much as Athena loved a gab, she was more interested in getting her hands bloody. She took over the notebook and quill immediately, and paused while Virgil finished his request.

She sniffed a laugh at the mention of Ankgatell. Beastly text. She'd found herself nearly shouting, 'get there!' at the text bogged down in useless ruminations. The work was, at least, thorough.

Some people, when passed a blank page, might hem about their drawing skill, but not Athena. She began working with a deft architect's hand, building a clearly rendered diagram made up of sharp straights and confident curves. Her handwriting was small, constrained, and blocky like tiny geometric runes, each letter using the least strokes possible. She jotted down small labels and annotations at the growing diagram.

Athena worked wordlessly. Instead of drawing bones, linking chakras, and ley-lines, she was placing overlapping circles, some circles overlapped others just touching at a point. Some were entirely contained inside another, others isolated from all the rest. Then with tight heavy strokes, she marked each intersection with square. Some circles overlapped at two points, others just one. The result looked like a cross between Centaur astronomical staves and a coffee-table in a home with no coasters.

She flipped it around and looked up at Virgil. A little smile and oh, the tiniest desire for approval.

"Right, have a look. Round here, the mind can be compartmentalized. Rooms, coffers, books. They're sorted out. Put in sequence. Nested. Grouped up. Could be orderly like rooms with multiple doors, could be an labyrinth more like. Entries can be wide open or not, locked up or not."

As she spoke of the entrances, she tapped the intersections. Where the circles overlapped, the entry was wide. Where they touched at just a point, well, that was harder to pass through.

"Making sense? Not that different from our Gari Ankgatell - this works better for non-linear relationships."

He waited while she drew - clearly it was going to be a while, and Virgil cast his attention around the library instead. He watched a group of witches standing around their own table examining maps, and a few lone readers with stacks of books next to them waiting to be examined. Another reader joined the area with hesitant footsteps. It was peaceful, respectful.

             "Right, have a look..."

Virgil turned back to his companion, eyes dropping to the notebook. The drawing was comprehensive: it illustrated Athena's understanding of the mindscape, and from this he knew that she was a person very familiar with her interior. She'd thought about this before. At length. He smiled to himself while he inspected it.

"That makes total sense to me," he gave the drawing one more look before turning to the page before, "A rather organised, versatile way. You must have everything in its place. This is mine."

Holding it up horizontally, he gave Athena some time to look at it first. His drawing had lots of little spheres dotted on a black page; he'd shaded the spheres to make them more three dimensional. They came in various sizes and one of them was merging with another, like conjoined bubbles.

"Every sphere represents a part or aspect of me. Or a collection of facts. Sometimes they join, sometimes they dissolve and manifest differently. They're never static." Virgil used his quill to point at a small figure in the middle of the drawing. "That's kind of like... my headquarters. The spheres draw closer to me when I need them."

His mind wasn't conservatively methodical. It was, in fact, very messy from the outside. The messiness was part of his natural defence: what's the point of looking in his head if you couldn't make sense of it?

"Now," he turned over to another blank page. "How do you view other minds from the outside, as a Legilimens?" Virgil handed her back the quill. "Are they like puzzles you have to solve? Yavin likes to think of them as houses," he chattered on with a grin. "He says it's like having a house with doors and windows but not everyone knows how to lock them."

Athene couldn't help but smile at the careful shading of the spheres. For some reason it made Virgil seem even younger, like he'd been drawing cubes and swirls in the margins of a text book. And the little man in the middle that leaned just a little, did he? It was all rather endearing.

"I see the person in a haze," Athena answered quickly. "A shadowy form. If I can get closer, I can see faces, and color, and I'll call it, texture. It's emotion and sometimes I perceive a memory like flashes. Whatever's seepin' out, understand? If in reality someone's putting on a show like they're trying to pull one over, I can look and see what they're really feeling, because it's all over their face."

Athena smiled. She knew it wasn't orthodox, that traditional Legelimancy was meant to be structured and methodical, and that had made sense to her. The human body was the same way and she was elbows deep in evicerations and bites and bones all the day long. But her foray into Legelimancy had stopped at prying into emotions. That's as far as she'd taken it, and as far as she cared to.

"I"m standing on the outside. I don't stroll into any foyers of any palaces and that."

She furrowed her brow then, collecting the thought. "It's the backflow. If I get too close and they're really feelin' something, it's hits hard and soon I'm not looking at it, I'm feeling it, too. And I really can't have that, can I? I'm meant to be putting arms back on, not worried that I'll never play violin again."

            "I"m standing on the outside. I don't stroll into any foyers of any palaces and that."

He broke into a grin, fiddling with the quill in his hand. "Neither do I." It was nice listening to Athena talk about Legilimency - more similar to his own approach because his skill emerged before his understanding of it. Not everyone had palaces or foyers anyway. Most people did not build such structures in their mindscape either because they didn't need to or they weren't inclined. Dreamscapes, of course, were different.

At the older woman's expression of concern, he sobered slightly.

"If you're standing on the outside, so to speak," Virgil spoke slowly, frowning, "then it might be easier for you to raise barriers against the backflow. We can try a few exercises to see what approach will work best..."

Years and years ago, when he first learned Occlumency as a boy, Yavin taught him by using various metaphors. Eventually they learned that metaphors were difficult to adapt to Virgil's way of learning but because of this he knew how other people understood mindscapes differently.

"Replicate what you think a backflow feels like, so that I can feel it. Try to permeate me," he decided after a pause. "I'll mirror the permeation, then we can experiment with different defenses."

What she thought a backflow felt like, little imp wasn't he? Athena wasn't even sure that was the word she wanted to use for it, having never really talked about it with anyone.

"Pull up your socks," she said with a wink, then sat back. She dropped her chin nearly to her chest, and closed her eyes. By way of demonstration, she called up a memory. She filled her mind with the space of the ward, then filled in the sounds and smells, then found her own body in it. Then, the girl on the table.

The girl had been delirious on the edge of consciousness after what was reported as an accidental manticore attack. Some part of the story wasn't lining up, so Athena reached out. She saw fear, which was to be expected, but then the fear flooded her.

Athena remember it like it was her own, even now at the table. She put it out on the table for Virgil to find, that the girl's fear wasn't about a manticore but about her older brother who'd brought her in. Later they'd found out the attack was no accident and the brother was booked.

"Bit like that. Comes at me like a wave. Might be more detail, might not," Athena said opening her eyes. Her smile wasn't as bright. She really didn't care for taking on others traumas - her job required detachment.

If the other Library patrons wondered at what this strange pair were doing, sat across from one another without a word, they did not exhibit any curiousity. Virgil's countenance had relaxed to something more neutral and he was looking at Athena without really seeing her: their minds were meeting, to share a particular memory. He allowed himself the time to acclimatise, to open his mind to it. Properly stepping into someone else's head, it was like looking at the world from a different angle.

Everything was different because people noticed different things in their physical or emotional surroundings based on a variety of past experiences. And Marrowbone's experiences were certainly rather varied.

His pulse picked up a touch, sensing the fear that had overtaken the Healer. The insidious and nauseating nature of it; Virgil swallowed, thinking of his own siblings for only a second. Adelaide would never. He would never, to Cecil. That's not what you did to people you loved, was it?

             "Bit like that. Comes at me like a wave." Athena finished, "Might be more detail, might not."

"Alright..." he sat straighter, stretching his arms overhead, fully serious now. "I can replicate that. Perhaps not as intensely. I'll try to flood you with the feeling, and I need you to try different ways of not letting it in. I think, to begin with -" Virgil bit his lip thoughtflly, "- um. You could imagine a wall. Fairly basic. It won't work, but your mind will move on to the next natural barrier, and the next and the next."

The young wizard rubbed the back of his head, blonde hair sticking up. "Trust your subconscious to do the detail work. It will, under constant assault."

Athena was rarely intimidated by a challenge or new thing to learn. A healer couldn't be, and even as a girl, anything exciting or strange she was the first volunteer, even if not asked. This moment was a bit different. It wasn't her body at stake, it was the exposed nerve of the mind. Her's felt unprotected and her strong arms and disarming smile weren't going to be enough to stop this practiced young wizard from coming at her.

She prepared and then Virgil was in her head. She saw him blurry, his form mixed with that of the memory of the girl. He was an adept mimic. And then the misty wave burst forth and Athena bricked up a wall in front of her mind's eye. Brick-brick-brick-brick, the wall formed but as Virgil predicted, it didn't stop the wave. It found cracks, it dissolved ceramic and mortar and it washed over her.

They tried again and Athena's mind constructed another barrier, this one a shield of shimmering quicksilver. The fear flowed around it, but found the edges and swept in on her.  Athena found this uncomfortable; she didn't really do vulnerable. But she also didn't do hiding. She never been able to escape notice, not in her entire life. Perhaps that could be...

And again, Virgil reset and produced the pulsing fear. This time, Athena felt a strong breath erupt from her chest. It met the oncoming emotion and split it. Athena moved to the side as the emotion flowed past her. She was surprised that she could observe it as it streamed by. And the flow was less worrying, less consuming, because she didn't take it into her. It passed and she saw the figure Virgil was using to represent the girl clearly.

Athena was not a barrier, emotions didn't need to be blocked or pushed away or pushed against. They could be contained but eventually they needed to move on, like a ghost after death.

Together they continued in this way, Virgil providing as much challenge as seemed helpful, Athena becoming more agile.

When they finished, Athena was weary but not beaten. "That's going to help. All this time, I was trying to fight it, but this is more compassionate. Don't need to experience to know it."

He had never taught any part of mind magic before, and hadn't known what to expect from trying to teach Occlumency to an accomplished Legilimens. Healer Marrowbone was relentless - which, in turn, pushed him to be the same every time he had to replicate the wave of emotion necessary to pushing past her defences. She caught on eventually: her method was different than some, who threw up walls. The witch quarantined and move the emotions onward, or at least tried to do that to varying extents.

His gaze flicked to the great clock that watched over the Library's many readers. There were more now than before, when he first arrived. Time had passed faster than he realised.

            "That's going to help. All this time, I was trying to fight it, but this is more compassionate. Don't need to experience to know it."

"Yes, I suppose." Virgil rubbed his face, shaking the stiffness out of his shoulders. "I like it that way, too. Everything just runs right through me," he had been doing it for years against Yavin's games and traps.

The wizard glanced down at their papers, and tapped his wand so that they shuffled together into a neat pile. "You'll get loads of practice in hospital, won't you? It gets easier," he tucked a quill behind his ear and smiled at her. "Would you like to meet again? In a month perhaps, to check on progress?"

     'Everything just runs right through me'

Athena didn't know him from Sam but she immediately believed him. There were either too many or too few or the wrong sort looking out for this little wizard. She had the sudden and distinct worry for anyone that pushed him to far. Maybe that was his innocent way that always belied a fighter below, or it could have been his steady stamina coming at her as part of their exercise.

The lesson was over earlier than Athena had thought, not by the clock but by her general habit to go until she couldn't any more. This would be a fun new thing: mediation. The rest of the day stretched before her.

"I've no doubt on that," she said with a broad smile. "Be mad to. Brimming."

Athena took her feet and put on her hat again. She tucked a blonde curl up inside, then tapped the table lightly with her knuckles. "Reckon we nknow how to find each other. Tarra, Virgil. See thee on the other side."

Fin