He began the Occlumency lessons at the start of third week of July, at the Wulfhall's main training space had become in the two weeks since the family arrived, a cleared room on the ground floor with the specific functional quality he had built in the Room of Requirements over three years.
Five students: Harry, Hermione, Ginny, Neville, Luna.
He explained it the way Snape had not explained it to Harry in the original timeline — not as combat but as architecture. 'The mind is not a room with a door,' he said. 'It's more like a building with floors. The surface floors are what people encounter when they look at you. The lower floors are where the things that matter live. Occlumency is not about hiding the lower floors. It's about controlling what the surface floors show and what they don't.'
'How do you build the surface?' Hermione asked. She had the notebook out, which he had expected, and was taking the kind of notes she took for things she intended to understand structurally rather than merely memorize.
'Deliberately,' he said. 'You choose what the surface is. Not nothing — emptiness reads as emptiness, which is itself information. You choose something real that is not the thing you're protecting. A genuine thought. A genuine feeling. Something that reads as the full picture because it is a full picture, just not the full picture.'
He demonstrated on Harry first — a gentle probe, nothing like the Legilimency attempt Dumbledore had made, the specific careful version of someone who had been practicing this skill since third year and understood the difference between the diagnostic and the invasive.
Harry's mind, unshielded, had the quality he had noticed in the original timeline — vivid, associative, the connections between memories and emotions strong and immediate. He was also, Ron noted, considerably quieter in there than he would have been before the third task. The specific turbulence that the Horcrux had contributed was gone. What remained was simply Harry, which was both more and less complex.
'You felt that,' Ron said.
'Yes,' Harry said. 'Like someone knocking.'
'Good. The first skill is feeling the knock. The second is choosing what answers the door. Try again — this time, when you feel me at the edge, put something in the way. Anything real.'
Harry tried. The something he put in the way was the Wulfhall's kitchen garden, which Ron moved through briefly before withdrawing. It was a genuine memory, fully formed, completely real. It communicated nothing he needed to protect.
'That works,' Ron said. 'Harry learns to build the surface,' he told the group. 'Now you.'
Ginny was the second fastest after Harry — she had a natural compartmentalization that Ron suspected had been developed during the second year possession, the specific survival skill of someone who had learned that keeping things separate was necessary, and which she had been building on ever since. Within two sessions she had a surface that was solid and genuinely natural rather than constructed, which was the advanced version.
Neville's challenge was different. His natural instinct was to try to hide rather than to misdirect, which produced the emptiness problem Ron had described in the first session — the surface was too quiet, which read as someone actively suppressing rather than simply not showing. He worked with Neville for three separate sessions on the distinction between quietness and naturalness.
By the third week Neville had it. The surface was his grandmother's garden — the specific warm familiar detail of something he genuinely loved, fully populated and entirely real. Ron moved through it once and withdrew and said: 'That's the one. That's your surface.'
Neville looked at him. 'It's Gran's garden.'
'Yes,' Ron said. 'Because you know it completely. There's nothing false in it. A Legilimens looking at that surface sees a person fully present in a thing they love, and moves on.'
Luna was the outlier.
He had expected this. What he had not expected was the specific quality of the outlier — not that she was difficult to teach, but that when he probed her surface, what he found was already structured in a way that had no recognizable equivalent in anything he had encountered. It was not compartmentalized in the conventional sense. It was more like the specific quality of her attention generally — entirely present, entirely genuine, and somehow moving in directions that were simply not the directions a standard Legilimency probe followed. He withdrew after thirty seconds.
'Luna,' he said. 'What were you thinking about just then?'
'The kitchen garden,' she said. 'Specifically the mint. I was wondering whether it would be more useful to let it spread or to contain it, and whether the spreading mint would affect the potions-grade properties of the adjacent herbs.'
'That's your natural state,' he said.
'Yes,' she said. 'Is it suitable?'
He considered this. 'It's more than suitable,' he said. 'Your natural surface is essentially a Legilimency trap. Anyone who probes it will follow the mint question and come out three minutes later having learned only about herbs.'
Luna received this with the quality she brought to information she found accurate. 'The mint is genuinely interesting,' she said.
'Yes,' he said. 'That's precisely what makes it work.'
Hermione was last, which he had arranged deliberately. She had been watching four sessions before her first, which meant she had the full theoretical picture before attempting the practical, which was how Hermione preferred to approach most things.
He probed her surface and found — architecture.
Not her surface as she experienced it, but the surface she had built: a fully realized space organized with the specific spatial logic she brought to everything she organized, each section opening into the next with the clean purposefulness of someone who had thought carefully about what she was constructing. It was the most deliberately built surface he had encountered outside his own, and she had built it in the four weeks since he had taught the first session.
He withdrew.
'You built that in four weeks,' he said.
'Three and a half,' she said. 'Once I understood the principle the construction was straightforward.'
He looked at her. She had the quality she had when she had done something she had put genuine effort into and was waiting to hear whether the effort had landed correctly. 'It's exceptional,' he said. 'The spatial organization specifically — you're using the architecture of the surface to redirect rather than simply to misdirect. That's an advanced technique.'
She absorbed this with the quality she brought to genuine praise — accepting it without deflecting it, which was something she had been getting better at since the birthday book. 'I was working from the library organization principle,' she said. 'The way the subjects relate to each other spatially. I just applied it to the surface.'
'Yes,' he said. 'That's exactly what you did.' He looked at her. 'I've been practicing this since third year. You've been practicing it for three and a half weeks.'
She looked at him with the expression she had when a genuine compliment had arrived from someone she respected. Her ears had gone slightly pink. 'Thank you,' she said.