"Kinda sorta!" he says. "I'm as ready as I'm gonna get, anyway."

"D'you think you managed to do anything? I mean, we'll test it, but how has it been going?"

"I can't really tell if anything works without, you know, trying it," he shrugs.

"All right. After dinner, d'you wanna try it?"

"Yeah!"

And lo, after dinner, they retreat to his room; it's Wednesday and she's staying out of her room till curfew. She sits and produces her vine wand. (She's developing a fairly good intuitive sense of when she'll get better results with one or the other, though she doesn't consider herself to have mastered a spell till she can do it with both.) "Ready?" she asks, looking into his eyes.

He nods.

She blinks, so she'll be able to maintain the read long enough to learn anything about his success or failure. "Legilimens," she says.

She looks, curiosity bridging seamlessly and unobstructed into seeing - what is he trying to hide?

Bella jerks her head backwards and closes her eyes. "Nng."

"Aww, shit," he says with a wince. "Sorry."

"I'm - I'm okay. Are you?"

"Yeah," he says. "I mean - no, but yeah. It's not fun to remember what he was like, but I'm used to it."

Bella nods slowly. "So - that didn't work."

"Nope," he agrees.

"Can you tell me more about what you were trying exactly?"

"I, uh... no," he says. "Not really. I mean, I was trying to do what you said the books said - clear my mind, move away from where you were."

"I mean - what were you trying when you tried to clear your mind?"

"...Not... think things?"

"I don't think that's - I'm making this up, but I have a sort of idea that what it's supposed to be is more like not feeling things? Like, focusing really hard on nothingness and if you have feelings about stuff then it just paints big arrows at stuff I could look at."

"...I am going to be so bad at that," says Feral. "So, so bad."

"You are? Why?"

"I have a lot of feelings," he says with a wry grin.

"And you can't put them on hold for a little to avoid making paths for me?"

"About as well as you could put not wanting your mind read on hold, I bet."

"I might be able to do that but it'd have to be really, really important," says Bella after a moment, "and it would be hard."

"Yeah," says Feral. "I mean, I kind of am my feelings, I don't even know what I'd be like without 'em."

"Maybe I should see if Sherlock or Tony will help," muses Bella. "...I don't know if they'd be up for it, though."

"I could keep trying," he says doubtfully.

"I'm not sure I can get good data out of you," Bella says, shaking her head. "If you have that much trouble with the basic principle, then if it doesn't work for you I still have no idea if I'm on the right track for me."

He shrugs. "Okay."

"Thanks for trying, though," Bella says earnestly, "it was really nice of you."

"What are friends for, right?" he says with a crooked grin.

She laughs. "Please don't try to read my mind just because we're friends."

"Not unless you asked!"

"I don't think I will. I guess I might if I thought somebody was definitely going to try to do it for bad reasons or was going to modify my memory? Because then I'd want to really know if I could fight them off or not and better you reading me for two seconds and not wanting to learn anything too private than somebody else doing worse. But even then I probably would ask Sherlock instead because I don't want to catch fire and because he's pretty close to mindreading sometimes anyway."

Feral giggles. "I don't want you to catch fire either," he says.

"I'm gonna go flying before it gets dark," Bella decides. "Thanks again."

"Have fun!"

Bella goes flying until it gets dark, then stows Terpsichore, reads about the history of the Statute of Secrecy in the library until it's nearly curfew, and then heads back to her and Sherlock's room.

Sherlock is present.

"Hi, Sherlock! So apparently Feral makes a lousy Occlumency test subject because he has really intense feelings about most everything and can't calm them down and stop painting me big glowy arrows towards his thoughts, so I don't have a good way to figure out if anything I have him trying would work for me."

Yeah, Bella's not sure she wants to outright ask on this one. If it weren't a big deal she'd be having someone try reading her directly. But: "If you ever feel like getting your mind read lemme know, but goodness knows I'll get it if you don't."

He nods slowly.

Bella flops onto her bed. "I think I'll try practicing clearing my mind anyway so I have half a chance if somebody surprises me. I guess I'm not short on other important stuff to occupy my time if I can't think of anything else to do there, though."

He nods again.