Sailing off the Map

Only two things saved Evan from hating himself for how he felt when he first saw the squat angles of the Lancashire skyline with its thrusting industrial chimneys: he wanted to take Severus with him when he ran away, and he didn’t actually run.

He also didn’t throw up, though he wouldn’t have blamed himself if he had.  He’d just come from a highly civilized morning in Wizarding France where everything (except breakfast*) smelled like fresh bread.  In Lutetia, nothing smelled like an open sewer, no one was screaming at each other through open doors about hangovers or their correlations with being bad providers, and very little muggle-polluted dust had actively crawled down his throat.  Spike’s so-called town (Spike had once called it a five-hundred-family hovel, which was more accurate except for sounding too rural to account for all the concrete or the industrial fug) was rather a shock to the system, and portkeys were never much fun in the first place.  He’d said the place was all grey, but even the air looked unpleasantly brownish to Evan.

Mum and Dad liked French food almost as much as Narcissa’s nouveau riche suitor’s family thought it was a subtle way to show off wealth and taste, but Dad also liked protein with his coffee and Mum didn’t like butter on her fingers.  Fortunately, they’d found a hotel that understood foreigners didn’t always want nothing but toast or pastries in the morning and specialized in crêpes.  Evan had considered trying to be sophisticated by asking for fillings like theirs, but Mum liked combinations like feta and grilled grapes with some kind of spicy sausage and Dad’s had cooked bananas in some kind of hazelnut sauce. 

Evan couldn’t handle that sort of thing before at least two cups of tea.  He therefore accepted that he was English, thanked Merlin that no one expected sixteen-year-old boys to have good taste, and had his spicy sausage with mushrooms.  They put a creamy sauce with a lot of thyme on it without asking him, but since it was quite nice (and completely devoid of feta, hazelnuts, hot grapes, and greasy-sweet banana-smell, some of which he would have been willing to try at a different time of day) he accepted this implied criticism with grace and pleasure.

Mum, as a Black, was taken aback by his ability to accept criticism with grace and pleasure.  With some difficulty, Evan refrained from explaining about Skills Absolutely Required For Not Murdering One's Favorite Roommate.

Spike was waiting for him, wearing ill-fitting, much-used clothing that Evan desperately wanted to burn.  He was standing, still and watchful, in a way that people never did.  When there was something to sit on or lean against, people did that.  When there wasn’t they shifted their weight back and forth.  Severus stood between two dingy buildings whose bricks Evan was admittedly also highly motivated not to touch, but he wasn’t just avoiding them.  He was rock-steady with a loose spine and casual shoulders, as uprightly solid as a full-grown oak.  

This was new behaviour for Spike,  who tended to try to back into (often nonexistent) shadows when he was out in public.  However, Evan wasn’t very surprised, and not just because Spike had suddenly started holding himself in apparently lazy readiness all the time after the concussion.  The bricks might once have been yellowish, or creamy.  It was possible they’d once been smartly welcoming and cheery and hadn’t looked at all like blocks of dried sneeze.

The portkey and the stench had left Evan reeling in a crouch on the filthy muggle pavement   This was to say that it was muggle pavement, all big flat squares of nearly-smooth concrete except where some urban rodent had trodden in bits of it while it dried and where sparse blades of grass were gasping through the cracks, and also grey from the settled particulate matter of smog and littered with cigarette butts, mud, and tiny, almost decorative shards of brown and green glass.

Severus didn’t reach for him, and his eyes were carefully free of disappointment.  Even kind, in a careful, shuttered way.  “You don’t have to be here,” was the first thing he said.

“You don’t have to be here,” Evan retorted.  “You can spend the summer at mine.  All of it.  All you have to do is not say no.”

“No,” said Severus, mildly if predictably.  “I do belong here, you know.”

“You also don’t have to do that,” Evan told him, scowling.  Spike might come from here, but Sirius came from a Slytherin home and Evan came from silence.

Spike’s mouth twitched.  “You know you look like a grumpy sheep when you scowl.”

“I don’t like it when you act like you’re accepting the inevitable but it’s both horrible and not inevitable, either,” Evan informed him.

“...Either.”  Sometimes Spike had a way of asking questions that would make Binns sound, by comparison, as if he not only knew who you were but eagerly wanted to know every thought you’d ever had.

“It’s not an expression that suits you,” Evan explained, giving up on being offered a hand and getting up on his own.  “Like grumpy-sheep on me.”

Spike now had on the look that meant he was running the last thirty seconds backwards in his head, turning everything Evan had said sideways, and enjoying it more on the second go-round.

“Are you sure I’m not allowed to kiss you?” Evan asked plaintively.  “That expression suits you.”

“Which expression is that?”

Evan had to think about how to explain it.  He offered, “The one where you remember that I like you and that you rescuing me from being terribly bored while trying to impress my parents for many weeks straight without ever getting a rest from them is not me doing you a favour.”

Severus had to pause on that one.  Evan could see the moment where he decided to take on faith the quite incredible notion that someone liked him; his shoulders dropped an entire millimetre.  A week was clearly far too long to have left him alone with his family and his brain, even if Evans was bopping* around somewhere.  

She did actually bop.  Gryffindors did sometimes.  Evan had seen them do it.  The accompanying muggle music was, admittedly, catchy.

In true Spike fashion, he proceeded to pretend that this uncomfortable descent into soppiness had never happened.  “I’m quite sure that ‘having our skulls beaten in by idiots against whom we’d have trouble defending ourselves without getting arrested’ isn’t on the itinerary, so for the moment: yes, quite sure.  You may explain why I don’t belong in my hometown, though I’m sure I needn’t tell you that there is a wrong answer.”

“I said you don’t have to belong here,” Evan corrected him.  “I already told Grandpère about your brush cleaner; if you made enough to supply Rose & Yew until next summer you could stay with me every holiday till the end of school and be fed and use the firm’s equipment and get your cost of materials reimbursed and he’d still owe you more money than you’d need for a new wardrobe and school supplies.  And not just because of what we’d save on treating turpentine lungs and headaches.  You could leave with me right now and never come back again—or just for visits—and not be in anybody’s debt.  It would be a completely fair trade.  I’m not just saying that, Spike.  It’s a good solvent and we go through a lot of paint thinner.”

Choosing his words carefully, Spike said, “It’s a bit of a complicated situation with me mam.”

“I know,” Evan said, reaching out to his wrist.  “I didn’t say you should decide not to be here. I just said that you, like me, have other choices.”

“I see,” Spike said, his face relaxing as he understood that Evan had meant he wasn’t going anywhere on his own, thank you very much, no matter how smelly things got.  “Well.  We’ll keep that option in reserve, then.  Do you want to go straight to mine?  I’ve told Lily we might come by and see her; her home might be less of a shock for you and you could get used to things by degrees.”

“Oi!” A shadow intruded and a sharp voice prodded at them from the entrance to… it was an alley, wasn’t it?  Evan had seen them in paintings, but the only ones he’d ever noticed in person had been in Hogsmeade.  Those had been much more pleasant.*  “What are you boys doing a-lurking in there?”

And not just because of the cobblestones and grass.  The one next to the quillery had a shade-garden in it, and Honeydukes had let Evan and the Hufflepuff prefects put up a mural of firsties playing with fizzing whizbees and Globubbles and extra-large chocolate frogs and ice mice on their alley wall.  Evan had enjoyed painting the frost and light refraction on the ice mice, and they’d all won points from Flitwick for the charmwork.  Even Grandpère had said it wasn’t a bad effort for Evan’s first large-scale painting.

Spike’s (almost creepily) calm and polite explanation that his friend had had a sudden migraine attack and needed shade was assisted by Evan’s involuntary wince over the probably-a-policeman’s accent, which Spike was also suddenly using.  

Now that Ev knew Spike (as opposed to sharing a room with him while mostly attempting to ignore his entire existence) he felt a bit abashed about how much he hated that accent and how he had, back in first year, so vehemently encouraged Severus to stop using it.  This, however, didn’t mean he’d learned to like it any better.  He hated it less than everything that had come out of Avery’s mouth since their voices had all broken, but more than Binns reading something that would later be exciting when Spike explained it.

Evan let Spike handle the policeman, telling him that of course Spike knew about migraines ‘and suchlike, everyone knows you come to me mam for headaches and that; I’ve been helping her since I was three, ask anyone,’ and that Evan was wearing such odd clothes because he was from London and they were all the style.

Evan didn’t realize what was wrong with that until they were well away from the oddly hostile not-an-Auror.  But when he did, it knocked him for a loop, or possibly two.  “I’m not from London,” he said, trying to sound casual even though Slytherin’s hands-down worst liar hadn’t sounded in the least like he was lying.

Spike blinked.  “Oh, right,” he said, “Hampshire.  But Reggie and Cissa are both from London; I suppose I think of you all in a lump on matters of extreme toffiness.  You should try London, though; I expect you’d like it.  They’ve take-away and tailors and so on.  Though I prefer Nottingham, generally.  We should go while you’re here; it’s only a few miles.  They’ve a wizarding street; a bit like Diagon but less frenetic.  And considerably more trees.”

“...Why do I feel like you’ve just talked in circles around me?”

“I’m ever so sorry I momentarily forgot where your enormous fuck-off house that I’ve never seen with the t’rifficly special gazebo is,” Spike said, rolling his eyes and not even trying to sound sincere as his voice dripped humble syrup.  Evan relaxed.  In his normal voice, Spike shrugged, “It’s just as well, though.  Anything fancy and odd has to come from London or he’d have had more questions.  I might just as well have said ‘the moon,’ really.”

“I’m not fancy,” Evan protested.

Spike grinned at him, which was to say that Spike’s eyes crinkled and his mouth twitched slightly.  “Your waistcoat’s been dyed marbled.”

“Exactly!  It’s very subdued and subtle.”

“...Compared to the ones you wear on weekends, I suppose.  Ev, it looks like malachite.”

“I’m supposed to wear green.  I’m ginger.”

“Yes, but do you see any male person other than yourself anywhere in sight wearing a colour which doesn’t mean your potion has failed with a discouraged collapse and isn’t even going to bother exploding?”

Evan didn’t see any person at all other than himself wearing anything which qualified as having a colour at all.  Or, if he were to be perfectly honest, as clothes.  “My school togs are extremely fashionable and kids are allowed to wear the kind of fashion that’s colourful and experimental,” he insisted, giving Spike mildly sad eyes to avoid giving his opinion of what his friend, so clever in most respects not involving Gryffindors, had chosen to allow to droop exhaustedly on his long angles and crawl over his magnetic skin.

“Evan, you’re wearing a waistcoat that has a cape attached.  Your shirt is silk—”

“It’s just mulberry silk, Spike, not acromantula or anything.”

“Your shirt is raw silk.   Do you have any idea how much bother that is to keep clean.”

Evan opened his mouth to say that yes, he knew all about the .002 seconds it took Linkin to snap his bony fingers.

“You’re about to say something about your house elf.  This proves my point: muggles don’t have those.  Your trousers are tailored—well done not wearing the sort that froths around the ankles, though; I don’t think I could have explained those even if I’d said you were in a band—and your shoes are both polished and clearly not from Pound—er, clearly not from a store where you can buy anything in it for a knut.”

“That makes me fancy?” Evan asked dubiously.  His shoes weren’t even pointy, or scaly.  Siri had shoes with four-inch soles that looked like a Muggle British flag except when they flashed all sorts of eye-stabbingly bright rainbow colours.  Ev’s were a soft, sedate charcoal with polish that harmonised with the greens of his outfit without being so obvious as to exactly reflect them.  He could have worn them to the most formal Ministry meeting without embarrassing Grandpère.  

…Possibly this was Spike’s point.

“As does the side-ponytail.  And odd.”

Evan considered.  “Let’s give Evans a miss, then.  I heard her tell Ben Goldstein her sister’s very judgy about odd things, and I only have one more fight left in me for today, Spike.  Portkeys are awful.  And my dad wants me to like cubism.”

Spike eyed him solemnly for a moment, then stepped a little closer as they walked past long rows of smoke-darkened buildings with a front door every few yards, surrounded by the reek of defeat and dirty water.  As cracked pavement gave way to the familiarity of cobblestones he said quietly, “I will go home with you, you know.  Only: I mean to do this.”

Evan nodded understandingly, even if he himself would have preferred to loan Spike’s father to Bella for half an hour.  “And then you’ll let me hold your hand?” 

“Just as soon as that won’t attract violence, yes.”  He paused, scowling at Evan in a forestalling-him kind of way.  “Which is to say, neither out in town nor in my home when anyone’s there.”

Evan made a sad noise.  Spike nearly smiled.