O Rose, thou art sick
—William Blake
In 1976, two days after Beltane and one day after the worst of his short and boring life,* Evan Rosier felt the dawning sun warm his coppery hair. Almost automatically, before even bothering to open his eyes, he reached down to check his best friend’s pulse.
* Even counting that Lughnasadh when Bella had taken the salted bread and tried to shove a whole loaf into Sirius’s mouth and Siri had reacted quite understandably and not a single one of the adults had taken any of it at all well. That was funny now it was over. There was nothing funny about yesterday, and never would be, and Evan was a little afraid of what he might do when his goon of a cousin inevitably insisted it had been hilarious.
Let’s not be overly dramatic; he had no fear that his friend was dead. When not painting castles in the air (literally. His favourites were the kind with stripy onion domes), Evan was a pragmatic boy. He only thought Severus might have lain awake all night, heart and thoughts racing like a glass-shard kelpie, instead of being comforted by the green blanket and sturdy form* shielding him from the world.
He wasn’t even worried about the concussion; the Pomfrey had assured him** that her monitoring charm was keyed to a technomantic device in the Infirmary (it looked like a metal flower, with petals that turned from white to red in warning) that one of the castle elves would be monitoring, and the elf would wake her if any of the petals blushed past pastel. She hadn’t been keen on letting Severus out of her domain for the night, but when a Gryffindor and Slytherin prefect both insisted that he wouldn’t be safe in public she’d given in and only kept him under personal observation for a few hours while the Bruised Brain Balm sank into his scalp.
* Evan was absolutely going to be off the team next year if Sluggy didn’t make him Quidditch Captain, so his Slug Club attendance this year had been rigorous and much more performative than he usually liked to be. He didn't much like feeling so responsible, but he’d grown several inches since winning the job. The Rosier blood seemed to be coming out quite strongly in him, and he suspected that by this time next year he’d be too shouldery to play Seeker competitively. He was sure he could get Reggie trained up to replace him in all the games that mattered by then, but if Mulgrew got the badge he wouldn’t think to train Reg properly and no one would stop Severus trying to eat bludgers like a total manebrain.
There’d also be a lot of stupid, obvious cheating which would do Slytherin’s reputation no good; Mulgrew didn’t think that making sure your plan made sense and was likely to work were important parts of the virtue of ruthlessness. But that aspect of the Quidditch Issue was only a problem for Evan because he knew Spike would get worked up about it.
**Along with Evans and little Perry Blakeney, who had both helped him both with getting Severus to the infirmary*** and with the yelling at everyone who’d watched the Gryffindor goons outrage someone who’d just been wandering around harmlessly reviewing his exam notes without doing anything about it. Blakeney had sobbed with a horrified, betrayed-by-the-cruel-world expression instead of yelling, which of course was much more effective since she was just a tiny, mousy-looking firstie. Evan was happily confident that she was going to Write Home About This. He rather doubted that Evans would—but then, it wouldn’t do anyone any good if she did.
*** Evans helped by casting the stretcher spell correctly the first time Ev showed her how, rot her talent even if he was grateful for it right now. Spike had made sure Evan knew it cold in theory, but it was much harder for him than the carefree wingardium. He could still only lift pillows without wobbling them and didn't dare try it on living things, not even (or, rather, especially not) Narcissa’s cat. Blakeney helped by making sure Severus’s frighteningly limp form was safely (or at least roughly) parallel to the ground and his robe was properly in place again. Evan himself helped by walking in front of them with a frozen smile that had every pureblood and magic-raised halfblood they passed leap out of the way of the procession and even seemed to put most of the students who didn’t know much about Blacks on edge.
So Spike was safe enough medically, and arrangements would be made for him to make up the missed DADA and Astronomy practicals if Ev and Narcissa had to have tea with every member of the Board of Governors and Ministry Exam Committee individually. But he was likely to be summoned to meet with Dumbledore as soon as the Pomfrey cleared him, and by then Dumbledore would already have heard the Gryffie trolls’ side. It would do him no good to go in exhausted and furious and maybe still in shock.
But when Evan reached for him, Spike’s wrist was warm and his pulse was sleepily regular, and before either of them had opened their eyes properly Evan was being kissed. This was delightful, though Evan wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
They had been kissing now and then for months without Evan thinking much about it except that Severus was awfully cute for a hawk-faced loon when he went over all hesitant and forced himself to be ambitious. Ev liked kisses, and the Seeker of a team who was doing well got a lot of them, and when he kissed Severus the way their magics eased together made it especially buzzy and hummy and time-erasing.
Then, after those terrifying weeks in early Spring when Severus acted like he was contagious and his eyes were nearly dead and he barely spoke, he’d come back from an undisclosed errand fully awake with brightly focused eyes again. All their focus had been for Evan.
Ev had instantly and without fuss or consideration become completely uninterested in his mother’s expectation that he explore the Hogwarts population for suitable marriage prospects. A nameless halfblood, however brilliant, obviously wasn’t one of those.
He’d already known that he’d rather be around Spike than anyone, and had been slowly realizing that he’d rather kiss Spike than have another go with anyone he’d tumbled. But when Spike had turned blazing black eyes on him and slid a hot, possessive hand under his jumper, Evan had decided that his primary criterion in a spouse was will have their own best friend and be happy to let us have this. So it wasn’t the fact of the kiss that threw him.
Confidence led it, as though Spike had been kissing him every day forever, and clinging desperation, as though they’d already been apart all summer and it had been as awful as Evan expected, much worse than previous summers. Spike’s narrow body had turned under him, and he was reaching unerringly and without hesitation for places that even Ev (who had been taking Mum’s wishes very seriously until this worst of all Aprils) hadn’t known could feel so nice.
Evan was, when he cared to be, a pragmatic boy. Though he knew himself to be selfish to an extent that only the least-socialised Ravenclaws would understand, he had been listening all those times Spike ranted about enlightened self-interest to their roommates. The idea had made perfect sense to him; it was the soul of both Hufflepuff and Slytherin, though Hufflepuff knew it only intuitively and most Slytherins he knew well didn’t seem to have caught the idea.
He knew he only cared about his own pleasure, but he also knew that these days what mostly pleased him (apart from a good meal and his hand closing around a Snitch and getting a painting so perfectly right that he was sure Grandpère would have less than a foot of crabbily calligraphed criticism) was seeing Spike contented and happy as they relaxed together, or Spike determinedly scowling, on fire to fix the world.
Spike would not be contented and happy if he realized Evan had let him act as if they were alone together when they weren’t. That meant there wasn’t a real choice. Evan had to take both his hands and move the kissing to them until Spike woke up a little more and Ev could explain that Avery and Mulciber hadn’t left for breakfast yet and the Pomfrey had an elf looking at Spike’s breathing and so on.
He considered that Spike froze a little more than the situation warranted, although Evan certainly agreed it was very sad that conditions made the warm early-morning interval they both would have liked unwise. Spike’s eyes moved slowly over him in sleepy pleasure before sharpening and widening, moved carefully all over the room, and then got stuck on the wall calendar, and that was also odd.
Admittedly, Avery’s calendars were odd. He was still cranky about Evan declaring their room a cat-free zone back in first year, so every year he brought a calendar full of unusually ugly cats, photographed in the act of being quite rude in ways that even Evan had found amusing for about two minutes when he was twelve. Since these cats didn’t leave their frames to leave other people’s pets dead on his bed or urinate all over the walls or yowl in his ear in the middle of the night*, Evan was happy to let Avery express his feelings this way.
Evan had been reliably informed (not only by Narcissa, Wilkes and Goldstein but by Cattermole, who doted on her pet rat and strongly felt that no feline belonged indoors) that none of the Slytherin girls in any year had cats who behaved like this. Evan got along well with most of the cats that draped themselves around the common room. He was on very good terms with Narcissa’s kneazle Salina, Wilkes’ weird, nosily friendly wavy-haired fellow with the long ears, and Goldstein’s beautiful Ketsele, a honey-colored Ceylon unimaginatively named by Goldstein’s Ravenclaw brother. Ketsele looked embarrassingly like a lioness for a Slytherin queen but was shy enough to make it funny. Nobody was exactly on good terms with Selwyn’s fold-eared half-kneazle Trollface, who was the exact colour of the common room carpet and quite reasonably hated all bipeds because of how often his tail got stepped on, but Evan shared with Salina a certain unlikeliness to move with jerky unpredictability (elegance, said Narcissa with approval. Laziness, said Spike with a disapproving fondness that seemed rather confused about itself) and Trollface preferred his lap to anyone but Selwyn’s, as long as Spike wasn’t being alarming nearby.
Ev thought that what Stripes and Stalksbynight were like had probably not been their own fault, even if Spike (known by both Salina and Ketsele as A Very Good Perch With The Best Scritchy Fingers) was right that all cats were at least a little bit possessed by demons. It was just that Avery rewarded Stripes for bringing him hunting trophies and Mulciber should never have been put in charge of so much as a pet rock.
“...Yesterday,” Severus uttered, in a slow, hollow, underwater voice.
“You fell on your head and missed the DADA and Astronomy practicals,” Evan said in the brisk tone he knew would help Spike feel like his world was, if still on fire, at least also being rained on. “If you try to stop me making sure you get to make them up, I’ll sit on you.”
“...I called Lily…”
“A 'ministering busybody who should stop sabotaging her fairy-princess-next-door reputation because getting help from a girl just makes boys look pathetic and therefore only makes things worse for you,'” Evan quoted. Spike’s eyes snapped so wide they almost looked round and the rest of his face went alarmingly blank, so Evan waved a reassuring hand and smiled, “Don’t worry, she knew you were in a state and I don’t think she’s planning to punish you too much for the fairy-princess crack. Last I saw her she was marching to the library muttering about the health effects of Macky’s mow, which frankly sounds like something to do with lawn care to me, so—”
“Can you possibly mean ‘machismo’?”
“I have no idea,” Evan said cheerfully. “But I expect she’ll forgive you for telling her the sad and stupid truth about Gryffie boys—you do remember you're not one, right?—after she’s yelled at you about it a bit and made you wear a tiara to lunch, and I’m sure that I and half the castle will know what she was on about after that. That witch has lungs, Spike.”
“I heard,” Avery began announcing with sadistic glee, pulling back their curtain (technically it was Spike’s curtain, but Ev had tied their bedposts very securely together in mid-April after Severus had started having screaming nightmares, so it hardly mattered now) to reveal his Wimborne Wasps pyjamas, socks whose polka-dots slowly shifted into pumpkins and back, and acnified face, a sad symphony in spots and begging to get mauled by a cranky pre-tea Severus. Evan really did not understand him, and not just because three patterns was too many for a fellow to wear at once even at night.
Spike, still lying flat under Evan with his hands held, blinked up at Avery with disfavour. Before Avery could finish his sentence, he was shoved without ceremony back into his own bed. No hand on him, no word spoken, no wand drawn. It was just like that first night in first year when Evan had come back from an errand to find Avery and Mulciber unconscious on the floor and Snape examining the shower like the two of them not only didn’t matter but didn’t exist. Ev was impressed and entertained all over again, as well as pleased that Spike had decided to work out his embarrassment over Evan's gentle reminder on someone else.
“Mulciber,” he called lightly over Avery’s outraged fight with his curtains, because Ev didn’t feel that Spike needed to have another fight first thing in the morning even if Spike was in a fighting mood, “don’t you think you and Avery had better get to breakfast?”
Into his pillow, by the sound of it, Mulciber grumbled, “I don’t have to rush a Saturday morning just because you and Snape want to shag.”
“No,” Severus inserted himself, his cold, smiling voice just barely laced with poison and menace, “you have to rush a Saturday morning because if you walk anywhere with me today it will be taken as a political statement.”
There was a startled pause. Not only had none of them ever heard Spike use that tone before, they’d never heard anyone do it so skin-crawlingly. Even Luke Malfoy at his most sneeringly polite didn’t come close. Avery was still cursing a blue streak as he fought to get untangled from his bed drapings, but background noise like that didn’t count against a Slytherin silence.
Then Evan said, thoughtfully, “Good point,” at the same time that Mulciber protested, in an almost touching display of House solidarity, “I’ll fight those ruddy wankers any time; it’s nothing to do with you.”
“That, Rosier, is a sterling example of the spirit of machismo. However, wordplay points for tying their House colour to a swear word,” Severus said judiciously. His eyes had a slightly wild but contemplative cast; it looked to Evan as if he’d decided the world had gone mad and the only thing to do was stay afloat.
In the end, the three of them went to breakfast without Spike. Spike’s absence was more usual than Evan’s presence; Spike often skipped the eating part of breakfast even when he had to show up, and Evan liked to sleep in on weekends. But he had to talk to people.
Narcissa first, of course; there was no thinkable alternative. She was paler than usual with darker makeup; her eyes blazed glacier ice over the sharp, impeccable pleats of her robes. She’d plaited her hair in a coronet and secured it with—well, probably charms, but apparently with a golden sickle, turned up like horns at the back of her head. Evan hadn’t seen her look so martial since Andromeda had sent certain family members her post-elopement address and firm instructions to act like good children and say what their elders wanted to hear so that decent people would take over the family eventually without all the complications of having to form a new one. He was pretty sure that Sirius had been so mad that his copy had burned up in a flare of accidental magic before he’d read the whole thing, but of course Siri had been so angry at everyone for the last few years that he wouldn’t have done as Andi asked anyway.
Narcissa forebore to comment on Evan being awake and upright, instead gesturing him to sit in the space that her crystallized wrath had kept empty for him. She told him the rumours she’d heard and silently expected him to correct her with an accurate report. He told her that he’d only come in at the end when Goldstein had come to find him and what he'd found, and then they both looked at little Blakeney (since she’d been solidly helpful and Goldstein was absent, being one of the people who went to the kitchen for meals when stressed. Evan’s eyes slid to the chipmunk-child first, and Narcissa’s followed with far more emphasis) until she felt their gazes and, alarmed, stood up from her eggs to join them and explain.
Once Narcissa had heard the whole story (Evan hadn’t heard how it had started before, either, but he was saving thinking about that part until he could talk to Mum and Grandpère about how completely you were allowed to destroy your relatives) she raised her eyes to one of the Slytherin banners on the walls (the ones hanging from the ceiling were yellow this year, and likely to be blue next week) and left them there for a long, angry minute.
Knowing his cousin, Evan had already gone with Blakeney to re-warm her eggs for her (it was what Severus would have done, and Evan agreed with absent-Spike that it wasn’t fair for her to help and then be stuck with cold eggs), so he was ready to casually follow along when Narcissa stood up abruptly to cross the room with a graceful, unconcerned pace and a pleasant demeanor.
At the Gryffindor table, Lily Evans was being reproached by James Potter and hissed at by Sirius. An alarmed Pettigrew and a rightly ashamed Lupin were trying to pretend they were miles away, and her girl friends were defending her hotly against Evan’s stupidest cousins while also making it clear they agreed with said cousins that she made bad choices and had bad taste. It was almost supportive, if you allowed for the way Gryffs couldn’t resist judging everything and took Spike’s resting sphinx-face personally. Evan wasn’t inclined to make that allowance this morning.
“Won’t you join me for breakfast, Evans?” Narcissa ordered, with a pleasant smile that nearly made it a polite request, ignoring Sirius’s scramble for his wand.
This being unprecedented, the entire Hall hushed to pin-dropping point within about seven seconds. Evans looked angry and scared for a minute, then was pulled into an inaudible conference by her alarmed roommates when she’d just opened her mouth to reply. Whatever they said left her jutting her chin out like a true manebrain, but their almost visible whispered assurances that they’d watch her back at least meant she wasn’t being truly stupid when she stood up with a civil smile and agreed.
Meanwhile, Evan had stopped at the Hufflepuff table (he wasn’t sure if Narcissa had lost her mind enough to invite Evans back to the Slytherin one, but it didn’t seem like a good time for him to lose his), cordially asking the Head Girl if there was room for them. There might be some bother, he explained apologetically, but they didn’t mean to trouble her badgers and he thought she’d approve of their intentions.
“Will I really?” she asked, giving him a beady eye that, despite the skills handicaps implied by her yellow-striped tie, communicated very clearly to Evan that she knew nothing about him except that he was Slytherin and a Black relation and tended to drowse off during prefect meetings.
He gave her a Rosier smile, all soft, sleepy petals with hooked prickers underneath, and he knew his hooded eyes had gone a blue closer to silver than green. “Should we encourage Gryffindors to be champions or bullies, do you think? Should we let someone get picked on for helping her friend?”
“Right,” she said decisively after taking a moment more to make sure he meant it than to think about the question. Evan thought well of her for this; he’d phrased the question so a Hufflepuff could only answer it one way, and Spike would have called her ‘unusually perky spacious’ (or something like that, but meaning clever) for noticing.
But, in the end, a Hufflepuff could only answer it one way. Everyone had seen the way Potter wouldn’t take a no from Evans, the way Sirius and their little blond friend sometimes got nasty at her over it behind Potter’s gracious back even when Spike wasn’t involved. Only a Gryffindor could be enough of a blockhead to think this could ever be ended by Evans standing up for herself all by herself. Courage was not, all by itself, magic. Numbers very nearly were, even if you weren’t taking Arithmancy. Which Ev was.
As a result, when Evans stood up, she and Narcissa were enthusiastically welcomed by all the older Hufflepuffs as they took their places near Evan. They were all drawn into an intense, happily shouty, table-long conversation about whether the Tornados had a chance this year. It was a bit sledghammerish, but Evan still admired the Head Girl for it; she wasn’t meant to be subtle, and she’d slammed the mostly-harmless conversation down on the table far too swiftly for any of her wide-eyed kits to have a chance to ask awkward questions.
Narcissa managed to be the main antagonist without a single sneer, having turned an affable conversation into a hot debate almost as quickly as it had started by brightly insisting that the Arrows were the best team by miles. Evan knew she only backed them because pale blue was one of her favourite colours, but since they did stand a fair chance this year the Hufflepuffs seemed to think she was serious. Evans, equally sports-ignorant, made a spirited argument for the Harpies, accurately claiming that the female of the species was deadlier than the male even though Ev didn’t think she’d ever even met Bella.
Evan’s self-appointed job was to hook in anyone who wandered over, whether they came in solidarity or just to listen in long enough to find out what on Myrddin’s green earth was going on. By the time the professors came in (apparently from a too-early meeting that had gone well over schedule, from the way they were huddled together in a haggard, bleary, coffee-scented lump of wariness enrobed by a stern determination to embody authority), more than half the school was either crammed into the Hufflepuff table or turned to face it with plates on blue-socked knees, yelling fervently about streaks, probabilities, momentum, and statistics.
Evans’s friends had come to sit with her after a few minutes, though after Lupin’s useless, apologetic face had been summarily declared ‘pitiful’ by Narcissa and ‘not good enough’ by Evans the Head Girl had sent him to tutor some younger kids at the far end of the table.
This wasn’t happening, because Perry Blakeney had finished her eggs and was reading with meek-toned fury to the wilted Lupin, twice her height, from a leather-bound 1788 prefect’s manual. So many first through third years from the outer tables had decided this was interesting that they were spread over the floor with their plates, like a red-and-green speckled oil spill. Reggie had come diffidently up to slip between Evan and Narcissa, trailed by most of the other Slytherins in his year (some of them were extremely crazy, but most of the creepier ones could read a room and the one with more hair than brains was magnetically attracted to drama).
Once the conversation had enough momentum that it could do without her, Evans turned to Evan and hissed (too loudly), “What is going on?”
Evan tried to think how to explain it to her. It had something to do with doing the right thing, and how that was hard for a lot of people even when they wanted to, especially when they were taken by surprise, so sometimes you had to give them another way to stand up once they’d had a chance to breathe. And there was also something there about how approval was a very strong kind of power, and a lack of consequences could work like approval, and how showing one’s opinion could sway the intentions of people who had to make decisions, especially if it was many ones’ opinions.
But everything around him was very noisy, and it was hard to think. It was especially hard to think about something that was likely to rupture his cool chrysalis if he tried, and this was not the time to have any feelings. After all, he still didn’t know how upset Mum would be if he discreetly murdered his cousins.
So he just said, “Loyal people should sit here, shouldn’t we? Anyway, I don’t see what moral justice has to do with playing Quidditch; the Harpies’ Keeper just got poached by the Falcons so even if you like their hiring philosophy I can’t see them having much of a chance relying on their reservist. Wrestworth dodges left every time; don’t try to tell me none of the Beaters in the entire league have noticed.”
Evans looked for a moment like she was going to protest and drag him back on topic. Then she looked at his hands and her eyes softened, and she went on to defend the Harpies in what Evan considered to be an inappropriately sympathetic way. He considered whether this bolstered Spike’s position that his Gryffie friend wasn’t actually a complete idiot with no sense of self-preservation. He decided it must; she must have decided not to poke his iced-over fury, not backed off for any other reason. Because his hands were completely steady, thank you.
It wouldn’t have been true to say that the Slytherin and Gryffindor tables were bare of everyone who didn’t personally and intensely dislike Spike. There were also plenty of Gryffindors who’d fallen asleep in their porridge or were frantically cramming for the next week’s exams instead of staring at the noisy crowd in suspicious confusion (Potter) or curled-lip disdain (Sirius, who, unlike his bricks-for-brains chum, probably understood what his cousins were trying to do). The other end of the hall had a smattering of Slytherins who were being cautious (Rowle) or had no political instincts and were just excited not to have to fight for the bacon (Avery) or couldn’t be bothered to care about a half-blood even if all the Black cousins were making a blatant public announcement that they did,* not even as a matter of Slytherin solidarity (Mulciber).
* And all the Black cousins currently at Hogwarts did care very much about Severus, every one of them. It was just that Sirius (as usual) did his caring from a different angle.
But the Heads certainly had not walked into a normal Saturday morning breakfast. Severus was going to completely blow his top over having such a fuss made over him. He was going to shout and rave about Narcissa and Evan and Reggie putting themselves in harm’s way, even though anybody with a scruple of common sense would know that harm to them was not going to happen. This certainty gave Evan a bit of warmth he could almost feel through the frozen slabs of enraged calculation, but not enough to let Spike’s lack of self-esteem have its way.
“Goodness,” said the Sprout, pleased and relieved, and she and the Flitwick started making the tables long enough for the kids on the floor. Sluggy affably chatted his way around the central mob with his coffee while the Tartan joined Dumbledore at the head table, predictably doing her supervisory duty while also-predictably not knowing what to make of her students today or engaging with them in any way. Dumbledore was smiling up there, warm and meaningless with sharp and thinking eyes.
Sluggy did ask about Spike when he reached the head of the Hufflepuff table, in a roundabout way that implied Spike was, understandably but childishly, sulking. “He didn’t know what day it was when he woke up,” Evan said, chilly and cordial, making Evans gasp. “I hope he’s got back to sleep.”
“I shall have the elves send him a tray,” Slughorn conceded.
Slughorn and Severus disagreed about everything and food was no exception. However, Evan might want a tray of food picked out by Slughorn if Spike also skipped lunch, so he thanked Slughorn for the kind thought. He’d bring Spike a couple of apples and some bread and butter himself, since Spike couldn’t keep cheese down when he was even ordinarily stressed. Besides, positive attention from Slughorn was positive attention from Slughorn.
Spike would hate even that, of course—Spike was going to hate everything about what Evan and Cissa were doing—but Spike was a very bad judge of what was good for him and if he’d wanted any control over Narcissa he should have let Evan persuade him into going together to get breakfast in the kitchen with Goldstein. And Ev, concerned about rapid-onset ulcers and stress-vomiting on an empty stomach, had really tried.
“Professor Dumbledore will want to see him, you know,” Sluggy warned.
Evan wondered what cutting thing Spike would have come back with to express a complete lack of surprise that the person who’d been attacked would be expected to defend himself to an authority who had consistently failed him but still liked to pretend they were chums. Before he could think of anything (because of course Spike never defended himself properly), Evans was frowning prettily up at Slughorn and asking, “Aren’t you going to check up on him yourself, Professor?”
It was good to see Sluggy faced with that directly. He handled it ably, if not satisfactorily, making jovial excuses as he retreated about self-sufficient young men not wanting to be bothered with old duffers like himself. Technically true—Spike would not want to see Slughorn—but Evan saw his own neutral expression mirrored in Narcissa’s more delicate face. More to the point, Slughorn saw it on them both, and Evans’s scowl and Reggie’s troubled look to boot.
When the Slytherins sitting at the central tables were starting to look their way for permission to leave, Narcissa turned to Evans (to whom she had not actually been speaking until now, since being friendly to Spike’s muggleborn bourgeois disaster-friend was not the point of the exercise) and said, “If my cousins give you trouble over this, you may tell them that I can and will make their lives unbearable.”
“If our idiot cousins, meaning Sirius and Potter, give you trouble over this,” Evan corrected Narcissa, “tell them that when they hurt someone they don’t like just because they feel like it, all their ancestors on Siri’s mum’s side of the family would be very proud.”
Narcissa’s ice-face went small-lipped, as it often did on the rare occasion when she had to admit that someone who disagreed with her had made a good point. “A gross exaggeration, but I suppose they’ll have more trouble pretending not to care about that.” She stood up, raked cool eyes down the table, and swept off. The speed at which half the Slytherins (including some who hadn’t joined the jolly hubbub) abandoned their remaining breakfasts to follow her out was, Evan felt, very funny. He almost wished Spike had been there to see it. McGonagall saw it, and the way her lips pinched would have been even funnier if it hadn’t been a bit concerning.
“Did he really not know what day it was?” Reggie worried. Evans leaned in, just as anxious. They were paintworthy together in that moment, physical complements united by the absent Spike, who Reggie resembled when he was next to Evens even though he didn’t really look like Spike at all.
Shrugging, Evan said, “He did look rather confused when he saw the calendar, but in fairness so was I, for a second. Avery forgot to turn the page over until yesterday and the June cat picture was, er, sitting in a position in which I personally would not like to be photographed.”
“I can photograph you if you’d like!” Lockhart volunteered, popping up just behind Reggie. Reg was so startled that his tea almost went all over Evans (which would not have been a tragedy except that they were supporting her today), but he knew what his roommate was like so being surprised was his own fault. “I’ve just learned how to use the flash!”
“I can provide my own flash, thanks.” Evan smiled meaninglessly at the nuisance and stood up with a polite nod of farewell to Evans. He’d scarcely left before her own friends were sensibly forming a phalanx around her, so she’d be perfectly safe if she followed his advice. Dumbledore was still sitting at the head table, anyway, keeping his eyes on things while he chatted with his colleagues.
Back in the dorm, Spike had not gone back to sleep—not that Ev had really expected him to. He’d expected to walk into either a black despond or a fury of revision-in-denial. Instead, a bookless Spike was calm but very intense and extra-pale as he wrote what looked like a to-do list in handwriting more spidery-elegant than his usual trying-too-hard. Since Ev had left for breakfast he’d apparently found a way to shake off the potion the goons had snuck him recently that had turned his body into a witch’s; all his clothes fit right and he looked properly himself again, long stubborn chin and all.
He also looked so blank-faced and wary that Evan went right for him and sat on his lap, turning the list face-down without looking at it because he’d know when Spike needed him to. He cheerfully announced, “Narcissa and I have made a giant but very friendly scene for which I think we don’t owe the Hufflepuffs anything, er, probably, and everyone is terrified and no one is going to bother Evans more than once because I told her what to say to the goons and so I put it to you, Spike, that I deserve to be kissed.”
Spike’s face warmed up so fast that Evan could almost hear the thud of a drawbridge falling. He made Ev explain more, but at the end of it he said quietly, “I thought it might be too soon, but you are my Evan, aren’t you.”
Evan thought about this. It probably was too soon, when he looked at the question as if it were someone else’s problem. They’d only kissed for the first time last year. It had only been two months, if that, since they’d started sleeping together, and less than a month since Spike had let that mean more than literal sleep. Mum had been very clear that even adolescents who were very sure of their very strong passions were very liable to change their minds by adulthood.
On the other hand, Evan wasn’t sure that the passions Mum had described (a highly uncomfortable letter coming from one’s parent, but he did appreciate that she was trying harder to mum these days and at least it hadn’t been a conversation) matched up with what he felt for Spike.
Or, at least, he did think it was a crime and a cruelty that he couldn’t touch Spike all the time and kept thinking at inconvenient moments about Spike’s hands and eyes and cheekbones and shoulders and trousers and the high arches of his feet. And Evan did feel quite fond about things that had annoyed him before they were friends and that he knew perfectly well would still rub him the wrong way coming from anyone else, like Spike’s awful native accent and unkind tutoring habits. All of that fit neatly into Mum’s description of passions that a young wizard might grow out of and which ought not to be taken too seriously.
But also: Spike’s magic fit with his. He felt awake around Spike in a way that he didn’t with anyone else, and Spike calmed down and acted safe around Ev in a way that he didn’t even with Evans. Everything including nothing was better when they did it together.
Even if Mum was right about passions, Evan couldn’t imagine being alive or a portrait and not wanting to see what Spike would take it into his lunatic head to do next, or not wanting to help Spike do whatever he’d insanely decided that the world needed him to. Or rather, he could, and the prospect struck him (as he’d been forced to realise during his DADA practical yesterday when the boggart came out) as intolerably cold, lonely, and dull.
Presumably there were other unpredictable people in the world, and some who cared too much. Maybe one or two of these even thought in a sensible Slytherin way that Evan could understand.
Would they also understand Evan? Trust him, admire that when things got sticky he found himself just doing things without even a second’s thought? Would they value his art even though he wasn’t a strong spellcaster? Love opening Evan’s mind to new ideas? Could any of them be desperately serious and funny almost all the time, or any of the other ten thousand things about Spike that were still captivating even once Evan had already figured them out?
No, it was very sad for Mum, but Evan’s spouse was going to have to be almost exclusively a business partner.
“If I’m not now,” he said eventually, noting with pleasure that taking this question seriously seemed to have been the right thing to do, “I expect it’d take something a lot worse than yesterday to stop it happening, as long as you’re my Spike.”
“Such as?”
Evan thought some more. He couldn’t think of anything terribly likely, so he shrugged.
“If I killed someone?” Severus suggested, not curiously but steadily, as if waiting for a blow.
“If that someone was me,” Evan said dubiously.* “And it wasn’t because I was in for a long horrible death anyway, or something like that. Or Narcissa or Reggie, I suppose, also assuming you didn’t have a really good reason. Or if you died, of course.” He had to admit that if Spike’s brain had been hurt so badly that he wasn’t himself anymore at all it might be hard to stay interested, but only to himself. And he was sure Spike would rather be killed than have his empty shell eternally looked after, anyway.
* It wasn’t that he felt there was anything strange about this discussion. Severus started little what-if talks with him about morality all the time, and would have with Narcissa except that she wasn’t interested. These usually had to do with classes—mostly history and DADA, but it happened in all of them, from time to time, usually when Spike had found a nasty use for a perfectly innocent spell like the accio .001 seconds after learning that it existed.
And Evan had been expecting Spike to feel raw and insecure this morning. He’d expected it to be much worse than Spike seemed so far, in fact. It was just that even Spike’s revenge plans for the Gryffindor boys were always about humiliating rather than hurting them, and when he did try very hard to hurt them in fights he didn’t go for the throat or any internal organs. He couldn’t see Spike killing anybody unless it was the only possible way to stop someone from being badly hurt. Spike, he had to agree with Narcissa, was a complete squish, though he wasn’t sure she was right that it came of being raised mostly muggle.
Severus’s expression went wonky, but in a much better way—taken aback and quirky, like he’d gone after Professor Flitwick had nearly been hit by a bludger at the Gryff-Raven game last year. Their shortest professor had been in the front row, of course, and had flinched so hard he’d fallen off his pile of cushions right over the railing. Dumbledore had got a floating charm in extremely quickly and the Tartan’s, Spike’s, and the Head Boy’s had all been nearly as fast, but the grass under Flitwick had also shot up to grab and cushion him, improbably flush with soft brown spikelet flowers, well before Flitwick had been able to get his own hand on his wand. Kids with allergies had a bad Spring that year, but Flitwick and the Sprout had been delighted with Evan, and Spike had kept giving him these soft, astonished, warming looks that were trying to be impassive for at least a week.
“What if,” Spike asked slowly, “it were Lily, or my mum. Wouldn’t you be frightened? Wouldn’t you think you might be next?”
“But you’d only do it if they needed you to or the world would blow up if you didn’t or something,” explained Evan, who had been required to owl-order himself some comic books when he’d first been introduced to pointillism and was still wondering whether, if he got some more, the stories and waist-to-hip ratios would start to make sense. “I’d be worried about you, of course, because it’s not like you and I’d be afraid you were under Imperius or similar, and you’d be very upset when you came out of it. But even if you had to kill them you’d be nice about it—”
“Nice about it.”
“Sorry, Spike, but I don’t see you going at someone with a crucio or thumbscrews or anything.”
“....Sorry,” Spike repeated blankly, eyeing him.
Evan shrugged. He could never quite predict when Spike felt expected to pretend he was very tough and unfeeling, although lately he’d been getting the feeling this was less likely to happen when they were alone. “I suppose if you really took against them you might yell at them first to make sure they knew what they’d done wrong. But if you made it really painful for them, you wouldn’t be you, obviously, and I’d have to go find you or get someone to break the curse or whatnot. But since, as long as it was really you, you wouldn’t be really hurting the people you killed, I wouldn’t have to be scared. I’ve got portraits already, Spike. I don’t want to go in them yet, but I don’t have to be scared.”
There was another of Spike’s slow, bemused silences, and then his hands flexed a bit, his taut shoulders lowering. “You do know, do you, that you’re completely mental.”
“You like me anyway,” Evan assured him, 75% confident about it.
“I like you because, you idiot space alien,” Spike scowled at him, hot and fierce about it.
Now at 95% confidence, Evan slid his hands into Spike’s hair. Which looked awful, of course. Spike had obviously showered while the rest of them were at breakfast, and he’d used the shampoo that meant he’d planned to hit the cauldrons today (which was probably a terrible idea but Evan couldn’t argue with wanting one’s own body back to normal), but as always it was light and silky over the backs of his fingers. “I know,” he smiled. “That’s my point, really. That I’m your Evan if you’re my Spike,” he repeated when Spike’s confused face showed he’d lost track of things.
“Then,” Severus said after one more long, considering pause, developing one of those crooked pieces of a smile that Evan always wanted to bite as his arms around Ev went deliciously snug, “I conclude that you not only deserve to but may be kissed.”
Quite some time later when they were quietly curled up together (Avery and Mulciber tried to get back in at one point, but evidently Severus had geniused up not only a fix for his unwilling sex change but also a better locking spell), Spike stopped trying to re-read his Arithmancy notes and asked, “Ev?”
“Mm?” Evan’s problem with Spike’s Arithmancy notes had something to do with Evan’s current ability to focus, but more to do with Spike’s handwriting. They weren’t as bad as Spike’s annoyed face had been suggesting, though.
“What would you say if I wanted to spend the summer together?”
Evan gave this as much thought as he had the earlier question, and quite a lot more than he had the whole thing with Narcissa and Evans and the Hufflepuffs. “My parents won’t like the idea, so it could be tricky to arrange. I’m not sure how, to tell you the truth, not just yet. But I’ll make it happen if you let me.”
Severus closed his eyes, let out a long breath, and fell asleep on him almost instantly.
Less than two minutes later, Madam Pomfrey showed up in alarm at what her monitoring spell had shown her (it was a ten minute walk from the Infirmary even at a dead run; Evan didn’t think their conversation had been all that alarming, but admittedly Spike had been having the worst week imaginable). Fortunately, Spike’s amazing new locking spell kept her pounding on the door long enough for them to get dressed.
When Evan eventually failed at not snooping into Spike’s list he found (somewhat to his relief) that it had been written in code, or Hebrew, or possibly Parselscript, if that existed. Once the snooping had been admitted to, Spike shot down all of Evan’s guesses, very smug. The code, apparently, was named ‘Cling On,’ but Evan couldn’t find out anything about it even when he broke down and asked Professor Babbling.