Summer, 1992
“Alright?” Tobias asked his commis for the week, frowning. They’d made it to a smoke break after the family meal, and Alex was staring at nothing like he’d popped off on the downers, or something, and it just didn’t feel right.
“Yeah,” Alex said, after a long minute. The key indicator of a problem was that he didn’t really smoke. Neither did Tobias, but the day’d been rough. Already.
In a good way.
“Can I do anything?” Tobias tried.
Alex snorted, like it was a funny question.
Tobias rankled instinctively at that. He’d been trying.
“No, it’s not – don’t be offended.” Oh, that nose. Tobias exhaled, tried to pretend to be pissed off at what he thought other people might see as an intrusion of privacy or something just to mess with him. (Other people who didn’t have a wife who could read minds.
Not that she’d liked to do it. It had been fantastic though.)
“Never,” Tobias told him, and put his cigarette out.
“Fucking hell, man,” Alex said. “Alright.” He exhaled. “Alright. My girlfriend. She’s pregnant.”
“Ummmm. Congratulations?” Tobias figured.
“No, thanks, yeah. I’m cool with it. It’s twins.”
“Oh.” Tobias blinked. “Shit. Okay.”
“Yeah. They’ll be. I’m just.” He fidgeted, obviously agitated, and then looked around – it was summer, it was busy, they were effectively alone. Birmingham being a busy city; but this was a back alley for the kitchen staff to take a break and catch a smoke.
“It’s two more little people. To raise and love and then tell them that they’ve got to lie about what they are forever or fuck knows what, and they’re going to have to learn to suck it up about the hate and the legal crap let alone the comments and the shit and to be honest, I’m just having a shit day. I’m sorry man.”
Well fuck. “Alex,” Tobias tried. “Uh. So. My wife died, right? But uh. She was Jewish? Her parents were Jewish. So so’s my kid.”
Alex looked at him for a very long moment.
“I didn’t know that,” he said, eventually.
“It’s not the same, I’m not saying that it’s the same thing,” Tobias carried on, “but he doesn’t tell anyone, I don’t think, and she didn’t used to like to mention it.” He paused. “The world is full of shitty assholes, fuck them.” He closed his eyes. “I think I miss Fen. Haven’t seen him in an age but we used to twat around a lot. We were stupid kids at the same stupid time, you know?”
And Alex laughed at him, and it was the best thing he’d heard all day, and he’d heard some great things all day.
“You call everyone under thirty a kid.”
“My kid’s thirty one this year.”
“Fuck off,” Alex said, good naturedly. “But I mean. I.” He looked at Tobias sideways. “You mean you two knew each other as adults? Or literally children?”
“Our twenties, was when we met,” Tobias confirmed, memories buzzing around in his head. “Well. I was. He’s three years younger than me. Three exact years,” he smirked. “When you’re twenty one that seems like a very significant amount of time.”
“Shit,” Alex said, and then they stood in the Birmingham summer buzz and didn’t talk for a while, and Alex looked at his fingernails a lot. “Thanks again, yeah,” he said, eventually.
Tobias blinked, not liking that one bit and not sure immediately as to why. “For what?” He demanded.
“The – Jesus, the job, making this whole thing work, looking after – you know, us. You know. I know you made it so Mark and Ella could get a leg up, and Zoe said-”
“I didn’t do shit,” Tobias snapped. “You did it. I didn’t do shit. This isn’t fucking – don’t do that,” he spat. “Don’t act like I did shit for you.”
Alex stared at him.
Tobias shrugged. “I’m a really, really terrible person and that is just a fact,” he said, calming down quickly. “If I can do anything decent here or there then fine. But don’t be making a scene over it and do not bloody thank me.”
“Alright,” Alex returned, after a long minute, looking a little too stunned for Tobias’ comfort.
A couple of shifts and a night drive later, he was back in Cokeworth. It was a few days after that unusual encounter in his not-routine that Tobias realised the date, and realised that the date meant that Sev would be back any day.
It was a strange feeling, waiting for his son to turn up.
Sev wasn’t a fixture in the town, not at all; but being honest he’d never been a fixture in the world as Tobias knew it. Tobias let his thoughts wander, recalling what Eileen had been capable of. Really capable of. He still had dreams, sometimes, of her reaction when Sev was born – apparently yelling at her from inside his own head and then continually banging on in hers. She’d been terrified.
It reminded Tobias of Alex and his fear for his unborn children. Except – it was never his fear, that his child would be able to do things most people couldn’t and also didn’t like for whatever reason.
It had scared the shit out of Eileen though. She’d thought he was doomed to be killed at one point, Tobias remembered it well. He couldn’t console her; his world was physics and sense and if you could read minds, who cared, do it. She had been frightened to death – perhaps literally, given everything she fucking pulled later – of how Sev would be treated if he ever showed off any of that potential.
As Tobias finished up the drive and went to park on the street over from his house, with space to actually park, he mulled over how stupid that had been.
Alex’s kids would to be able to go fast. That was the first thing he thought they’d be, was fast. Babies making a break for it every ten seconds. At least they’d have parents that are faster. Family that was faster.
Jealousy, Tobias thought, was the real problem. Any bit of the racism they got from the cult of that part of England was fostered in jealousy. There was no way any of those stick waving idiots could think they were somehow genuinely superior to any one of the right and proper British werewolf pack.
He really did miss Fen. He wondered, briefly, if they’d even get along, now.
Sev turned up at home while Tobias was in bed, hypnopompic mind catching the noise his son made and turning it into other things. Big shadows, fast movements.
He was awake and up by the time Sev had ascended the stairs.
The mood Sev’d left with the previous summer – and it was it’s own recognizable thing now wasn’t it – immediately and obviously was still afflicting him. Tobias narrowed his eyes while he pulled on a shirt, and Sev froze at the doorway to the bedroom.
“You’re still here,” his son blurted.
“Shocking turn of events, I’m aware,” Tobias acceded, as he finished getting dressed.
“Could you.” Sev adopted a ridiculous expression. “Can you not be still here? Just. Leave me alone?”
Hm. “Why?”
They really could never just say hello to each other like the rest of the world seemed to. It was too late, it would be strange to start doing that now, Tobias thought.
“What do you mean, why?”
“It’s a very straightforward question, Sev. It’s only got three letters.”
Sev stared at him some more. “Why do I want you to leave me alone?” He inferred, little genius, with a tone that Tobias recognised to mean that they were about to have what Sev thought of as an argument, and Tobias thought was Sev needing to eat something and have a nap.
He raised an eyebrow and didn’t budge.
“Just.” Sev looked increasingly desperate about something. “Can’t you just. Get a job, or something? If you have to be here can you just do something other than go to the sodding pub or wherever it is you take the car?”
“Get a job, or something,” Tobias repeated, very slowly.
Sev shrunk back against the wall, just the smallest fraction, before he stopped himself.
“Is it such a foreign concept to you-” he started, snappish, and Tobias couldn’t deal with him, he turned and clapped a hand over his own mouth. He was going to burst out laughing or have an equally awful reaction. He let his shoulders shake with it for a moment and marvelled at the incredulity of his own life.
The not-routine had led them to this point.
Where Sev was enquiring about his employment. Or, rather, making some absolutely fantastic assumptions.
“Oh,” Tobias exhaled, getting a hold of himself, “you entertain me. Honestly. Get a job, or something!” He’d only clocked sixteen hours so far this week, but it was not like kitchen work was for bringing in money so much as keeping his head on straight. Maybe that was what the idiot meant. Please, Daddy! Stop worrying me by being potentially unhinged. Oh, dear Christ.
“Why is this so funny to you?” Sev all but whispered, tone grating.
“It’s hilarious,” Tobias informed him, with genuine mirth. “Do you hear yourself? Honestly. I’ll make you some toast, go shower off the bullshit attitude and then have a nap.”
“Have a-!” Sev’s jaw dropped.
“Come on,” Tobias lunged at him, and began the process of manhandling him into the bathroom. “If you can’t do this by yourself by now, I’m afraid I can no longer blame being a very shitty parent for all your shortcomings.” He smacked a big loud kiss onto his son’s hair. “Get in the shower,” he ordered, and waited until he saw evidence of getting undressed before he retreated to the kitchen.
When he returned with four slices of toast, Sev was drying himself off. On closer inspection his hair was wet but he hadn’t washed it. Tobias put the toast down in the bedroom, rolled his eyes and marched into the bathroom to turn the water back on and shove him back underneath it.
“Get off of me,” and “stop it,” were all that Sev managed to whine before he went back to playing at being a rag doll, while Tobias had to do everything himself. He ended up practically in the bloody water, having to crowd Sev into the corner and forcibly lather him down. Sev tried to hit him a couple of times, which reinforced the need in Tobias to feed him something, and after not even a couple of minutes shrank back with his arms around himself, like Tobias was doing something absolutely terrible to him that he hated instead of just making sure his adult child had clean hair before he got into – presumably – Tobias’ own fucking bed.
“Why don’t you sleep in your own room any more?” He thought to ask while he worked the shampoo. His clothes were soaked at this point.
It was going to be an interesting answer. The last few years they’d very rarely been at home at the same time for sleep, but each summer, when he’d actually made it to bed, Tobias absolutely knew when it’d been slept in by another person.
It would have been an interesting answer. Sev’s face suddenly scrunched itself up very tightly.
Tobias let the water run for a bit, just watching his expression. It ran away with the suds, leaving a blank, closed eyed nothing. Tobias moved his hands to touch the skin around his son’s eyes, and he flinched at every movement. The reaction prompted him to do it more, to hold the sides of his face, his jaw, the skin behind his ears.
When he turned the water off, he realised that he had half expected his son to be crying, and he wasn’t.
He just stood, face blank, as Tobias reached for a fresh towel to dry him off with.
He ended up in three towels, covering his whole body and hair. Tobias manhandled him up off of his feet – mentally clocking his weight as he managed it – and carried him out. He sat him on the bed and made quick work of changing out of his own soaked clothing into something dry, chucking the wet things away to deal with later.
Sev’s eyes were still shut when Tobias pulled him to sit at the top of the bed.
He reached for the toast, and, keeping an arm clamped around Sev’s torso, broke it into pieces and made him chew and swallow the lot before he left him to snooze.
By seven thirty the same evening, Tobias decided that Sev had had enough sleep and probably now needed to start relearning how to socialise with not-in-a-cult humans, even if it was just for the summer.
If the last few months had been any sort of pattern to go by, Mikey would have caught sight of the car walking their dog and would be banging on the door in the next sixty minutes. Mikey, having half the time lived under the same roof as Sev for a number of years, fully understood the boarding-school-in-Scotland bullshit, and after losing his half-sisters to it one way or the other, had gone sympathetic rather than apoplectic the way the Evans men tended to go when anyone fucked around with their family.
He wouldn’t punch Sev in the face, was mostly it, and Tobias wouldn’t have to deal with the underlying tension that Sev seemed to have around Henry now for whatever reason.
“Get your arse up,” he called, and was pleased to hear movement. “We’re going to the pub. Mikey’ll be over in a bit most likely.”
That prompted more movement, and in a rather bizarre change of pace for him, Sev was dressed and down the stairs within minutes.
“Michael’s coming here?” He asked, looking inappropriately panicked. “You’re – you speak to – he’s coming here?”
“Yes,” Tobias drew the word out. “Probably. Oh, he moved, February. This is on the way to the pub for him now and to be honest, he’s a good kid.”
“He’s a – he must be what, thirty eight?” Is what Sev decided to say next, which – Tobias didn’t try and understand that one. “Anyway, no, you can’t, just – don’t – I can’t be here. Just go to the bloody pub, it doesn’t matter. Please just leave.”
Tobias blinked. “Do you have some kind of problem with Mikey Evans?” He asked, incredulous. “What issue would you possibly have with him, of all people?”
“Just go out,” Sev shouted.
“Well, sure, but you’re coming, that’s sort of the point,” Tobias explained. “Put some shoes on, then. Jesus.” He moved around Sev to get to the cupboard by the front door to retrieve his jacket, wallet and house keys still in the inside pocket. Plenty of other things stashed in there as well, but even after three years off the real money maker of a job he still couldn’t imagine never being at least decently armed.
‘Get a job’! Oh, Sev.
Funnily enough, the knock he had been expecting came early, and Tobias chucked a pair of shoes in Sev’s direction – still the middle of the room – and pulled the front door open.
“Yo!” He greeted his – well. How did he think of Mikey? Sort of like a foster nephew, or something? Definitely an Evans, and Tobias was absolutely Evans-adjacent.
Mikey wasn’t on his own.
“Hello, hi,” Mikey said, “you alright? Remember Nicky?” He poked the sandy haired little boy next to him, who looked up at Tobias with interest.
“Hello Nicholas,” Tobias said seriously. “Are you coming to the pub young man?”
“If anyone asks, he’s fourteen,” Mikey instructed. “That you, Sev?”
“Hiya,” Nicky said, looking around again with big, green eyes. “I’m fourteen.”
Tobias turned to see whether Sev had managed to put his shoes on yet, and almost had to double take.
Sev was backing away haltingly, staring directly at Nicky, looking utterly white with something almost like horror on his face.
“Oh yeah, I know,” Mikey said, like this was a normal reaction to a child. “He’s twelve. And we were drinking God knows what at Grandads by then, but Marie would kill me if she thought he was having anything other than lemonade. I can do the marginally responsible thing while I take my hyperactive eldest out of the house for a bit.”
“I want vodka,” Nicky volunteered in a reasonably passable affect of an eastern European accent, smirking at his Dad, and that of all things seemed to do something to Sev, who bolted in the direction of the kitchen. Tobias blinked after him.
“Just a sec,” he waved, and by the time he’d taken a few more steps he could hear the sounds of dry-heaving.
“Oh don’t you throw up that fucking toast,” he despaired to himself, and crossed into the room to find Sev gripping onto the sink like it was a lifeline. “Hey,” he started, and Sev, without looking, practically begged,
“Get out, get out, get away from me, please get out,” and Tobias, thinking about mind readers, very much wished for a second that Eileen were around to possibly get any bloody sense out of this entire situation. He backed out of the kitchen, making enough noise that Sev would hear that he was going, and then he backed out of the front room and out of the front door.
When he closed it, the two of them now with him outside of the house, he allowed a very small, “fuck,” before he turned back around.
Mikey had a very patient, very kind look on his face.
“It’d be nice to see him, but obviously…” he trailed off.
“Absolutely nothing obvious is going on here,” Tobias shook his head. “Alright. I can deal with that later.”
Mikey frowned. “No?” He said. “If you need… I mean.” He glanced down at Nicky, who didn’t look at all surprised by any of this, which was more information for Tobias. He wondered for the first time in a while what kind of child Sev had really been when they were all growing up, and what Mikey had told his own son about any of it. “Marie still works at the hospital,” Mikey said. “You know, she’s one of the paediatric nurses, but she knows about the boarding-school-in-Scotland stuff enough and she knows about the NHS and what’s decent and what to avoid. If you needed it.”
Because he thought that Sev was unwell. Which. He very much was, but Tobias had not heard that out loud from anybody else for – well. A very long time indeed.
“Christ,” Tobias allowed himself. “Well. He only got back to the house today. Midday, really.”
“Back from – right. Look. He can’t be the only one in this situation.” Mikey sighed. “I might ask Marie anyway, if that’s alright with you? If she’s heard of anything like it. Last time we spoke about any of it was – well. I didn’t mention it, because there wasn’t any need, but – Nicky, if you’ve got questions about this now, you ask them alright?”
“Whatever, yeah,” the child responded, seemingly content to wander next to the pair of them.
“About a year ago, in July, a letter turned up addressed to Nicky, from – you can guess where, obviously.”
Tobias felt his teeth clench. “Right,” he managed.
“I showed Marie, we had a quick discussion and I made the mistake of bloody burning it.” Mikey shook his head. “Mistake only because six more turned up the next day.”
“Burned it, huh.”
“Yeah. Things got dicey for a while and they were pushy, Toby.”
“Pushy?” Tobias enquired, suddenly feeling a lot less like he’d been in a not-routine for three years, and a lot more like the person Henry Evans had used to send out when a job needed doing.
“We handled it. But it was rough. They try it again with Callie and I think we’re going to end up having a problem.”
“They can’t have Callie,” Nicky announced, sounding very sure about the whole thing. “I’m bigger now. I can fuck up anyone who tries to visit her.”
“Langua – oh, you know, Christ, I don’t actually care,” Mikey said. “We talked about this. Anything like that ever happens again -”
“I run away screaming, ‘paedophile, help’!” Nicky told him, brightly. “I know, Dad. So… that was Uncle Sev then, right?”
Tobias blinked, surprised at the title from the kid.
“Yes,” Mikey said, and then didn’t say anything else, and the kid nodded along like it all made perfect sense.
They stayed at the pub until half nine, and nobody brought any of it up again.
When he got back home, after a meandering stroll back to avoid thinking about how to ask a specific range of questions, Tobias found the house empty.
Aside from himself, it stayed that way for the next six weeks.
He was making pasta, one afternoon, just for the hell of it – putting the wheat flour and egg mix through it’s paces. Methodical and grounding, he was idly thinking about the processes involved from this point to the taking of it to Pam and Henry’s as something like a fettuccine alfredo when he heard the front door key being used.
He’d worked in silence for a good week and it’d done the job he wanted of improving his hearing. He would have known anyway that those were Sev’s footfalls; he knew his son was wearing those heavy shoes he usually turned up in but never wore out around Cokeworth.
He heard him flit around the house for a while, before he approached the kitchen, and he felt as well as heard the little start of surprise when Sev realised that he was actually there.
There was a beat, and then,
“How do you do that?” Sev asked.
“Make pasta?” Tobias didn’t turn around.
“No – although, why are you making pasta?”
“Nice, steady job, making pasta,” Tobias told him. “Good bit of decent labour. Takes time to learn how to make it correctly, takes time to make, needs patience and consistency and a mite of understanding about gluten bonds.”
“… I thought it was just that I was never looking for you, in particular.” Alright then. “Do you know, if I weren’t looking right at you at this moment, I don’t think that I would be able to tell whether or not you were here?”
“That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Tobias let his child know. “Do you not have ears? And three other senses besides?”
There was silence after that.
“Pasta dough,” Tobias filled it himself, “needs to rest, before you can start thinking about making anything to eat with it.” He turned around and looked Sev up and down.
He was dressed in boarding-school-in-Scotland formal, whatever the hell they called that. There was a single blonde hair snaking around the back of his collar. Tobias stepped closer, under the guise of moving the pasta dough around so that he could clear down where he had been working.
Sev smelled just ever so slightly familiar.
Once the pasta had been set aside, Tobias started fishing around the kitchen. He grabbed a short tumbler and set it down by the fridge. There was a carton of cranberry juice in the door and he started with that, then grabbed a left over half of a lime. He didn’t have any other citrus lying around so juiced the lime and took a twist with a kitchen knife to drop into the mix. He definitely had some of that orange flavouring shit lying around – Alex and Zoe had been at a cake shop in central Birmingham and he’d dropped by enough to scavenge what they’d been playing around with.
Once that was in, he opened the tiny freezer, which was mainly used to store vodka, and poured in twice as much as the cranberry juice.
“Triple sec… where did I leave that shit,” he asked himself, heading for the cupboard he knew full well it was at the back of. Half of the measure of the vodka. Swish, swish around the glass. “No ice for you,” he said and walked back to Sev, picked up one of his hands and put the tumbler in it, pushing him toward one of the ancient kitchen chairs around their table.
Sev’s face twitched, but he took it and he sat.
“Why are you giving me alcohol?” He asked, after a minute.
“Because you clearly need a Cosmo,” Tobias told him, and went back to clean down where he’d been working.
His memory tilted back to the last time he’d smelled that particular blend of smells.
It had been 1976. Tobias had dropped by Spinner’s End with no intention whatsoever bar staying around for a bit between jobs.
He had found an empty house, and one clearly not lived in for at least twenty months by the state of various parts of it. There had been letters piled up, about funeral expenses and welfare checks, various legal correspondence and an A4 envelope with his name on the front alongside the Birmingham Children’s Hospital logo. Most of the post had been almost two full years old, and it had hit him, all at once, the obvious: His wife was dead.
He had sat on the floor and looked at one of the walls for a very long time.
He had assumed that Severus would be at the Evans’, where they would probably be able to deal with a matter of that significance appropriately, and had felt something that somebody else might have called glad.
He had heard, through the silence of his sitting, someone sneaking around the front of the house. Heavy shoes and an aristocratic accent that said Latin words to open the front door and wander in.
It had turned into one of the few periods of his life that he didn’t quite remember correctly, but he knew that he smelled that extremely particular smell, and he knew that he had beaten the living shit out of the blonde, stick waving asshole that tried to break in and shout words at him that were almost certainly designed to have him killed.
Tobias had killed plenty of people at that point in his life. He knew intent when he heard it.
Tobias blinked the memory away and finished clearing down the flour, washed down the counter top. It was a shitty and old counter top, but it was his shitty and old counter top and it was clean.
He washed down the bits of flour that dusted to the floor.
He washed his hands.
Sev was looking, when he turned back, just watching him, with a look of consideration, over the top of his glass. When their eyes caught, he drained the last of his cocktail, blinked, and held the empty glass out.
Tobias made him another one, but with orange juice instead of the lime. He cut a fresh peel.
“I liked the other one better,” Sev told him.
“Noted,” Tobias returned.
“Do I want to know why there’s cranberry juice in the refrigerator?”
“Mostly,” Tobias said, “because I picked up some cranberry juice.”
Sev was quiet for a minute, and Tobias just leaned back against the counter top and watched him drink his drink.
“I want to know where you get the money from,” Sev asked, then, and downed the rest of his cocktail in one like a middle-aged Madonna fan about to get wild at the disco. He appeared to be bracing himself.
Tobias didn’t laugh. “What the fuck are you talking about now?” He enquired.
“It’s a simple question,” Sev sneered. “I don’t know what you do all day. Now you’re making – you’re making pasta, and there are strange things in the kitchen that must have come from somewhere. I’ve seen you hand over cash at the pub. The car must get fuel somehow. I want to know where you get the money from.”
“Alright,” Tobias said. “In return, then. I want to know why you never touch any of the money.”
“So you’re not going to answer me?” Sev nodded like this was playing along with his own internal narrative of events. “What is it? Theft?”
Tobias looked at him a minute longer. “I think,” he told his son, “that if you’re going to stay here for the next however long until you piss off again. You ought to spend a shift or two in a kitchen. You need something to wear you out so you stop with these blasted fits and moods.”
“I ought to… what? I have fits and moods?”
“Productive acts of service are useful for mental balance; even if you’re just the bloody pot wash they’ll at least keep you busy.”
“What the hell are you talking about? What on earth makes you think you can now order me to be a – pot wash?”
“Because,” Tobias sighed, “you spend most of the year – you know what? You’re going to eat, in about an hour, and you’re going to watch me make a fucking fettuccine alfredo for no reason other than it’s something with lots of calories that also tastes really, really, ridiculously good. And then, I don’t know, Severus. Focus on the now, if you will.”
He worked in the silence that followed, thinking vague thoughts about how too much of the butter-rich sauce was going to make his son ill considering his usual diet; thinking about making enough to take some to Pam and Hen’s regardless. Thinking about a universe where he could drag Sev over to his one time foster-Grandparents house with him and they’d all eat together and just be – well. Normal isn’t the word. But. Not this.
By the time he had prepped and organised, he figured the pasta could start the process of becoming noodles, long and uniform.
It took a while to roll the pasta out into long thin sheets; roughly the same size, chopping at the edges until they were all exact – flat rectangles waiting for semolina flour, waiting to be turned into something that would cook all together in a steady unison.
“Get up here,” he instructed Sev, who hadn’t moved or spoken since his pronouncement. “Grab a knife,” he added, when Sev actually did as he was told.
“Flour flour flour,” he proclaimed. “Then roll them up from each side. So that they meet in the centre. The flour will shake off so chuck it on.” He demonstrated, rolling the rectangle together from the outsides so that two rolls met in the middle. “Then cut these into eight millimetre strips,” he said, taking his own knife and slicing across.
He waved a hand and indicated that Sev should start on one of the rolled sheets in front of him.
Sev blinked, and then, without a word, copied what Tobias had shown him with precision. The speed wasn’t there, but the speed wasn’t the point.
“Either that knife work is hereditary or you’ve been chopping properly fairly habitually,” Tobias observed, after Sev finished two sheets with surprising proficiency.
That made his son pause.
“I didn’t say have a fit about it,” Tobias chided, lifting the finished strips and collecting them together. The movement made flour go everywhere, and once he’d collected the pasta he started to clear down again; cleaned away the debris, washed down the knives, his hands, the floor, the counters.
“When did you learn how to do this?” Sev asked, after a long minute of standing in the centre of the room.
“God knows. It’s good work, though. Mad people work in kitchens and it’s something you can do anywhere in the world. Good cover, good – why? Are you reconsidering?” Tobias teased. “You’d love an eighty hour work week. What do you do at that school?”
“About that, actually. It doesn’t really stop. Classes are around forty by themselves.”
“Grim,” Tobias acknowledged. And then, because he thought must as well at this point just ask, “so. What is going on with you? Before you run off again upset about whatever the hell it is.”
Sev exhaled, long and deliberate. “I’m going to get changed,” he said.
“Don’t you dare go out,” Tobias felt the need to warn him. “You’re back down here and eating this in thirty minutes alright?”
Sev went and, for the second time, did what he’d been told.
The not-routine was updated, and they fought, but verbally, and they chopped things after Tobias had demonstrated what he wanted and Sev demonstrated himself capable, and eventually his son made a remark about potions, which were basically just ‘magic’ cocktails but Sev insisted that there was more to them than that, and argued when Tobias pointed out that millimetres and cutting style and timing mattered in cooking, too; it just depended on what it was and where it was that you want to be involved in said activity.
It was nice to see him doing something with a knife all the same. If he ate afterwards, more to celebrate.
Sev didn’t run off again even once, although he wouldn’t see Mikey and he wouldn’t even talk about seeing Henry, or Brian, Mikey’s brother, or even bloody Pam – and Tobias didn’t push it. He watched him get fed, exist in the basics of routine, occasionally shoot Tobias a glance he didn’t care to interpret, and looked steadily less with it as September approached.
“See you in ten months, then, kid,” were Tobias’ parting words, and when Sev opened his mouth, shut it, and repeated the action twice more before he stomped off and disappeared for presumably the rest of the year, he wondered – not for the first time, but with less heart than he used to – why he still felt the need to bloody bother.