September 1, Evening, Rosier Hall
Dear Canadiwizard In Old York,
Thank you for writing in with that interesting story. While the moon frogs of our August issue may well be the source of your ancestor’s legend, we cannot substantiate the connection. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to study moon frogs in sufficient detail to determine whether their origin is terrestrial, as the wizard who secured and photographed these fascinating creatures was unable to keep hold of them long enough to perform a dissection. Having learned that the moon is without gravity, we speculate that moon frogs have developed the ability to apparate, so that the powerful jumps typical to frogkind do not send them hurtling into the unkindness of space. We must also sadly note that no moon frogs large enough to be seen from Earth have yet been observed. Or indeed, as would please many grandmothers of my own people, any moon rabbits. But take heart, Canadiwizard! The unproven may always yet be only undiscovered!
—Mrs. M. Lovegood, Asst. Chief Editor, The Quibbler
“I swear,” Severus snarled, slamming wrists-first through the doors of the vanishing cabinet, “it’s like dropping into an actual fucking snake pit. That castle is slavering for blood pudding made with my—Evan?”
Ev looked up from the mask he was sketching. He had the penseive out, and a projecting-charm trained on the memory of Lucius standing up on it. Luke’s face was hovering in the air near them, frozen and haughty-over-self-doubt and three times its usual size, gone all translucent towards the neck. Evan only needed his face.
He smiled, trying to make it a full-bodied one, and put down the sketchbook. The last thing anyone needed was for Spike to think Ev had gone off with the fairies again, and resort to drastic measures. He’d managed to make that clear to Voldemort, he thought, but he was a bit worried about what the cost might be.
They’d deal with it. Now he ended the projection charm and said, “Hallo, Trouble.”
Taking the badly-needed steps to come up against Spike in front of the fire, Evan pushed the unnecessary-for-indoors-wear mantle off his shoulders. His arms came a-circling and his nose went into one of those lovely hollows under Spike’s cravat and he sighed a happy mmm noise into, sadly, a vest that was not Spike’s skin.
“I thought your pulse was just calm all day,” Spike informed him suspiciously, hot hands splayed deliciously tight and possessive over his back, digging in worriedly around the fingertips, “but you look blue.”
“Blm?” Evan asked the delicious collarbone.
He was torn. There was, on the one hand, slightly sheepish delight that Spike was using colors to talk in. Usually he only used shades of potions to very precisely describe shades of other things; color-as-metaphor was more of an Evan-and-Narcissa thing that Spike only used when he had to. If Spike was picking up Ev-language, using it before trying anything else… well. Evan had disgustingly squishy newlywed’s feelings about that, which Spike was not going to want to hear about.
On the other hand, he wasn’t interested in anything but getting at the new-and-old, fresh, invigorating note of wet stone layered into the comforting, familiar intrigue of woods and heather and spices and Spike-skin.
“Blue,” Spike repeated, trying hard to be annoyed while having his throat sucked, poor doomed thing. “Slightly blue about the edges, not to mention lethargic and pale and detahhh-h-h… Detached! And exhausted, and as though humiliating Luke through a mmm a mask he’s meant to be honored by wasn’t a prospect that thoroughly delighted you with a wicked delight unspeakable by the ton—that is, in any language known to man, by which I deduce that—”
“That’s all very well,” Evan broke away to inform him, ignoring this ton of nonsense in favor of jigsaw-fitting their noses together, “but apparently we’ve both had dismal days and you smell like a spice-wood and a heather field and the sky when it’s raining all at once, Spike. I mean, feel free to keep talking and all that, it feels lovely, but do keep in mind I shall be snogging you the while and not paying too terribly much attention.”
Spike’s eyes were probably only crossed because Ev’s own were so close, and they were probably only pure black because his eyes were, in fact, pure black, but Ev liked to think his lower hand had something to do with it, too.
After a pause wherein Evan refrained from occupying himself so completely as he would have liked (it was only polite to give the other fellow a chance), Spike said, more temperately, “I’m expected to take all my meals in the Great Hall. Faculty does, and evidently I’m close enough to count.”
This took a moment’s sorting out, which was difficult when Spike’s hand was slow-stroking the small of his back. Finally, though, Evan pointed out, “You sat every meal in the Great Hall when we were at school, too, and you spent more than half of them studying. You kept sneaking apples and onions back to eat after dark.”
“We could try it,” Spike allowed slowly, looking a little happier, or at least less furrowed above the eyes. “Only…”
“Mmm?” Evan asked from under his ear, and got a shiver.
“I think Madam Nell cursed me,” Spike murmured into his temple.
“Spike Snape,” Evan pulled away, grinning, “that is outright slander. That sweet old daisy-sprite. That tiny little holy terror I want to paint on all the tarot cards who beams sunshine out her ears. You lie through your face.”
“I believe it, ergo it isn’t slander,” Spike insisted, putting his chin up in one of his absurd valiant poses. “It was a curse about mornings. One morning everything’s normal, then she gives me a ribbon and suddenly Leaving Evan Alone In Bed To Sleep Of A Morning Is A Crawlingly Unthinkable Horror. There is no other possible explanation. She cursed me, with a morning curse.”
Evan tugged him down so he could laugh himself sick on a comfortable Spike’s-back-pillow made of bones on their rug in the firelight, as nature intended. If he had been feeling a little blue (or, indeed, a little white) when Spike came growling in, he was very nearly warmed-through now.
He’d be even warmer if Spike’s skin was closer and all this linen wasn’t in the way. One could take care of such things efficiently with wands, of course, but efficiency wasn’t nearly so nice.
“I’m explaining,” Severus failed to sulk.
“By all means,” Evan said cheerfully, smoothing ugly lichen-colored cloth up and away from skin which was, admittedly, a little on the sallow side because Ev hadn’t given him a chance to wash his morning soap off yet, but soft and wiry-ripply and just begging for him to warm his cold face in it. “You can explain while I paint your spine.”
There was a long, suspicious silence, but Evan knew his Spike-timing. By the time Spike demanded to know what exactly he meant by that, his mouth was halfway lowered to the topmost knob. And that, he noted with a long smile he made sure to press into the inky roses bursting into bloom along Spike’s neck and arms to rub petals with him, was the last they had of properly-strung-together words out of Spike for a while.
The back of his mind put aside to remember that this was, in fact, rather worrying; Spike usually got squirmy and overstimulated and took over, except when he was shaken or worse. However, unlike Some People, Evan was capable of thinking, on occasion, about one thing at a time.
And, actually, it turned out that Spike was feeling masterful enough to eventually make him stop only a little farther along than usual, bite him for pouting, and drag him into bed (skipping the bath; Spike and He-Who-Must-Never-Be-Thought-About-In-Bed-Ugh-Nonononono must not have brewed anything up at the school).
“But if we slept on the rug you wouldn’t be leaving me asleep in bed,” Evan pointed out.
“I’m not leaving you asleep in bed,” Severus informed him. “I’m waking you up.”
Evan eyed him as dangerously as a man could eye anyone who had a soothing hand pressing him softly down by the stomach and sternum and another kneading him tantalizingly and aggravatingly just two inches from the best place possible. “When are you waking me up,” he demanded.
Severus shrugged. Ev would have enjoyed what the movement did to the muscles along his side if he was also enjoying any single thing he was hearing. “Five?” Severus suggested.
Evan’s eyes bugged out in silent outrage. It would have been less silent outrage, but there was so much of it he couldn’t even squeak.
“I know, Ev,” Spike Spike-apologized—which was to say that he looked unhappy but his chin was sticking out stubbornly. “But I have to be in the common room at six-thirty to make sure the little monsters are presentable and—don’t laugh at me when we’re naked!”
“You’re going to make sure,” Evan spluttered, folding up over him, “oh, Spike! Oh, Salazar, you just wait till I tell Cissa, she will fall over dead.”
Rather than sulking or getting mad or turning his back to Evan and freezing him out all night (Ev could see the options flit, thankfully fleetingly, though his favorite pair of exceptionally evil eyes), Severus favored Evan with a long, vicious, killer-whale smile: all teeth. “Good point, well made,” he said. “Of course, I’ll notice bad mending and curses and that, but current fashion disasters are quite beyond me. Good job I’ll have an invisible clotheshorse at my side.”
Evan stopped laughing. Six thirty. “…No,” he declared. Firmly.
“You go on telling yourself that,” Spike suggested with what he thought was sympathy, but everyone else knew was unadulterated, vicious, gleeful malice, and patted Evan on the hip. And then swept his hands inwards and brought his mouth down to an ear with such delicacy and decision that the last corner of Evan’s fire-sparking brain that couldn’t even remember why it felt it should be horrified was drowning in the sharp and gorgeous velvet lava-syrup of spikespikespike in probably less than three seconds.
When Evan woke up, someone had put a featherlight charm on his head, which was in Spike’s lap as was correct and proper, but Spike was fully dressed. In out-of-doors clothes. With boots. He could see them, propped up clean and shiny and far away on the other armrest. There was a belt between Ev’s mouth and Spike’s bits and everything. A buckled belt. It was horrible.
Also, the blankets were gone, because they were on the sofa in the Slytherin common room (Ev had napped on it-and-Spike more than often enough to know from the feel), facing the wrong way, and Evan couldn’t see his own hands.
“There,” Spike said, trying to be comforting and mostly managing smirky, petting his invisible hair, “you don’t even have to get up. Just prop your eyes open.”
Evan hated himself, just a little bit, for the way Spike’s voice smoothed comfort into his bones and blood even when Spike was being an unadulterated rat.
“Timezit?” he whined. He knew he was whining, but he couldn't help it. There was no sunlight filtering through the water outside the great window, no light anywhere but the low flicker of coals in the hearth.
“Six-fifteen.”
“Nooooooooo…”
“Well, I tried to wake you up earlier, Ev, have a bite and a cuppa and perhaps say good-morning, but you weren’t having any of it.”
“’R’a rat,” Evan informed him hopelessly, grinding his eyes into Spike’s not-terribly-forgiving hipbone. Even if he could force himself upright, he didn’t know where Spike’s room was in this benighted ever-shifting honeycomb of a castle. He didn’t even know if it was in the Slytherin wing at all. Dumbledore might have put Severus next to the infirmary; Evan certainly would have.
It would probably, he reflected grousily, be a time-saver. If Spike could make Ev want to murder him, he really had no hope with anyone else.
“I know,” Spike said softly, bending down to press his forehead to Evan’s shoulder. His hair was damp, which made Evan unspeakably indignant for reasons he was sure he would have been able to identify if he’d only been awake. “But I refuse to get up five days a week as though you don’t exist and never see you till a very late supper with scarcely a moment to eat or talk, let alone read, before it has to be lights-out for early mornings.”
Evan turned to glare up, even if he was invisible and Severus couldn’t see. That had struck through him, right through, woke him like a bell inside his head and left huge wide swathes of him melted into quivering mush. You couldn’t let someone know that who was already being wildly unfair.
After a moment, when he felt more collected, he said in a too-calm but not cold voice, “This doesn’t answer your problem, Spike.”
“Of course not,” Spike hastened, sounding a bit relieved for some strange Spike-reason. He went one in one of his I-know-I-did-everything-the-worst-way-possible-but-fundamentally-I’m-not-wrong-and-someone-will-acknowledge-it-eventually voices. It was the one where he was actually embarrassed about his behavior, but not enough to admit it, and someone who wasn’t a snake might have had a dislocated jaw from sticking it out that far.
Spike could, actually, pop his jaw out, in the same slightly-odd but not magical way some people could turn their elbows around like owl-necks. Evan had never told him it was one of those things he and Siri had in common for no possible reason, and had long since decided to just enjoy the ability without allowing the coincidence to make his brain fry and weep sizzly, greasy tears of thinking too hard about his cousin in all the most disturbing ways.
“But now you know I mean it. And you can think of something better. You have to, Ev; I don’t think I’ll have time today. This week. Christ,” he sighed, dispirited, and dragged a hand down his face.
“You’re fetching me all of the coffee,” Evan told him. “And when we’re done, you’re bringing me back home and I am going back to sleep.”
“I don’t care if you sleep till tea,” Severus told him, and for half a second he really sounded like he believed it. Then he reconsidered, to Evan’s profound relief, and gave the far more Severus-like qualifier, “I might die of contact embarrassment, but needs must.”
“You’re too deranged to die of any sort of embarrassment,” Evan told him, hoisting himself farther up so he could cram his face into the uncapacious wedge between chest muscles and curling in. “Honestly, Spike. Even for you. This is mental.”
“Don’t make good points if you don’t want others to expound on them,” Spike suggested haughtily, long, warm fingers curling around the back of Evan’s invisible neck, sinking into his hair, mmm.
“This isn’t expounding, this is kidnapping,” he pointed out, but since he’d turned his face into Spike’s overly-buttoned ribs he didn’t hope to be taken terribly seriously.
“Pit-viperhood doesn’t give you a monopoly on snap decisions.”
He pulled away far enough to drag a droll eyebrow upward where Spike could feel it move. “Mine usually involve conscious people, Whiplash.”
“I’d have had an elf take you back to the wardrobe in twenty seconds flat if you’d had a serious objection, and you know it, Kettlepot Whingerton,” Severus told the top of his head. “Or go together. The Slugstache didn’t think I needed to be here till six forty-five.”
Evan made a rude noise, but then a terrible thought occurred. He might be under Lupin’s handy little chameleon spell, but they were in the Slytherin Common room. “Spike—you do have a muffliato up?”
“No, I put a one-way hordloc internos between us, your lips to my ears. A muffliato would hide our words, not your presence. And separate notice-me-nots on you, myself-as-a-person, my clothes, my hair, and the sofa, what do you take me for?”
“Oh, all right then,” he capitulated, or, rather, burrowed sleepily, into Spike’s welcoming (but, drat him, belted) stomach.
“…Right,” Spike said cynically, and snapped his fingers four times, right above Evan’s indignant eyebrow. “Good morning, Nandy. No, over here. I don’t want an apology, I want a cup of coffee and its pot, please. Strong, and enough for two.”
And then there was coffee. Which was, once Evan was awake enough to enjoy it, infuriating. He’d never been allowed coffee as a student struggling through his morning classes, not even as an adult wizard in his NEWT year, and it turned out the Hogwarts coffee was excellent.
Since, however, it was extremely important not to let Spike win when he was behaving horrifically, he grumbled, “I don’t know why you think I’m going to be any use getting extra-sneaky children who don’t want to be awake to breakfast when I don’t want to be awake either. I sympathize with them, Spike. I am in complete agreement. Expecting anyone to sit up enthusiastically and take in information they may need later before at least one in the afternoon is disgusting behavior, and if you ask me—”
“I’m not asking you to herd cats to breakfast,” Spike said patiently. “If they choose to miss a meal, that’s their look-out, and if anyone chooses to miss a class, they’ll discover soon enough why that’s not a decision to repeat.”
Evan shot him a grumpy why then am I not in my nice bed pray tell look, sipping his strangely smooth and delicious coffee dangerously.
Patiently ignoring it, Spike went on, “I think you’ll be useful because I’ve sat in Diagon while you and Narcissa shared a teapot like a couple of vicious cats, and you could make fun of the poorly-dressed while fully asleep.”
Ev sat up quickly enough to very nearly spill his precious, precious coffee. “Spike!” he exclaimed, eyes wide. He vaguely remembered Spike saying something similar last night, come to think of it, but then he’d been distracted. “Did I sleep through eight months? Is it my birthday?!”
Spike laughed, just with a slight rocking of his breath and a crinkling-up under his eyes, and squeezed Evan’s hand. Seriously, he said, “You and Narcissa didn’t let me go to our first breakfast in rags, and you didn’t care a jot about me at the time, or have the least feeling for our House’s reputation. No one explains the ways to wear the ties, or—”
“You are ridiculous,” Evan informed his broody hen, and, putting down the cup they were sharing, snogged him silly on their common room sofa one more time, counting on Spike to be more alert than himself even while being kissed.
His trust was not only well-founded but justified: Evan was still floating happily in his lovely swimmy place, letting Spike’s grabby-hands around the back of his head and neck be his only grounding, when Spike suddenly pulled back and rearranged himself into an attitude of cool watchfulness.
Right under Evan. It didn’t exactly tickle, but Ev had to stuff a hand into his mouth to keep from laughing out loud anyway. No one would have heard the actual laugh, but Spike tended to startle (not to say bristle) when people laughed loudly near his ears.
As a thoughtful and supportive person, he rearranged himself at Spike’s side, in case Spike decided to uncoil and stand up at people in a rapidly unnerving sort of way. He hadn’t seen that sort of behavior recently, but then Spike hadn’t been faced with irritating fourth-years recently.
He whispered right into Spike’s ear—which was not, despite Spike’s spell, redundant. Not after the way Spike had distracted him from arguing last night. “One point when you know something’s wrong, three points when you know what. You lose your chance and I take over when they’re three-quarters to the door. Kiss tonight per point.”
Spike tried to slide Evan an outraged look without actually turning. He wouldn’t have succeeded even if Ev hadn’t been off to his side and invisible with unmeetable eyes. First, he had been successfully challenged and Evan wasn’t blind enough to miss his eyes brightening and the That’s What YOU Think curl at the end of his lips.
Second, he didn’t have time to be outraged, because the footsteps that had alerted him had resolved into a tall fifth-or-sixth year with red-brown hair and a chipmunk-cheeked pointy-nosed face that resolved into dismay when she saw an adult in her common room.
“Good morning, Miss Chisterleigh,” Spike greeted her with a bland suggestion of a smile. Evan still didn’t recognize her as a former fellow-Slytherin, although he did recognize the Bagman ears and cheeks and it did look quite like the Chisterleigh chin, now he was looking for it. “You’re first up, well done. Let’s see if you’ll be first to make it to breakfast.”
“Oh, come on, Naj,” she said, missing whining by a few crucial notes. She was clearly going to go on protesting, but Spike cut her off.
“Because,” he said with implacable eyebrows, “I imagine it would be quite difficult to move quickly in such fashionable heels.”
She crossed her arms (not, Ev was pleased to see, in a way that seemed specifically designed to emphasize her juvenile bust. Nobody who knew Spike well enough to call him ‘Naj’ should think that would work on him) and huffed. “There’s nothing—”
Spike’s Chaser’s wrist flicked out, and the girl nearly fell into the arms of the small group approaching behind her. “That was a gobstone, not a spell,” he said calmly, “and it wouldn’t have worked if you weren’t trying to balance on quillpoints. Do help Miss Chisterleigh back to her room, ladies, and assist her in locating her school boots and a dry set of socks.”
There were a few amused notes, which Ev thought was very good-spirited of people being slowed down on the way to breakfast.
“Oh, and while you’re back at your dorms,” Spike called out to their backs in the same bland tone, “you might keep in mind that Wingardium Leviosa is a rapid-acting first-year spell, and troglodytes well below your own age might be able to lift a hemline several inches before its wearer notices.”
A couple of them turned to look at him. They weren’t visibly deciding how horrified to be and why: this was Slytherin. There was, however, a certain air of you have got to be kidding hovering around the chandeliers.
Spike shrugged the shoulder Ev wasn’t leaning on. “Expressing yourselves through uniform modification is all well and good,” he said, “but you will be spending your days amongst the foul-minded monsters with poor impulse control commonly known as ‘half your peers.’ And when I say that I’m only speaking of hormones. This year’s political climate has yet to be assessed. We won’t be able to do even the most preliminary of soundings until this evening.”
“This is Hogwarts!” a girl with a prefect badge protested. She had the narrow Nott jaw and the Lingreen eyebrows, and her accent was too perfect, like Spike’s. Her nose and skin tone, pale though she was, suggested a distant drop of near-East blood. Evan would have bet twenty galleons she was a Quartstave. “Not a war zone!”
Spike raised an eyebrow at her.
“Look,” snapped yet another girl whose name Ev couldn’t remember. He did remember Spike drooling poisonous red ink all over her Herbology essay once, and that she’d had to be brought down to the kitchens after for cocoa and hot buttered toast.
Evan had sent Regulus to do it. Reggie was good at that sort of thing and had needed a confidence-booster, whereas Evan had needed to stop Spike from storming off to do things that were not his job and might get him hexed into jelly in the name of making all Slytherins learn all the available things.
“I know things were bad when you were here,” she foolishly tried to argue with him, “but—”
“You had no idea half of what went on then,” Spike said softly. “I could tell, because all your year took far too long to stop walking the halls alone when you felt like it in your third year. What makes you think you know what others outside these rooms are thinking now? Or will come to think, and plan, and decide on a lark to do without planning?”
“Three more years of Divination since then, for one thing,” the possible-Quartstave offered reasonably.
Spike inclined his head. “Divination provides a very good start,” he agreed, pitching his voice a little louder because another group, with a shorter average height, had come up behind the sixth-year girls. “But we only go out wearing targets strapped to our chests if we have a very good reason for it. And if I see any ungraduated Slytherin presenting the appearance of being easily disrobed, I will expect an explanation every adult of their family would be not only satisfied with but pleased by. And be assured that, if I feel at all uneasy in my mind, that explanation will be put to that test.”
This only got a howled Naj!!!! from about half the group: the rest were too young to know Spike.
“I mean it,” Spike said grimly. “And you can’t guilt me about grassing on you, because I’m not just one of you, you are in my care. If I have to pull in your parents or your great-grandparents to teach you the habits of safety, or your bloody house elves, don’t you imagine I will hesitate.”
This got him a lot more complaints about how Hogwarts was perfectly safe for people who weren’t Severus Snape, which he met with a sneer of open contempt.
“You could have said last night,” said a grumpy boy from the slightly-shorter group. “Before we got dressed.”
“I was hoping your native good sense and well-bred groundings in propriety would make warnings to dress properly and within accepted Hogwarts limits unnecessary,” Spike said, only semi-witheringly.
“But loads of people wear short skirts under their robes, or nothing,” Chistlethwait-or-whatever complained.
“I think you’ll find,” Spike said dryly, “that half those people are thrill-seekers or otherwise happy-go-lucky—both of which tendencies I expect to see well-mastered where they present in Slytherin—”
Evan idly debated kicking him, or possibly laughing in his ear. But that wouldn’t really be fair, and would therefore lead to argument: just because Spike was a trouble-magnet didn’t make him a voluntary thrill-seeker.
“—and the other half are deliberately laying obvious traps to attract easily controllable life-mates,” Spike finished dryly. “When tempted in that direction, I advise you to look at the colors at your throat.”
Ev thought this was a little unfair to Hufflepuff.[1] They had a House reputation to counter if they wanted to be exciting or mysterious or sexy. They had to go for that extra touch of flamboyance, if they wanted to be thought of as anything other than ‘oh, the Huffie? Yeah, she’s nice.’
“Slughorn doesn’t mind,” the possible-Quarterstave countered, putting hands on her hips. Since she was, in fact, quite reasonably dressed except for having stuck her quill in her hatband (an affectation that Ev gloomily expected Spike to pretend he approved of for practical reasons rather than as a Quidditch statement), Ev approved. She was either defending her housemates with the standing of her badge or fighting for her future prerogatives while she still had the high ground. In either case, good strategy.
“Slughorn doesn’t stop you,” Spike corrected, a sardonic eyebrow up. “I am doing you the courtesy of giving you information directly, rather than becoming more and more annoyed by your poor judgment over time until you unaccountably find yourself off the Christmas Party And Post-Graduation Assistance list.”
This met with a moment of silence, and a higher-pitched ‘huh?’ from a shorty off to the back-left. The possible-Quartstave, however, glared at Spike and demanded, “Are you saying we shouldn’t dress as we like because it lets boys be pigs?”
“No one has permission to be a pig,” Spike said irritably. “What you wear does not give anyone permission to be a pig. Piglike behavior is not to be condoned, and will not be condoned by me. Unfortunately, there are those who will be pigs, whatever consequences they risk for it, and you are sharing halls and classes with them, and I don’t give a damn about what the world ought to be like.”
Liar, Evan thought fondly.
“The world is a hellhole,” Spike rolled on, implacably annoyed, “and this school has a uniform code, which you accepted when you came, and while you are under my aegis you will not shove at its loopholes to tempt fate like daredevil Gryffs. I don’t care about your thirst for self-expression. Save it for Hogsmeade weekends, when your safety is the available adults’ only job. If you’re too young to know that, while in the castle, they’re too busy to monitor all potential pigs, take it from me.”
There was a whispered argument amongst the sixth-years. Then, from the hallway, a cool voice asked, “What other instructions would you like to see spread, Apothecary Snape?” and a rather small young lady with a shining prefect badge and henna writhing distractingly all over her coffee-colored hands stepped out from where she’d been probably-eavesdropping.
Evan’s grandfather claimed to enjoy painting henna. Ev still hated it, due to not being good enough yet. It always came out either blurred or monstrous. At least tattoos stayed more or less in the same place, or all the ones Ev had seen so far did. If you were patient, you could get their full ranges in all the angles. Henna was like trying to paint an entire living portrait inside a living portrait, and he just couldn’t get the knack of it. This was probably not a black mark against someone Ev’s age, since as far as he could tell his dad hadn’t managed it yet either.
“Good morning, Lead-Prefect Shafiq,” Spike greeted her in an equally formal tone. “I think you will agree with me that the drakelets should be aware that unbound long hair in students attending Potions, Defense, Herbology, or Care of Magical Creatures is, being foolish and unsafe, highly discouraged. Scent worn to Care of Magical Creatures, Divination, and Potions is similarly discouraged, and anyone choosing to wear any cosmetics or extra adornments to Potions class had best be prepared either to prove that what they’re wearing is not a safety hazard around unstable cauldrons or to remove it.”
The Lead-Prefect gave this due consideration. In Ev’s opinion, she took a second or two longer than was quite necessary. “That seems reasonable,” she said finally, “but the students won’t find out the schedules until breakfast, and will not know which set of precautions to take.”
“Then I suggest,” Spike said, tilting his head and dry again, “that students either ensure they are prepared for any class they might take before leaving the common room, or finish eating early enough to make any necessary adjustments.”
There was grumbling, but it wasn’t as bad or as mean as it might have been.
“You liar,” Ev snugged Spike’s arm when the kids had gone, pressing into his cheek so Spike would feel his smile. “You don’t need me at all.”
“Bite your tongue,” Spike retorted, offended, and Evan smiled wider.
By the time Evan closed the points tally, Spike had caught six joke items and a charm bracelet that he said was a terrible stealth weapon because a) it was called a charm bracelet and b) everyone who heard it clinking would be annoyed and direct that annoyance at Slytherin as a whole, because no, the clinking was not charming when one was trying to take notes.
He had put his foot down about open-toed sandals, too. Ev was looking forward to sharing his loud, irritated objections to them with Wilkes (who might have worn sensible boots for one week a year, in midwinter, maybe), inviting her over for tea, and then sitting back and enjoying the argument.
He also sent no fewer than eight students back with their ears on fire for not wearing wand-sheaths, and one for leaving his actual wand in his actual trunk. That one’s actual ears actually blistered. Spike yelled at him again for letting bad language shock him into hurting himself with his accidental magic, and threatened to make him brew a term’s worth of burn cream unless he talked to the Pomfrey and Flitwick about it.
Ev had caught a pair of wobbly heels and a set of tap shoes charmed to look like school boots, a pair of stockings that made him wince (Spike noticed those on his own, but because a hole in the toe was making the girl walk funny, not because of the horrible color). Also a pair of stockings that Spike must have thought were okay because they were black, but which had some dangerous patterns woven in.
They’d disagreed about a wristwatch with a loud and erratic tic, which Spike had clearly thought was a brilliant weapon until Evan had pointed out he was going to have to listen to it. Spike had also resisted about the second-year who’d apparently shredded his school tie on purpose at the end to be fringe-like; Ev had to point out that deliberately destroying official school stuff was a bad look.
And he’d had no problem at all with the waistcoat that all but screamed I Am An Illiterate Farmer’s Pig-Boy and would have made Evan cry if he hadn’t been in sneaky-mode. He hadn’t exactly given in on that one, but after much hard, indignant poking he’d long-sufferingly asked the boy if it was a deliberate choice.
Evan hadn’t even had to poke him about three pairs of under-robe trousers worn under open robes, or the pair of trousers that were actually pyjama bottoms. Ev took this as a major victory, although more Narcissa’s victory than his own.
Spike was looking rather ragged by the time he brought Evan back to the vanishing cabinet. When they were safely in his rooms, he said in his trying-to-approximate-an-apology tone, “It may take me until the weekend to make it up to you.”
“I expect you’ll have something good planned by then,” Evan said unconcernedly, taking the invisibility spell off himself. It was, however, in a forbidding tone that he asked, “You’re not planning to do this every morning, are you?”
“Tomorrow,” Spike said, “and once or thrice a fortnight through Halloween, and then maybe once a month. They shouldn’t be able to predict when I’ll do it.”
“Okay,” Ev said, still in his best stern tone, “but am I expected to get up before six on all those days?”
“Tomorrow?” Spike-begged Spike. “After that I should hope my eye for this sort of thing will be at least somewhat practiced.”
“Mmm,” Ev hummed, dubious and noncommittal. “Maybe. But not as a matter of course, Spike.”
“No,” Spike hastened to agree. He thumbed gravely over the tree on Ev’s left arm, troubled. “But I don’t want to only see you once a day for a late supper, Ev.”
“No, that’s unacceptable,” Evan agreed, doing his own thumbing over the back of Spike’s hand and getting a highly gratifying three-inch shoulder drop for his trouble. “Bring me your class schedule, we’ll have a look.”
Unfairly suspecting that Evan’s vengeance scheme included biting him somewhere visible as well as making him suspiciously late for breakfast, Spike wouldn’t stay for a decent good-morning snog.
Evan knew that was what it was really about, but what Severus actually said was, “I can’t, Ev, I have to go be a hypocritical killjoy and interfere with all the upper-form beds.”
Evan eyed him. “Since you said ‘hypocritical,’ I think you’re going to do something Slughorn doesn’t care about. If he doesn’t care about it, you don’t have to do it.”
“Horace Slughorn is not my moral compass,” Spike said, his mouth going very hard and his eyes sparking like cold flint.
“If you’re about to say Evans is, you’re going to come home tonight and find I’ve boiled oolong for twenty minutes in your best pot,” Evan warned him, scowling.
The flints melted into a grin that very nearly reached Spike’s mouth, and then Evan got pulled into, if not a satisfying snog, at least a lovely little nuzzle. “I use my own, thanks, don’t bother. Go on, I’ll explain later.”
Resignedly, Evan allowed, “Oh, I’m sure you’ll think you did, but I’ll get sense out of you in the end,” and the hard gust of breath that Spike thought was a laugh followed him into the Rosier Hall side of the Vanishing Cabinet.
Stepping out into his bedroom, Evan made a beeline for the hearth, twitched a pinch of Floo powder into it, and dove through into Malfoy Manor the moment Narcissa answered.
“Evvie, are you all right?” she met him worriedly, cleaning ash off him with the brush instead of her wand like a mother hen. “You should have come yesterday! Bella came over for tea, she said he was awfully unhappy with your report about your trip. He didn’t hurt you did he? Oh!” she gasped, hands flying to her mouth. “Evvie, what are you doing up at this hour, did he curse you?!”
“No, no, it’s fine,” Evan waved her off. “He didn’t curse me. Bella exaggerates everything, Cissa, you know she does.”
“’Exaggerates’ isn’t ‘wrong,’” she pointed out, folding her arms and glaring at him as if he were Spike insisting he was fine when they met him at King’s Cross with his nose broken again.
“I’m not saying he wouldn’t have liked us to have made more alliances,” Evan agreed, moving over to the cradle by the window to see if the baby was awake (fortunately he was not). “But I think he sort of enjoyed hearing that Spike made a friend with connections and nobody liked me.”
“Evvie,” Narcissa said in a very Spike-like lowering tone, frowning at him in a way that conveyed whole worlds of disapproval without wrinkling her forehead.
“Narcissa, he said he’s been to Albania and he should have warned me they think people who smile a lot are liars and fools over there. I’m not saying he was impressed, but he admitted he sent us out unarmed. He doesn’t think we weren’t trying. We’ll just have to follow up on the Karkaroff angle.”
“Evvie,” Narcissa said severely, “your strategy cannot rest on someone who, you have assured me, eats bugs.”
“He was trying to steal my Spike,” Evan reminded her indignantly, “every day, and I was drunk, and you can have a perfectly lovely career even if you eat bugs, look at old what’s-your-cousin Caractacus.”
“Disappearing out of a grimy old pawnshop is not my idea of a perfectly lovely career,” Narcissa informed him, still doing the Narcissa-equivalent of an irritated Spike-scowl.
“Well, I expect the Bulgarian bug-eater’s to be a very promising one,” Evan assured her, totally straight-faced, although he was sure she heard the faint dry note in his voice.
He wasn’t lying. Karkaroff, in his Slughorn-trained assessment, was almost sure to have a sound career, if not a brilliant one. It might be founded entirely on nepotism, but that had never stopped anyone who had more self-esteem than self-respect. In Evan’s opinion, Karkaroff, while nowhere near as bad as Gildylocks, wouldn’t understand the difference.
“You should be more worried about the short-term prospects! Bella said he gave you two a special project and you didn’t get anywhere!” she accused him anxiously.
“Oaks don’t grow over tea,” Evan said, starting to feel a little cranky. He was sure he would have had more patience with her very warming concern if they’d been having this conversation five hours later in the day. “Acorn sown, it’s not my fault if he had unrealistic expectations, and that’s not what I came about, Narcissa, it’s Spike.”
She collapsed in graceful horror into an armchair. “Oh, no, did he get himself fired already? Or did one of the seventh-year Gryffindors try to strip him and stick him to the Astronomy tower? Oh no, they tried and he killed them! Evvie, is he in Azkaban?!”
“No, Cissa, will you listen?” Evan pressed, jittering his fists urgently on her chair-arm. “He kidnapped me out of bed at six in the morning and expected me to help him with no preparation and be functional at six in the morning just because he was asking me to, without even bribing me, and just assume he’d listen and be reasonable and do what I said if I said no! Completely out of the blue!”
There was a long, long moment where Narcissa was staring at him and visibly trying to make sense of that and work out what she was supposed to make of it. Evan deeply, deeply sympathized. It had taken him at least ten minutes.
Then her face crumpled up and her eyes went all watery and she softly cried, “Oh, Evvie, I’m so happy for you!”
“I know!” he exclaimed, throwing his arms out victoriously (and, if truth be told, rather bouncily), and let her hug him.
“Thank you for telling me, darling,” she said, a little snuffly, and cuddled his arm with her head on his shoulder until the baby woke up hungry and started to cry.
“I think that’s my cue, unless you want help,” Evan said, eying it warily. “I just had to come tell you.”’
She waved him away, still beaming a bit as she bent over to pick Draco up. “Does he know you’ve worked it out?” she asked with interest.
“Don’t be silly, coz,” Evan laughed. “He hasn’t worked it out.”
“Are you going to tell him?”
He tilted his head. “Er, no, obviously, because I don’t want him to have a stroke.”
She made an unimpressed face, and sniffed, “Most people wouldn’t have a stroke just from realizing they trusted someone they’d already married. And not even in an arranged marriage!”
“Sure,” Evan agreed, grinning easily at her as he stepped through her fireplace back home. “Most people aren’t Severus.”
[1]Evan may possibly be a little paranoid about Hufflepuffs laying marital traps for poor innocent Slytherins just trying to get to know everybody.
Because for two solid years he had to put serious effort into not dating Pansy's mum.