Valley of the Shadow, Act II

"If you've come to steal the family jewels, I don't think she's got any."

Reggie yelped and turned around. He consoled himself with the knowledge that he'd only dropped the book on his foot because he was going for his wand. "Evan!" he said crossly, restoring both book and wand to their proper places. "What are you doing here?" When this just got him more eyebrow, he asked crossly, "Why in Medea's knife-drawer would I be looking for jewels in Professor Bagshot's library?"

"Why would I look to find Reggie Black in Auntie Bathilda's library?" Evan asked rhetorically, draping himself against a bookshelf with absent-mindedly artistic lethargy. "But here you are."

It was more like second cousin four times removed, but Evan had been the kind of quiet but not sullen little boy who was fed a lot of sweets by every witch with a scrap of maternal instinct who bumped into him, on the premise that he'd needed cheering up. It had infuriated and baffled Sirius, who'd tried on several occasions to copy his dispiritedly polite look. The result had been less successful than an excellent satire of your garden-variety Psuedo-Suicidal Faux-Byronic Poet. Sirius had generally been told to stop cadging for biscuits and play with the other children, and Reg for several years had been very confused about how many sisters Uncle Darius and Aunt Drusilla had (none).

Fortunately for Evan and for Reggie's mental health, Evan had had the sense to share his loot.

…Except for that time old Charis Crouch gave him toffee with chocolate and nuts (and rather horrifyingly demanded that he call her Nanny Carrie). But that was probably at least partly Bella's fault for taking the crayons hostage.

"I'm looking for a book," Reg said, scowling at him. "I owled about it, and she said it was nice to see Binns hadn't killed off all interest in her subject since he died and I could come look for it if she wasn't in."

"Trusting old bird, I'll have to tell Cissa to suggest Aunt Dru have a word with her," Evan said thoughtfully. "Nothing personal, Reggie, only not all her relations are as universally beloved as my own good self—"

Reg rolled his eyes. Not too hard, though, since Ev was kidding.

"—And not everyone's forgotten that. What are you looking for? She's got a bit of a personalized system, you won't find it by author."

He hesitated. But actually, what he was looking for was perfectly unexceptionable, really. So probably he shouldn't have hesitated. It was too late to pretend he hadn't, so he looked embarrassed instead. "I wanted to see what she had on Salazar," he admitted.

Evan looked politely puzzled, though he didn't insult Reg by cloaking it in one of his sleepy looks. "That's not like you, is it?"

Reg drew back his head a little, insulted. "I read!" he huffed. "Just because I'm not Spike doesn't mean I don't read. People who aren't Spike read the occasional book and still go out some evenings sometimes, you know."

"And at night," Evan said blandly, and Reg couldn't stop himself flinching. Evvie didn't press it, though, not even to ask how Bast was doing. He just continued as though he'd always meant to. "Yes, I remember. Vastly overrated, if you ask me."

"No one did ask you," Reg grumbled. "No one had to ask you."

"No, I suppose they didn't," he said smugly, with a restrained little spine-wriggle that in Reg's opinion should have had him arrested for public indecency, except that they weren't in public. "But I didn't mean you're illiterate, kitten—"

Regulus sighed. It was also probably (definitely) (far) too late (by years) to get his hands on a time-turner and arrange to be named after a less embarrassing snake. The hell of it was that the scientific name wasn't any better, because he'd been given it at thirteen and Thor Rowle had decided almost immediately that slipping an N in there made 'boiga' very 'funny.'

"I meant, well, the stuff Auntie B keeps down here is like that glass-fronted shelf Spike keeps in his stillroom next to the ingredients pantry."

His face fell. "That bad?"

"That bad and really dusty," Evan said ruefully. "Less arithmancy, alchemy, algebra, and researcher-grammar, but old-people grammar's just as bad in large portions. There's enough howsoevers and hithertos and begats and extra Es floating around down here to make a modern publisher start throwing reducto curses around. Not being Spike is probably an important factor, honestly, unless you're here for serious research. It's not a place to look for a good read. Some of it's not even Middle English, Reg."

"…So when Dad said she had primary sources, he really meant she had primary sources," Reg drooped.

"…Er, what else would he have meant?"

"Well, I sort of thought he meant primary as in, you know, the best ones. He was a little… I asked him after his after-dinner digestif and I thought he might have meant the primary sources and… missed." He avoided Evan's eyes, and not just because it hadn't actually been after dinner. Ev probably didn't look pitying, or even have that awful kind look, and of course he was family and already knew, but… still.

"Ah." Yes, Evan understood him, all right. But you could rely on Evan not to be sorry for you. Or even care much, unless Spike made him think he should. "No, he probably meant what he said. She keeps all the originals at Gringotts, of course. Everything here's a geminus-copy," Ev shrugged. "But, well. Why the sudden burning interest?"

Reg scowled at him again, and this time it was with genuine resentment. "Don't you ever feel like everything's going wrong and there's nothing you can do?"

Evan stared back at him. Blankly.

"Not once?"

"Regulus," Evan said, slowly and carefully, "I live with Spike."

Reg returned the stare, confused now.

Evan sighed at him. "The only days where there's a less than 95% chance that Severus will not have actively involved himself in a dramatic catastrophe which, he has perfectly logical reasons for concluding with clarity and certainty, will inevitably lead to us all straight to the intersection of Ragnarok and the apocalypse are the ones where he never leaves the flat or speaks to anyone but me at all. And if I tried to keep him home more than one day in a row, he'd chew his way out straight through the wall. And even when he does stay home he's usually giving himself an ulcer about all the pre-existing catastrophes."

"So… he's the one I should ask what to do about feeling like that."

"Don't bother," Evan said dryly. "Going to find the best book about Salazar or Machiavelli or whoever is exactly what he'd do, too. Besides, I don't know what you mean. Just the thought of his stomach lining makes me feel exactly like that. And his nerves, they must be in rags already and we've only been out of school two years!"

"That sounds exhausting," Reg said experimentally, in case Evan was trying to warn him off, tell him living with Spike wouldn't be a walk in the park. It wasn't Reg's fault Spike had outsized magnetism for a homely bloke and Evan kept snogging him in front of Reg. It wasn't as if Reg was going to do anything about it.

"You'd think so," Evan agreed with a sort of proud, baffled, long-suffering pleasure, "but he doesn't seem to run out of energy. He doesn't even sleep enough, if you ask me."

"Er… that wasn't quite what I meant."

Evan looked at him like he was speaking Mermish.

"Evvie, has anyone ever told you that sometimes you look exactly like Bella?"

The you-are-speaking-Mermish look continued. "I can't say anyone has, Reggie, no, what with her being a slate-eyed brunette who moves like she's got a book on her head when she's not diving at you with her nails out."

"I just mean, er, Spike's not actually the only person actually alive in the whole world, right?"

"Quite right, Reg," Evan said in the kind of gentle, condescending voice that was begging for a hex. "I can prove it to you, if you weren't sure. I've painted some of them, they mostly haven't started moving yet."

Reg scowled. "I mean, things can go wrong about other people, there can be problems that are bigger than just about Spike."

"Yes, I know," Evan said, not changing tones. "I hear about them all the time. They're the ones he's worried about."

"…I'm getting you an apron for your next birthday."

"Make sure it's one of those completely white lacy ones that'd dissolve at the first grease spot, then; Spike won't let me in the kitchen."

Although that wasn't exactly news, Reg still had to ask, "Exactly what use are you?" Mostly because Evan in a gingham apron was funny but Evan in a French maid's outfit made his head hurt and he didn't want to think about it. He really, really hoped Spike had better taste than that. It wouldn't work at all.

"I'm very pretty," Evan replied serenely, without skipping a beat.

"You're very Anglo-Saxon," Reg corrected, because Evan showed more of the family's Macmillian strain than anyone else, and it went with the Rosier hair so naturally that Reg was really surprised that Evvie had never painted himself as a Viking. Or he would have been, except that holding up something like an oar or a sword would probably have been too much work. He was a bit too broad to be called pretty, really, including in his long face, and Reg would have thought that a painter who had voluntarily stepped down as their team's Seeker for exactly that reason would know that.

Evvie raised an eyebrow at him. "Has anyone ever told you that you get as snippy as Siri when you're in a mood? We'll blame it on dust in the brain. Come on up and we'll see what kind of tea she's got in until she gets back and you can pick her brain instead of sneezing through her books. Have you seen the garden? The plangentines won't be blooming in August, of course, but she's got heather, moly, and sunflowers right up next to each other, it's hysterical."

"…Why is it hysterical?"

Evan's mouth opened and closed a couple of times, and then he said, "You'll see when you look at it."

"What are you doing here, anyway?" Reg asked, following him upstairs a little reluctantly.

Evan shrugged as they came into the old lady's entryway. "I didn't have a sitting today, and I needed to get out of the flat, and I haven't visited in a while."

Reg eyed him warily. "You needed to get out of the flat?" That was like Gildy saying he needed to get away from the mirror. It was summer, really quite warm out, and not a weekday. Unless things had drastically changed since school, it was something close to a miracle that Evan was awake.

Disappointingly, Evan looked proud. "Spike hasn't sent polite nice-to-have-met-you cards yet to all the brewers he's just decided he despises in person as well as for their research," he explained. "I thought it would go faster if I wasn't around to be glared at for getting him the cards and promising Mum and Narcissa I'd let them know when he'd finished."

"Well, what were you doing in her library then?" Reg asked suspiciously.

Evan eyed him, a little perplexed. "Er… I thought she might have been down there and not have heard the door?"

Which made sense and everything, except that Reg hadn't heard the door, or the doorbell, or anyone calling her name. "And being-Spike being a factor in who'd enjoy the books down there has nothing to do with it, I suppose," he hazarded skeptically.

"We are getting to the end of the Greek-Slytherin saga," Evan conceded. "Do you want to borrow it when we're done? It's very good, and I know a good cleaning charm for books."

Regulus made a horrified noise that was definitely not a squeak. Evan just kept looking at him, innocently offering. Sometimes Reg couldn't believe his mother thought Sirius was the awful, inappropriate one.

"Do you want that tea or not?"

Reg definitely-didn't-whimper, and then he got ahold of himself and insisted, "I'm making it."

"I'm not that bad," Evan complained, trailing languidly after Reg's determined stomp to the kitchen. It was very old-lady's-kitchen-ish. "Spike's just mental about tea. Left cabinet above the sink, blue tin."

"Is there something Spike's not mental about?" he grumbled, taking the tea down and looking for the pot.

"More about some things than others," Evan said in that light, careless voice that was guaranteed to make the spine of anyone with a scrap of sense freeze solid. "F'rinstance, I wouldn't like to see him if he was trying to protect someone, and someone got in his way on purpose. Even if it was the same someone."

"I don't know what you mean," Reg said. And could have cursed himself. Wrong, wrong, wrong, you never said that, that was as good as I admit it.

"Oh, that's a coincidence," Evan said cheerfully. "I don't, either. Reggie, the teapot's sitting on the stove."

"Why talk if you don't know what you mean," Reg muttered sullenly. He wanted to bang things around, but he wasn't Sirius, or twelve, and it wasn't his teapot.

Of course, it wasn't Evan's kitchen table, either, but that wasn't stopping him from putting his boots up on it. "Oh, you were asking about feeling as if everything's going wrong, down there," Evan said, waving an airy hand. "What I mean is, I don't mean anything specific, but he'd come find a book because he'd want an instruction manual. You remember the way he wouldn't let anyone look after him at school."

"What does that have to do with wanting an instruction manual?" Reg asked, feeling a bit like a top someone was spinning. Spinning badly.

Evan regarded Reg levelly over his boot-toes. "Being protected from things that are going wrong takes it out of his hands, Reg. That makes him helpless. You know Severus. Do you think that's something he appreciates?"

Reg bit back the instinctive defensive scowl (not a pout), and made himself look back just as levelly. "What if it was a case where he'd really be safer if he wasn't involved, would you care what he appreciates?"

The boots came down and Evan sat up, regarding Reg with a new interest. "It's a nice point," he remarked slowly. He really was looking at Reg as if Reg was an easel he was thinking of buying. It was thoroughly squirm-making. "I don't know that I ever met it before. Of course, then we have to ask ourselves, is it up to me to decide, and if so, do I decide based on whether I care or based on what he wants?"

"Exactly," Reg sighed, relieved.

"Really," Evan added, giving Reg a warm smile, "no one's ever asked me that before. I'd be tickled just frightfully pink if you'd asked because you cared about my opinion."

"What?" he stuttered, panicked. "No, I—"

"It's fine, rabbit," Evan assured him, amused. "We fish for the answer we want, I understand. But actually, your answer is, no, I wouldn't tie Spike's hands even to try and keep him out of trouble. He'd just dislocate his thumbs to get free and get into it anyway, if he'd meant to in the first place. Maybe too late, with a weak wand-hand. And that would be my fault, and he'd know it."

"So he's the only one who gets to protect other people?" Reg scowled.

"We've already established he's mental," Evan shrugged easily, leaning back in his chair again and lacing his fingers behind his head. His feet stayed on the ground again, though, thankfully; Reg had felt terrible about letting him do that in Professor Bagshot's kitchen even if there wasn't really very much anyone could do about Evvie. "Comes of having a Gryffie mum, I expect. Anyway, that's what he does when things are going pear-shaped."

"Oh," Reg said, making it sound as though he was realizing Evan had just been getting tangled up trying to answer his question. Almost as much to continue that pretense as because he wanted to know, he asked, "What do you do, then?"

Evan slid him a neutral face that said This so clearly he might as well have rolled his eyes. Then he shrugged and smiled, and said, "Oh, I make sure he gets some sleep."

"No, I mean when you feel like that."

"I make sure," Evan repeated slowly, "he gets some sleep."

"Yeah, but going back," Reg reminded him, "to that bit where other people exist?"

This time he got a cool, judging look—not as if Evan disliked him, or even thought he was being stupid (well, not very very stupid, probably?) but as if there were six or seven possible answers in the balance. "My work," Evan said finally, slowly again, but this time as if he was choosing his words carefully, not as if Reg was an idiot, "is to make sure they go on existing along with the living after they die. I don't think Severus quite believes that, at heart. And, you know, coz, I think of myself as a Black just as often as I do a Rosier, so don't take this amiss, but I don't think any of you Blacks understand it."

"What do you mean, he doesn't believe it?" was all he dared to ask.

Evan shrugged. "He doesn't think the people in portraits are themselves, not really. He doesn't say it, but I know he doesn't think they're much more than complicated photographs. He thinks it's a bit morbid, actually, except when he has nightmares about wizards are right about portraits except about it being a good thing to do for people and actually we're jailing and possibly torturing all the ancestors. But mostly he thinks they're just echoes of who they were, paint charmed to mimic what they'd say and do."

Drolly, he added, "Although why he thinks that would be simpler than just giving the psyche a new home to be drawn to when the anima breaks away from the body, I can't imagine. I mean, if it were easy to enchant things to do more than one thing, we could all make our own brooms and more people would charm their own clothes, don't you think?"

Reg looked at him helplessly. He understood portraits weren't anything as unimportant as photographs, but he didn't understand what Evan was getting at behind the chatter.

"You and Narcissa and Sirius and Bella and Andi and Spike, you all think the same things are important," Evan said, and held up a hand when Reg would have protested. "Oh, I know, you disagree a lot, but you're all playing the same game."

"What exactly do you think is a game?" Reg demanded, his skin going hot and prickly and tight. The thin, red silk scarf he hadn't had to look at since Severus had 'needed an occlumency partner' wasn't a toy. What had happened to Rabastan wasn't some forfeit.

Fortunately for Evan, he appeared to give this question some real thought. Finally, he said, "'Abstract ideas matter.'"

"…Like what?" Reg asked dubiously.

"Like blood and purity and power."

"You don't think they matter?" Reg asked, even more dubiously.

"I've got this life to have a body in and I get to spend it with Severus," Evan said simply. "I don't know what it'll feel like to be paint."

"Don't you think that's a little selfish?" Reggie snapped. The tea was whistling behind him and he really didn't care.

Evan smiled easily, and floated the kettle off the flame. "Nope. Spike does what he wants and I make sure he gets some sleep."

"…Oh," Reg realized, sagging with stupid. "And what he wants is…"

"To be mental, right," Evvie agreed, all placid. "Well, he doesn't want to, but he wouldn't be Spike if he could help himself. Come on, it's nice out and you haven't seen the tragedy of the sunflowers yet."

Reg followed him and the floating tea-tray out into the garden, which didn't look so awful to him. Professor Bagshot had a little table set up under her plangentine tree, but Evan pulled his chair a little ways away from it to bask in the sunshine. Reg would have scorched if he'd tried that for more than a few minutes without a potion.

"It matters who's in power," Regulus said after a while. "Because everyone who goes for power thinks those things matter, too, and wants to do something about something."

"I know," Evan agreed, a little sadly, without opening his eyes.

"But if you know it matters, why don't you care about making sure? That someone good is, I mean."

"You know I've picked a side, Reg."

"Yeah, but just because it's us and your dad. You don't care, you just said you didn't."

Evan pried an eye open to look at him. "Reggie, how many politicians and government officials and power brokers have you met since your mum decided you were old enough to come to parties?"

"Er… a lot?"

"And you're sure you know, do you, when they're saying something they believe and when they're saying something they're determined to stick to no matter what it costs them and when they're saying something they think you want to believe that they believe and will stick to? How many of them are you sure about that, how often?"

"I'm sure I know one who means what he says," Reg said dutifully.

"Of course," Evan murmured, his eye fluttering shut again in the lowest-energy ironic bow Reg had ever seen. Severus was right; Evan's level of laziness was actually, in a bizarre kind of way, sort of impressive. "But even when they mean well, getting anything changed in that anthill without resorting to outright tyranny costs more than any career has to give. Everyone's terrified that any change could lead to a mistake that would cost us our traditions, or even Secrecy."

He turned and looked at Reggie, a little wryly. "Don't let me stop you being optimistic, rabbit. It is important to have someone in charge who isn't going to break everything. Other than that, though, I can't think the name on the door matters much. They'll be pulling against the same old rusty hinges."

"…Actually, I don't think you should let Spike talk politics to you anymore," Reg decided.

"Actually, I talk to a lot more Ministry people than he does," Evan pointed out. "Often for quite long periods of time, while they whinge about how impossible it is to get anything done."

"Oh."

"Sometimes while in really uncomfortable positions," Evvie added. With, in Reg's opinion, far too much enjoyment.

"Oh, yeah," he remembered, making a face. "Some of those are really undignified. I couldn't believe Mother really wanted me to go along with all that, the first time."

Evan eyed him oddly. "Been a while?"

"The last time was," he swallowed, "when they made me the heir."

"When you were fifteen."

There was something flat about Evan's voice, but Reg seized with relief on a way to get where he wanted to go. "Right. With the family crest behind me and the ring and everything, I felt ridiculous." Actually, he'd felt like Atlas, but you didn't say that. As if it had just occurred to him, he asked, "You must know all the crests and things, don't you?"

"Grandpère might know all of them," Evan demurred. "I couldn't draw them all from memory or anything."

"You could do Salazar's, though, couldn't you? I don't mean the House one, not the full coat of arms, I know that one, I mean what he would have put on his things. On his journals and like that. If she's got anything of his I really would like to read it, even if it is dusty. It'd make a change from Gilderoy's masterpiece, at least," he added, making a face.

"I thought you were enjoying that," Evan noted, amused.

"I am, but it's a bit much in large doses. I can't decide whether the version in first person or the one where it says GILDEROY LOCKHART every three sentences is worse."

Evan laughed. "Well, if you mean his monogram, that's easy enough." He pulled a quill-case, inkpot, and sketchbook out of a mokeskin pouch at his belt. "Here," he said, taking out a broad-tipped quill. In a moment, he'd laid out a serpentine S made wholly of diamond-shaped strokes, like the backs of some rattlesnakes only green.

"That's it?" Reg asked, his heart sinking. That was exactly the pattern of green stones Kreacher had drawn on his picture of the locket. "It's so simple."

"Complicated isn't always clever," Evan said. "You don't want a signature that's going to take you forever, do you? Bogs up the paperwork."

"Suppose not," he admitted. "Evan?"

"Mm?"

"Has he ever asked you for a portrait? Or your dad?"

"Not me. I don't know about Dad, but I don't think so."

"Do you think you could find out?"

Evan hesitated. "Maybe," he said slowly. "Why?"

…Good question. Evan would definitely need an answer to it prepared, too, and all Reg had was Divi-trained intuition sending chills up his spine. Mud. Er. "He and Spike really seem to get each other sometimes," Reg said earnestly. "What if he thinks the same way? We need to make sure he's taken care of."

"Good thought," Evan declared, smiling. "All right, maybe. Reg?"

"Yeah?"

Evan was quiet for a moment. "You know I know first-hand that there isn't anybody who's more brilliant or a better person than our Spike—"

Reg sighed at him. "Evvie, this is what we who live in reality call a 'personal opinion,' and the word you wanted there was 'think.'"

"No, I just know better than you due to better exposure," Evan said smugly. "Anyway, you know that I know that, so you'll know how seriously to take me when I say this."

"'Not at all.' Right."

"No: very, very."

Reg was skeptical.

"He's a horrible, horrible role model, do not emulate him in any way," Evan said, firmly and fervently. "I mean this. It will only lead to tears and he wouldn't want you to."

Reggie blinked.

"I mean it," Evan insisted. "Reggie, don't you understand? The only reason he played Quidditch in school was so your brother and Pettigrew would aim at him instead of us. Severus is a crazy person. This is what he does. He is a moron."

"Why are you telling me this?" Reggie asked uneasily.

"I don't know if you remember," Evan said, blandly enough to make Reggie flinch. "But I was your prefect and your captain, both of you."

"Of course I remember," he said defensively.

"Oh, good. Then maybe it won't surprise you too much if I let you know that I don't have to know what's going on to remember what it looks like when someone's thinking like a Chaser, and when someone's thinking like a Seeker. Especially you, as I've seen you play both. I also know what it looks like when someone's thinking like a rotting bludger-sponge."

Reg sort of wished that if Evan was going to swear (insofar as Evan did swear, which admittedly wasn't very far) he wouldn't do it in a bland-as-porridge voice. It was unnerving. On the other hand, coming from Evan, doing it normally might be just as bad.

He had, at least, taken on a bit of a severe, scolding tone, now, although you had to know him really well to hear that he wasn't just a shoes-untied degree of peeved. "And if I'd had any interest in putting up with that nonsense I would have let Mulgrew be captain, because let me tell you, Reg, he really wanted it, and I didn't especially need all those extra politics at the same time as my NEWT classes."

"I honestly don't know what you're getting at," Regulus told him, just in case it would get Evan to tell him something he didn't know.

Evan sighed. "I just think you should know that if he could make sure, by bleeding every day, that you could stay home every night eating cake with a family who was always nice to you, he'd do it."

Reg's shoulders hunched. "I'm not a child," he said miserably.

Evan shrugged. "If you want respect," he said sympathetically, "go live up to everything your brother wants where he can see you at it. Spike doesn't care about any of that. He doesn't expect anything from anyone, mostly, and when he does it isn't usually very good. You're about the only person he's ever met that he's not afraid of, as far as I can tell."

Evan paused, eyes flicking and lips pursing into a thinking face. They looked at each other, and, in silence, agreed that Gilderoy didn't count.

Evan went on, "That's special to him. He wants you to be all right."

"Spike's not scared of anything," he said hotly, and immediately wished he either hadn't said that or hadn't just insisted he wasn't a child. Either would probably have been okay on their own; both together were mortifying.

"Okay," Evan said tolerantly, pushing a teacup at him.

"Well, he's not scared of you," he pointed out, trying not to flush and not to sound sullen at the same time.

"Reggie," Evan explained, still sounding horribly tolerant, "I could get hurt or stop liking him." He paused. "Well, I think we've about got that last one sorted, and he mostly trusts me to stay out of trouble, but I could still get splinched or catch dragonpox or Finally Realize What He's Really Like. Pretty sure he's more afraid of me than anyone."

"That's not being afraid of someone," Reg scoffed.

"Well, you've been in his head, I suppose you'd know," Evan allowed mildly, and turned his face up into the sun again. After a moment, without opening his eyes, he added, "You can stop looking at me like I'm going to kill you in your sleep, Reggie; I don't envy you the experience."

"It wasn't nice at all," Reg assured him hastily, and then realized that was probably the wrong thing to say. "I mean—"

"You mean being him isn't something you'd wish on anyone," Evan translated peaceably. "That's what I've been saying for the last five minutes. He wouldn't either."

"Would you?" This time he did want to know.

A very cold smile flickered around the edges of Evan's mouth. Reg would have thought a smile like that would look wrong on him, but it didn't. "I can think of one or two people who could do with a dram or two of what he was born overdosing on." He looked at Reg, his smile warming, softening, and Reg thought he was telling the truth. "You've already got too much, Reggie. That's why he's not afraid of you."

"Evvie?" Reg asked plaintively.

"Mm?"

"When did you get nasty?"

Evan looked at him for a while. "I wish you'd married Selwyn," he said regretfully—out of nowhere, as far as Reg could tell.

"She didn't have all that much patience with me, actually," Reg informed him warily. "Becca was always more my friend than she was. I was never all that comfortable with Marielle, tell you the truth."

"I know," Evan agreed, "and I liked Goldstein, too, but she wasn't much use to you. Even if you and Selwyn had never got to love each other, you were good partners and shieldmates, as prefects. I wish you still had someone who wouldn't hesitate to split skulls if someone looked at you sideways."

"She only did that because it undermined her authority and it would have been worse if you or Spike or Narcissa had had to step in," Reg pointed out.

"It undermined her authority because you were a unit," Evan said, "and what was done to you was done to her."

Reg nodded an I-suppose sort of nod. "I don't see why I have to marry someone from my form, though," he said. "Cissa didn't."

"Of course you don't," Evan blinked, surprised. "Marry a forty-year-old hekau if you like. Only, I thought Selwyn was good for you. No nerves, no games, no nonsense. Nothing to fret about. You wouldn't have had to spoil it trying to be more than friends and partners, you know."

"That's all well and good for you to say," Reg grumbled, giving him slit-eyes.

"It's not my fault I got run over by the Hogwarts Express on a practically daily basis for seven years," Evan protested, turning his little smile skywards. "Anyone'd be jelly after enough of that. It's not as if they let you change rooms, you know."

"Would you have?" he asked curiously.

Evan chuckled, his eyes crinkling and his nose wrinkling a little. Reg wondered if it ever felt unfair to Spike that Evan's nose was a bit small for his face. "That first year? In a heartbeat."

"Well, lucky you," he said sourly. It wasn't that his roommates had been all bad by any means, but 'no nerves, no games, no nonsense' was in no way what his form had been like.

"Oh, Merlin, don't say that in front of Severus." Evan scrubbed a hand down the side of his face. "He'll agree with you at the top of his lungs for the rest of the afternoon."

Reg blinked. "…Why at the top of his lungs?"

"He's got opinions about how much luck kids ought to need. He's been on it a bit, lately. Two guesses why."

"…I actually don't have the faintest idea, Evan."

"Really?" Evan blinked at him. "Reggie, that grant ruling could come down any day now. He did his best at the conference and so did I, we've tried to get as many people lobbying the committee as we can, and he was so nice to some of the most anti-werewolf voices on it I had to make him cocoa to get the taste out of his mouth, but at this point there's nothing more he can do without making a bad impression. Please do not mention the word 'luck' in front of him. Or 'chance.' Or 'odds.' Or—"

"I get it," Reg interrupted, smiling a little almost despite himself. Then his shoulders curled. "Um… Evvie?"

"Mm?"

"Um… look, I know Narcissa's been on his side with this, but…"

Evan sat up and looked at him full-faced.

He squirmed. "It's just… she was writing a letter to the committee while I was over, and I happened to look at Lucius, and he had this sort of… expression."

"What kind of an expression."

"Like… 'I'm sorry you're wasting your time and I wish I could tell you.'"

"Did he see you seeing it?"

Reg nodded. "He looked at me like…" He tried to mimic the way Lucius had eyebrow-shrugged at him: a sort of we are men of the world who know these things together, it's too bad but c'est la vie sort of look.

Evan just sat there and breathed for a few moments, but his lips had gone white. In a numb sort of voice, he asked, "Ministry politics, d'you think?"

"Um." He shrugged apologetically. "I don't know for sure but… those aren't the people I've heard talking about wanting to be more organized and better prepared?"

"Better prepared," Evan repeated. "As in, better supplied."

"I don't really know anything," Reg emphasized.

"Right," said Evan meaninglessly, and stood up.

"They wouldn't leave him hanging without a job," Reg said hastily. "I know they wouldn't. It'd probably pay better." It was possible that no one had thought of that, but Reg was sure Lucius wouldn't mind if Reg reminded him that that sort of thing was important to Spike. He could certainly afford it. There was always that quality-comparison magazine thing Abraxas Malfoy put out for shoppers in Diagon and the other wizarding commercial streets, if Spike needed a cover sort of job he could explain to people. Spike had even worked on it before, in a junior position.

"Yes, of course," said Evan vaguely, and started back towards the house.

"Evvie?"

"Mm?"

He swallowed, and asked in a small voice, "Would… would you paint me?"

Evan turned around, slowly, first his head and then the rest of him. Reggie shrank back: he was being glared at. He was about to say never-mind, it was such a Spike expression, but then Evan, extremely crossly, snapped, "Thank you. Call the desk at Rose & Yew about a time; I'm not allowed to do my own schedule since I couldn't get a word in edgewise to tell Muriel Prewett she was insisting on Thad Ogden's time. Which was not my fault, I don't think your mum could have shouted over her." He stormed into the house, muttering, "Not since you were fifteen my eye, it's as bad as Spike!" Then Reggie heard him say, in a quite different voice, "Auntie! I was afraid I was going to have missed you!"

Reg sat still in the garden for a few shaky minutes, listening to Evan explain and chat to Professor Bagshot, not really trying to hear. He had the sense of that happened too fast that he always got after parties, where people weren't really talking over his head but it was all he could do to keep up and he knew he was missing things.

Of course, it was a bit flattering, if you looked at it the right way. Evan had probably still been pulling more punches than he would have with people he was working on at a party, but he was definitely pulling fewer of them than he did in his flat when Spike was there. And Reg had always assumed that was just because they were alone and informal, but after this he was going to have to consider that it might have more to do with the universally-acknowledged wisdom of Do Not Fence With Snape Because He Avoids And Gets Annoyed At Things He Is Bad At And Will Instead Choose To Clobber You Over The Head With A Mace Made Of Your Failings.

Not that being considered better than Severus at dancing around was very flattering, all things considered. Still, if Evan was willing to spar with Reg in a friendly way even now that they were out of school, that was actually really nice of him. Especially given that the Dark Lord was giving Reg an opportunity to do things more on Lucius's end than Bella's, which was almost more intimidating.

Feeling better, he picked up the tea tray and went in. Evan was helping the old lady put away her shopping, but he looked up with a smile and made introductions.

"Thanks for letting me come use your library, Professor," Reg said, shaking hands. He wondered if she had any goblin blood. She wasn't as short as Professor Flitwick, but he still had to bend down for it.

"Nonsense, it's a pleasure to see someone your age interested," she said, adding with a sly sort of smile, "even if it's only in their own House's founder."

"I guess that must be the most common." Reg let himself flush a little, even though he could feel Evan being amused with him. Evan was putting away a re-waxing cheese wheel with his back turned, but Reg could still tell.

"I told him he'd be better off talking to you than sneezing through your books, though," Evan told the Professor cheerfully. "I fancy he didn't quite believe me because Binns is so awfully dull and it's far more possible to read the textbook without nodding off, but you do realize, Reggie, it was Auntie Bathilda here who wrote the textbook."

"No, I do know," said Reg, wondering why Evan was so keen to be alone with the Professor's books and smug to be proved right about it, "but I don't want to be a bother…"

"Not at all!" She patted his hand. "I wouldn't mark fourth-year homework again for all the dragonhide in Romania, but I do miss the rest of it sometimes, you know. Any tea left in that pot?"

"Most of it," Reg admitted. "…Why fourth-year homework, particularly?"

She grinned. There was something familiar about it, although how wrinkled her mouth was got in the way of working out what. She was related to the Rosiers, of course, but Reg didn't think that was quite it. "Fourth years are the oldest who aren't swotting for one of the really important exams. That means they're the oldest students who have any free time worth mentioning, and half of them realize it's their last hurrah. Dreadful work, simply dreadful."

Reg grinned back, although less widely, and looked at Evan. "I do remember being deeply aware it was my last year before Slughorn made me start trying to tell people what to do who did not want to be told," he agreed. "Same with you?"

"Nope," Evan replied easily, smiling drowsily from under his eyelashes. "It was not my impression that Slughorn could make me do anything just by giving me a shiny pin."

Reg blinked.

"Except go to the meetings," amended Evan, and stretched. "And maybe do a patrol or two. Glad I got a chance to see you, Auntie B, but I s'pose I'd better let Reggie pick your brain in peace."

"Now, you won't get away without some brain-food for that flatmate of yours," Professor Bagshot scolded. "A young man shouldn't sink all his energies into one subject, it's not healthy. And a good read that isn't an art supply catalogue or coffee table book wouldn't do you any harm, either, young man!"

"We've been reading The Odyssey," offered Evan. He did meek well enough, but it was an enormous lie.

She gave a massive sniff. Reg didn't even know her and he could hear the disdainful FICTION in it. "Your set could do with being less obsessed with one era."

"That's really just Malfoy," Evan protested. "Severus had something fourteenth-century lined up for next."

She looked slightly appeased. Slightly. "The Canterbury fluff or that florid Italian gossip-rag, I expect. It usually is, when anyone bothers at all. Well, go find something to keep it company. Third shelf under the round window with the sun-catcher. Don't hesitate if anything else catches your eye, and do remind him that if I see so much as one pencil-mark I'll draw his leg-bones out through his eye-sockets."

"Yes, ma'am," Evan laughed, and disappeared downstairs.

"Lovely boy, young Evan's flatmate," Professor Bagshot confided, "do you know him? He's nicely careful with his teacups and so on, I've never seen so much as a crumb, but he will scribble."

"Er, yes, I know him," said Reg, trying to wrap his mind around 'lovely boy.' Despite being strongly in favor of Spike himself on any number of counts, he wasn't sure anyone had enough mind to stretch that far. "Yes, Miss Pince beat him over the head with her umbrella once before she realized it wasn't one of her books. He was really offended she thought he'd write in one that wasn't his." Mostly because that would have been the same as giving his notes away.

Her face disappeared disapprovingly into its wrinkles for a moment, but then she sighed and shook her head. "Now, then, what was it you wanted to know?"

Regulus kept his questions confined to the usual ones any Slytherin feeling a bit lost in the everyday politics of family and Ministry might wonder about. Was she sure no one had written down the things Salazar had said to his students, or that no one had found a journal? Mightn't it just be that no one was publishing them because Slytherin was undergoing an unpopular phase? What had he thought, really, how had he worked, how did she know?

Finally, when he was running out of innocent things to ask, Evan came up. There were four books in his arms, and while the top one was indeed a fourteenth-century history and the one below it was a book about magic in the period, Reg couldn't help noticing that the spines of the bottom two were turned towards Evan's body so no one could see what they were.

The goodbyes were all very charming (apparently 'brain-food' included a dish of baked mackerel as well as books), and Reg was almost sure that he didn't show any impatience, or that if he did it could be put down to having to stop an interesting conversation.

When he was quite sure Evan was quite gone, he breathed a sigh of relief, leaned forward in his chair, poured the old Professor a new cup of tea (with just a drop of Clearwater's Chalice of Credulity dropped from his cufflink as he reached over it for the lemon) and started to ask about caves, and druids, and green potions, and things Slytherin had owned.

It wasn't all that helpful, actually, except that it made him think he and Severus had been on the right track to begin with. So he started asking about her old students.

That was better.

For a given definition of 'better.'

He felt rather badly about obliviating away so many hours of a mind like hers, but it was for her own safety, really, that she think he'd left just after the silly questions. And they were silly questions: he had exactly the books he'd asked after in his own family library, although admittedly they were hard to find, let alone reach, even if you were on the Tapestry.

But an old lady like her wouldn't be too embarrassed to have fallen asleep in the garden on a warm summer's day (she'd weighed nothing at all, he could probably have picked her up with his own hands), under the dappled shade of her own winter-fruiting tree. He left the book she'd had near her sofa open on her lap, and just hoped to Merlin he was right about that being the sort of thing she'd do.

After that, he went to go see if Marielle had any plans for the evening or was up for a visit, with or without Bulstrode. Evvie was right: she was restful. They both were. Reg rather felt he'd like to be done with games for the day, even if it meant listening to stories about the perils of training security trolls all evening, or even about dodging rejected dummies and strained peas and why Reg was clever for not settling down right out of school even if he was more than half sure they were both wrong and kindly lying.