Still Dye-Urn, Later
"Shut up," Severus mumbled into his palms, his fingernails digging into his forehead.
"And while I personally would hesitate to use the word 'panic,'" Evan continued jovially.
That expression on that face sent a bit of a chill down Filius's spine, considering how often he'd seen one so much like it in the papers, magnanimously pronouncing what was going to be forced on people for their own and the greater good. This face was, while just as long as the one that haunted them all, not so delicate or vulpine, the chin either softer (whose wasn't?) or just held that way. There were no tight, uncompromising furrows drawing or bracketing the infamous shape of the mouth below the longer, waving, ruddier hair—a shape which could, unmarred by impatience and contempt, still be called generous.
Currently the eyes would have been unnerving Filius anyway, unaccustomed as he was to seeing any particular sign of sentience tucked away in there. With their lids up for the first time, however, he could see they were a bright greenish-blue, not starkly stone-grey at all. The skin around them was smooth, not even beginning to show where its lines would settle, and all the laughter in them was warm, so that their too-familiar slant didn't look wolfish at all.
Lost in his own mortification and unaware of Filius's discomfiting reverie on variations on a bloodline, and whether a pureblooded portraitist might have read Dorian Gray, and if not whether he ought to be encouraged to or kept away from it at all costs, Severus moaned, "Shut uuuuuuup."
"I think we might be willing to concede," the old enemy's great-aunt's cousin went on gravely, eyes doing something so horribly close to the paler blue Albus Twinkle that Filius would have been tempted to drink the whole bottle of cider by himself out of sheer cognitive dissonance if he hadn't rather suspected that they two (three? Probably three) were of one mind about how badly Severus needed a mug of cocoa and a scratch behind the ears, "that we might not have thought out quite every answer to every contingency before approaching the good Professor."
"Would you be willing to concede that, had you found an understatement that massive in a piece of homework Evan had submitted to you as your student," Filius asked Severus, trying hard to stop his mouth twitching, "you'd have been obliged to mark him down for it?"
He was a bit surprised that Severus was letting Evan stay in the room for this conversation at all, as Albus had said that Severus had been most emphatic about protecting Evan from having dangerous information. But Evan had been smilingly and stolidly immovable, and he'd had the good manners to do it by snuggling comfortably into the sofa rather than looming. More, Severus hadn't seemed to expect him to go, and they seemed to have worked as a team on Thursday night.
Under the circumstances, Filius was inclined to think that Albus's information had just been a result of one of Severus's overwrought fits. Since Evan was covered by Severus's paperwork, he was prepared to treat it as such until otherwise indicated.
"I hate everything," Severus sighed pathetically.
"Severus?" Filius prompted expectantly.
"Yes, fine, obviously, all right, I panicked," Severus snapped grumpily, his shoulders hiked all the way up to his ears. "Why is it you coming to chew us out instead of Professor Dumbledore?"
"For one thing, he doesn't know yet," Filius replied, floating a glass of cider over. He hadn't come to scold but to evaluate—at least, not until he did have a handle on the situation—but Severus was one of those boys who never believed you when you told him he wasn't in trouble. The historical evidence was generally on his side, for one thing. "Horace isn't one of us, you know. He didn't rush to report in, he went for a drink. I ran into him at the Three Broomsticks, and he was so unnerved that it wasn't difficult to get the story out of him."
Which would probably have given him the cold sweats, if he didn't have his great-great-great grandfather to thank for a bloodline richer in night vision than adrenaline.
Besides, he judged they were safe enough. Rosmerta didn't use coasters, and there hadn't been any wet rings on Horace's table besides theirs, and Horace had behaved as though Filius had been the first person who'd asked him about his problems since he'd started drinking. Filius had flagged Hagrid over with a few broad hints, complete with eye-rolling and the hand-gestures everyone on staff understood to mean 'go into petty cash if Poppy's out of Hangunder and digestive potions.'
Hagrid was excellent with drunks of all sorts, and he didn't even mind herding duty when they weren't aggressive. Horace didn't have an aggressive bone in his body. He could rely on their good Keeper of the Keys to get Horace safely back to his rooms for a kip, which should give Filius plenty of time to sort things out here.
It was quite safe, as far as keeping Horace's story under wraps went. There was almost no chance that Hagrid would hear anything that he ought not to let slip. The two of them together in the presence of alcohol made an equation that invariably resolved not in teary confidences but in Loud Singing With the Harmonies Taken Very Seriously. Filius was delighted to be missing it this time: the effort they took to hit the notes was usually successful, but always murder on the tempo.
And he really would prefer to have a full picture to take back to Albus before Horace started talking to him and Albus began forming his impressions based on Horace's. Even if what Horace told Albus while sober was considerably more coherent than what Filius had gotten.
What Filius had heard (and what he really thought Horace had been trying to say) was 'Severus tried to frighten me in order to impress me with how afraid he is.' Albus, however, tended to react to anything he saw as a power-grab by examining it through a greed-colored magnifying glass. Filius rather expected that, unless he was given a clear and unbiased analysis which accounted for that possibility, he would jump, leap, and even fly to the conclusion that Horace was telling him, 'Severus tried to intimidate me into running away.'
Which would in fact make no sense, since Albus knew that Severus knew that Albus knew what Severus's position was. Severus trying to force Albus's hand by knocking Horace out of the game, either out of his own ambition or as a genuine ploy on behalf of Riddle, made so little sense that it made Filius's head spin trying to encompass it.
He'd known Albus a long time, though, and Albus just wasn't rational about power games. It made him better than most would have been in his shoes about keeping himself in check—and finally realizing he was more chary than most was the reason he'd started taking on more roles than the strictly academic after the war—but it also gave him a dreadful squint at times.
Everyone had those, of course. That was what colleagues were for.
All in all, it was enough to make Filius feel cautiously optimistic about their new Divination teacher. At the time he'd thought she was using a rather obvious ploy to try to make friends when she'd said her cards had told her it was a propitious day for explorations and she hadn't ventured to the village yet. Maybe she'd been onto something, though, and hadn't just secretly meant that the weather was nice and she'd been skulking timidly around the grounds for nearly a month and Filius looked harmless.
Well, Rosmerta would take care of her, and if she was offended at being abandoned he'd just praise her for knowing Horace would need a friend in his Difficult Time and seeing to it that Filius could Be There For Him. She seemed a nice enough girl; most likely being appreciated, with maybe a new quill as an apology for abandoning her, would make her feel happy about it all.
Severus, who might or might not recognize 'nice' if it shook his hand in the street but had never appeared to wish for an introduction, blinked suspiciously. "Slughorn hates you."
"He doesn't hate Professor Flitwick, Spike, they're in a competition he's not enjoying," Evan said serenely, rubbing Severus's back. Filius had formed that impression himself, based on how Horace merely sniped at him at staff meetings and meals and tried to use students to show him up without making any real attempts to sabotage his career or his nieces'. It was good to have the opinion confirmed by someone who'd studied Horace's methods directly, though. "I agree, though, Professor; you're not who I could have expected him to unload onto."
"Boys," Filius said reproachfully.
They looked at each other. To his pleasure—or, rather, relief—while Even still looked a touch confused, Severus looked as if his worst fears had been at least half-confirmed. "He's not the only person in the world who frequents the same areas as Slughorn and knows how to inveigle," the boy told his friend glumly. "We should have planted a geas after all."
"We agreed he'd respond best to respectful treatment," Evan replied, his voice saying I am being tactful in public and his face asking are you suicidal?
A you're right and I don't have to like it sort of grimace pulled Severus's face into very nearly an L-shape. "Well, gotten a promise, at least."
"Would have diluted your impact, Spike."
"Might have been worth it." Severus looked at Filius enquiringly.
"I think you're safe in that area," Filius told him, "at least now I've sent him back to the castle. Though," he added, deciding not to put any severity into his voice because Severus was One Of Those Boys and it would be overkill, "I hope it was a calculated risk."
As he understood it, the boys hadn't had any control at all over the Ministry finding out when young Neville Longbottom had been born. On the other hand, Harry Potter's birthdate had got out because they'd let the Malfoy House Elf, Dobby, stick around to observe the birth (more or less), and failed to lock him down securely for it, or take any measures to ensure his silence, until it was too late.
There were two benign explanations for that. The first was that one or both of them had both understood and realized at the time that Dobby's first and truest master was not Severus's auxiliary Narcissa Malfoy but her husband Lucius, who was not in Severus's confidence, and that Lucius would be closely questioning Dobby on the proceedings. Believing that Lucius would do that and knowing Dobby would be unable to lie to him, trying to persuade Dobby to keep anything from him would have been a stupid risk. with a chance of failure that utterly dwarfed the potential payoff, and they would have been quite right not to try it.
The second was that it had been a rookie mistake: that they'd been so caught up in worrying about all the other, noisier, and more pressing concerns that they'd simply forgotten to think about a little elf whose job was to be helpful and who was staying quiet and out of the way. No good agent forgot about the servants, and Filius wouldn't have expected it of a young man of Severus's background.
There were, however, mitigating factors. Lily had been not only involved but in pain (which, as Filius understood it, put things in a category with asking Albus to think calmly about a wizard proclaiming himself Emperor Tyrannodictatorius Rex The Dark Lord Of All Yggdrasil Who Feasts On The Marrow Of His Subjects' Babies In The Name Of Eris And Kronos), and they were both new and untrained.
Either way, the consequence was that the Longbottom and Potter families were in for a very nasty and stressful time of it, even if Voldemort didn't decide to target either or both of them, because he might decide to at any moment. However, that wasn't Filius's problem right now.
If they'd let Dobby be free to do what he would on purpose because they knew they had to, they'd behaved just as they ought, and he had no problem. If they'd let him go for a different reason, they couldn't be trusted, and he didn't have a problem, exactly, but was going to have to start playing a game that he deeply disliked. If they'd let him go for no reason at all, because they simply hadn't thought about him, he only had a problem if they weren't learning from the mistake.
To his relief, Severus nodded. "I'm not sure I can articulate why," he said, "but I was sure a minimalist conversation would make the most impact on him." Not conclusive, of course—and what agents were capable of in chaotic field conditions should never be compared with what they could do in situations they'd set up and were in control of, naturally—but a good sign.
Evan rolled his eyes. "It's because he's the world's archetypal gossiping sensualist, Spike," he said affectionately, "and five seconds of silence in an occupied room makes him feel something has gone desperately wrong with his whole day."
"…Well, all right, but my thought process involved white gloves, black smoke, and distorted mirrors."
Evan paused over his own cider. "Er?"
"I said I couldn't articulate it. I'm not contractually obligated to give you any more scones, you know," Severus added sulkily to Filius, who was trying not to choke on his drink.
"He did bring the kind of cider you like," Evan pointed out cheerfully. Severus made a grumbling face.
"And," Filius added brightly, "I'm not even going to ask whether your wand is all black and tubular with a little white tip." Of course, he knew it wasn't; he saw more of students' wands than anyone but Minerva, and Severus's was almost bone-pale, with the faintest of rosy-grey tones. He wasn't a wand expert, but you did get to know wood on the dueling circuit, and he'd have thought Severus's was lime or white pine if it hadn't been so whippy.
The only question about Evan's, of course, was whether he'd been offered a selection of dead ancestors' rosewood wands or Ollivander had been told the only options he was allowed to offer the boy were those of length, thickness, and core. Fortunately, Evan and his wand seemed to scrape along well enough together—rather better than his grandfather or his aunt Druella had done with theirs, at any rate, although Druella had had the sense to find herself a replacement. Filius hated it when the pureblood families hobbled their children like that, and in the Rosiers' case it was, as far as he was aware, since they weren't showing any other signs of financial difficulty, nothing but vanity.
Severus (who had tried to dye his wand black at least two times that Filius knew about, speaking of vanity as well as black wands, not to mention an uncharacteristic lack of doing one's homework) glared, and when Evan repeated his interrogative noise, he snapped, "Never mind." Then he got a thoughtful look.
"Spike?"
"No," Severus said, nodding decisively. "It was definitely not a joke worth explaining."
Evan went on looking at him for a little longer than Filius thought the comment deserved, with an edge of calculation under his drooping lashes. Then he shrugged carelessly and sipped at his cider. "If you say so."
Filius wasn't sure whether to hope he hadn't just had an impact on their private life or that his throwaway remark wouldn't come back to bite him. As that had been Severus's I have a plot to get into the Restricted Section to make my essay THE BEST EVER look (wherein for 'best' read 'most disturbing') and not the I have a plot to get into the Restricted Section to win a fight I can't avoid using shock, awe, and creative mayhem one, however, Filius wasn't overly worried about it.
"What I do want to know," he said, putting his socks up on the coffee table and wiggling his toes meditatively, "is why you didn't come to strategize with me and Albus before you plunged right into traumatizing poor Horace."
"Slughorn dithers," Severus replied. "That's time in which to strategize with others such as yourself and Professor We Both Know You Feel I'm Right Deep Down, which going to him first wouldn't have given me. And, as Evan pointed out, Slughorn appreciates being deferred to. The more velvet the gloves he's handled with, the more likely he is regard what's being asked of him as a favor, and he's practically hypnotized himself to automatically do favors for anyone who asks him in the right way, without wanting anything much more in return than a fruit basket and a Christmas card."
Filius started to protest.
"Yes," Evan agreed with him, smiling gently, "but the larger favors he expects for future protégés are, as you might call it, the price of knowing him at all, or of his friendship, or of doing business."
"Or you might call them being given the opportunity to pay past favors forward," Severus said dryly. "However you choose to look at it, a relationship with him isn't a balance sheet. It's the occasional great benefit on one side, and a thousand small remembrances and tedia on the other."
"Not a word, tedia," Evan murmured into his tea. Filius might have remarked to him that language was always changing, and that if a spoken word was understandable and apt it soon would a generally-known one. However, Evan's eyes had crinkled warmly above his teacup as he spoke, so Filius judged he was only playing some gentle private game and needed no instruction.
Severus waved crisply airy dismissal, not in any way chastened. "Regardless. If we hadn't spoken to him first, we would have been managing him in a way he would have recognized, and he would have had every right to be offended."
Filius paused with a scone halfway to his mouth. "But doesn't that mean that by speaking to him first you were still managing him?"
Evan smiled. "Yes," he explained, "but, you see, they're the rules he wrote himself for the game he wants us all to play. The difference is between manipulation and etiquette."
"Don't ask him to explain what that difference is," Severus put in gloomily. "It goes on for hours and doesn't get you any further than 'the game's been agreed on.' Even when it hasn't, in fact, been agreed on and you're absolutely certain that the real question is who's manipulating whom and whether it counts as manipulation if everyone involved knows it's going on. Asking is useless, trust me on this."
"Severus, I wasn't going to forget you're twenty-one just because you've been out of school a few terms," Filius assured him, mouth twitching again. "We did your paperwork less than two weeks ago."
"I will burn all the scones right now."
"I'm twenty-one, too, and I understand it," Evan pointed out. He took a tranquil bite of scone, presumably so as to semi-rescue one from the flames, and added cheerfully, "I'm four months less twenty-one."
"Three," Severus growled.
Evan made an eh noise and waggled a hand, indicating with remarkable eloquence for such a languid gesture that surely it was of no moment whether one rounded up or down.
"You didn't spend all your time at school giving me twenty-foot essays when I'd asked for five pages," Filius reminded him, trying less hard not to smile. This was such wild exaggeration as to be slander, but it was fact that nine times out of ten the footnotes had come on a separate scroll.
"Into ash and little curls of fragrant steam."
"I'm sure he just meant I actually attended the Slug Club meetings," Evan placated him.
"The hatred for everything is all-encompassing."
"That was redundant, wasn't it?"
"No," Severus snarled, "because the hatred for everything encompasses the entirety of me."
"Ahhhh."
Filius rather got the impression his presence was getting in the way of some tender gesture Evan was sorely tempted to slip under the gates of Severus's sulk.
"Anyway, you don't understand it, or you could explain it properly. You just do it instinctively," Severus added crossly.
"Is there a difference?"
"ALL-ENCOMPASSING." He glared at them both. "All right. Possibly precipitate reaction to stimulus stipulated. Did you just come to mock, Professor?"
"Oh, Severus, of course not. I thought we'd start with how deluded Horace is about what you were trying to tell him, and go from there."
"Do you think he was very deluded?" Evan asked. Filus had never seen him like that, leaning forward on his elbows with his eyes gleaming raptly. If he hadn't been leaning sideways over Severus's shoulder with a foot sneaking around the other young man's ankle, it would have been disconcerting, but as it was there was something soft about it.
Severus slid him a funny look anyway, seeming uncomfortable.
He looked back, and they exchanged a little conversation with frowns and eyebrows. It was Severus who gave in, despite still seeming uncomfortable as well as perplexed, and Evan settled farther onto his shoulder.
Filius decided he was best off by far pretending that none of that had happened. Just like he'd pretended Evan hadn't met him at the door wearing nothing but a dressing gown embroidered with thorny vines and the most unhappy, unwelcoming look Filius had ever seen on him. And that there hadn't been blotchy, irregular red patches poking out just slightly from under Severus's crisp green-brown collar and cuffs (which were in actual fact not there anymore, having faded away while Evan was changing). Severus had put Evan Rosier before Narcissa Malfoy on his list of auxiliary crew, before Regulus Black on the list of people he wanted Albus to protect (though not before Lily Potter), and before his mother on his list of emergency contacts and medical proxies. That probably covered what Filius needed to know.
"I think he was very drunk," he answered. "I'm reserving judgment on deluded." He looked at them expectantly.
Severus looked back at him warily. Filius could handle that, but Evan was giving him big excited tell-me-tell-me-tell-me eyes. Filius, never having had a puppy, didn't quite know how to react to that. It certainly wasn't an expression he ever got from his students, except on the rare occasion one of them worked out that he'd lived through their history homework and was a better speaker than Cuthbert, or at least more likely to use visuals and anecdotes.
That was an excited look he would have given in to, but this wasn't that sort of well-intentioned-and-desperate. It wasn't quite the same as the typical MI-20 field agent new-toy-I-want-it-I-want-it-I-want-it expression, either: no drooling, and therefore he had no instinctive reaction to kick it firmly out of his office with a leviosa and a lecture about responsibility. He thought the last time he'd seen anything like it was when his youngest niece had last asked him for a bedtime story, but since always she'd used the same expression whether she was allowed to have another one or not, he couldn't tell whether the look was innocuous or disingenuous. That had been a long time ago, anyway.
Filius hooked a thumb at Eager-eyes and cocked an eyebrow at Severus. "He's odd," Severus didn't-actually-explain. "One becomes accustomed."
"One becomes accustomed to odd very often in Ravenclaw, but not like that," Filius remarked.
Which might have been, he realized at once, a bit unfair. Lots of his students were apathetic and disengaged until one hit on their subjects of interest and they suddenly sat up straight and developed expressions and started gesturing energetically all over the place. It was true, though, that his students were more likely to talk your ear off about their own research until they noticed you were not only asleep but covered in dust and cobwebs than snuggle their subjects like teddy bears and stare eagerly at you until you gave up every thought you'd ever had.
It wasn't, as far as he could tell, a Slytherin sort of odd, either. You did occasionally see Hufflepuffs giving their spouses and sweethearts the reverse-arm-candy treatment, the one that screamed I am so proud to be the ornament of this brilliant/powerful person, and it wasn't terribly uncommon for Slytherins to honor each other or flatter a Hufflepuff plus-one with it at a showy or formal gathering.
Filius had never seen it done in private before, and certainly he'd never seen it pulled on someone who was so obviously being made uncomfortable by it. That seemed counterproductive. Therefore either Evan was not only odd but brokenly insane (which he didn't think was the case, because Severus, while more than a bit of a twitch and not good with people, wasn't stupid about them or stupid generally), or Filius was missing a great deal of information. Even if the latter was, as he suspected, the case, though, it was definitely odd behavior for a Slytherin. If he'd had to name it, in fact, he would have said 'home-schooled.'
Except that, no, that didn't seem right, either. Evan behaved beautifully in public, and Filius had never thought anything was strange about him before.
Except, at least, that his in-class presentation (a bit like that of the so-called Marauders but in a less exciting way) had consistently led his teachers to be pleasantly surprised by his academic performance whenever they actually stopped to realize that the papers they were marking had been written by the boy who was generally gazing out the window with a rather vacant expression. And had really been written by him: his handwriting was a bit, er, rococo for even the Love Letter line of dictaquills.
It was even clear to everyone that they'd been composed by him, although he rarely cited sources that Snape and Miss Black didn't. Miss Black had generally got her facts more or less right, but most of her efforts had clearly been spent towards composition, and her essays had tended to read like letters from a concerned relative who was very gently concerned that her teachers should understand clearly what they were getting themselves into before making a decision about whether or not to use whatever magic the subject had been. Rosier's were, however baroquely written, plainly stated.
And Filius knew he hadn't been getting Snape to tell him what to write. Filius had, on at least four occasions, kept Snape after class to make him explain sets-of-paragraphs in which Filius had been quite certain the boy fully understood the principle involved but had fallen all over his quill trying to explain himself—and on three of those occasions, Rosier had neatly summed up the concept Snape had exploded all over in one or two laconic sentences. Snape's essays always showed more depth of understanding, even when that understanding was rather confused in substance as well as expression, but there were only two students in that form who put things plainly and succinctly. Of the two, it was only Avery who'd consistently earned marks below-or-well-below an E, except when the Quidditch pitch was churning. It was just that Avery always seemed to be trying harder. By far.
But putting up an empty-headed front over a perfectly competent mind was far from an unheard of choice, except in his own House, although Filius had sadly noted over the years that it was still a more common one among witches.
No, Evan behaved quite within acceptable norms while in public. It was only now that Filius was speaking with the young wizard privately and in his own home that he was noticing socialization anomalies. And now that he'd realized that, he realized that they were even more glaring because Severus was still every inch the Severus that Filius knew from office hours and Music Club and the other odd extracurricular encounter.
He shrugged, ignoring the winning smile being aimed at him. "As I understood it, he'd been told to resign in your favor because you were about to be given a lot of free time for the express purpose of dumping into all reservoirs everywhere a lot of poisons no one else had ever heard of."
The boys glanced at each other. "We're extrapolating," Severus admitted. "And 'all reservoirs everywhere' is almost certainly hyperbole."
"And the tip wasn't exactly what you'd probably call concrete," Evan agreed.
"But our source was reliable, and about the only margin for error is 'was his source being played,' because I don't believe for a moment that our source was either playing us or being played by his."
"Ours wouldn't," Evan elaborated. "He wouldn't try to play us. He might withhold information, but he doesn't think he's good enough to fool either of us in any other way."
"Even if he wanted to," Severus added, in a slightly reproachful let me fill in the bit you neglected to mention voice.
"And the bloke he got his information from," Evan said, giving Severus an okay, granted, but not important at this time sort of shrug, "goes all seedy and oily when he's being manipulative; it's very obvious and our chap would have noticed."
"Bottom line," Severus opened his hands, "you understood him correctly. I'm quite convinced enough to take it as a working hypothesis that all efforts to preserve my lab's project are being sabotaged by Parties Related To My Consultancy With You for reasons that include freeing me to brew things that around 98% of the population, including myself, would vastly prefer remain unknown."
Filus tapped his scone against his plate thoughtfully, heedless of the glob of cream that slid off of it. "A freedom to be avoided, to be sure."
Severus, he noted, was behaving as though turning the grim assignment down once given wasn't an option that had even crossed his mind. He was ready to contort himself like a ferret turning around in a jam-jar to avoid getting the job in the first place, but he wasn't acting like someone who knew or even hoped that, once asked, he had the option of saying no, or avoiding it, or subverting it.
When he'd been in a lather about finances back in the staffroom at Hogwarts, he'd talked about Evan selling his art to muggles, and finding work in the rather Ministry-skeptical Sherwood wizarding area for himself. As if Europe and all the other continents didn't exist. Filius happened to know he'd been to some of them, and Horace had bragged about an apprenticeship offer in Hong Kong that was open to Severus in the 'if you ever change your mind' sort of way.
Which all meant that Filius was going to have to check for geases, memory charms, and confusion spells before he left. That could wait, no need to go pull the conversation off-track for it, but even if Severus convinced him he had valid reasons to write off his options and his omissions weren't blind spots, it was still a sensible precaution. Possibly one to be taken regularly, just as a safeguard. Certainly if Albus decided to go ahead with this harebrained idea of the boy's.
"And you thought the best solution was to step into a job that's even more difficult and complicated than the one you were just turned down for two months ago? Neither of which, if I may be direct with you, anyone under forty and quite possibly under seventy should even consider, in my opinion."
It wasn't a young man's job to begin with, as he'd told Albus, and in Severus's case, if he began teaching in the 1980-81 academic year, all of his NEWT students would have known him in his OWL year, when the ill-feeling between forms in his year had been at its full force, so many of all ages had behaved so badly, and absolutely everyone knew or suspected he'd taken or dealt out the worst of it. Some of the nasty rumors about things he'd done and that had been done to him would make a sudden comeback if he showed up under any circumstances, let alone in an attempt to take command.
Filius believed almost none of these, although he knew the one involving the pack of lascivious werewolves in the Forbidden Forest in September to at least have started out being loosely based in truth—in that Severus had indeed been caught coming out of the forest long past curfew and scratched up. It hadn't been anywhere near full moon. On that occasion, as he'd explained to Pomona, who'd been the one to collar him, he'd only been gathering wild moonflowers and John the Conquer roots, and had to dive into a some shrubbery, which had turned out to be more brambly than he would have preferred, to avoid one of the pricklier centaurs. What the school had turned that into had been uniformly grotesque, if, in some variants, predictable.
No one could get a straight answer from anyone about whatever had disrupted his OWLs or who had seen it, and the rumors ranged from horrible to criminal to frankly ludicrous. Something had definitely happened, though. Inquiring made Horace's eyes hood over, Poppy's face turn white and red, and Minerva's lips vanish. Albus had just looked sad and said, "Need-to-know, my friend," which couldn't be argued, being well within his rights.
Then there was the time Severus had 'flayed Sirius Black alive and made book-covers out of his hide.' In point of fact he'd turned the other boy's skin nearly transparent, coolly explaining, when charged, "He keeps trying to expose all of my nerves; it's only fair." Minerva had taken, as well as more points than Filius would have, the opportunity to give all her classes a lesson in human anatomy before the effect faded, and Sirius had by all accounts rather enjoyed himself.
He'd also 'turned Peter Pettigrew into a boy-shaped swarm of bees for a week,' which was fact-based only in that a swarm of bees and a boy in Peter's form had briefly become quite closely acquainted. James had amazed Poppy by keeping his head, not flailing about, and only getting three stings. Severus hadn't denied responsibility, only that he'd cursed James, scornfully telling Minerva, "It wasn't even a hex, they were just looking for pollen. They're not going to stay interested in something that doesn't smell like flowers. Word to the wise, Potter—or, at least, of advice: Evans is if possible even less attracted to the delicate aroma of manure than bees are. You won't get anywhere with her smuggling dungbombs in your pockets."
According to Minerva, once enough Minty Migraine Mellower and scotched tea had been applied that she could see enough humor in it to stop growling like her smaller self and be wry instead, James had not only been carrying three dungbombs in his pockets but six fireworks, a vial of stinksap, and a trick wand that looked quite like Severus's and had, when waved, turned back into Aberforth Dumbledore's most cantankerous goat.
But the story about the Sirius-hide book-covers persisted, although sometimes it was shoes or a vest or worse. And the one with its roots in Halloween of '73, and the one about drop-kicking a first-year from the Astronomy tower (it had been a fourth-year pushed through the window of the Slytherin common room into the lake, who'd then been hoisted out of it by the feet before he'd even started to panic or swim. Admittedly, Poppy had reported that Severus had looked shifty when he'd agreed that the upside-down bit had been on purpose to jerk any remaining water out of the boy's lungs).
And the one where he stalked through the night and hung any first-years he could get his hands on up from the ceiling in cocoons to rot until he was ready to suck their juices out with his proboscis. Filius had no idea where that had come from, but it had made all the older Slytherins, including Severus on the rare occasion when he wasn't already in a sensitive mood, look amused. The younger ones had tended to look at each other and giggle and take on I-have-survived-horrors airs that no one over thirteen could possibly take seriously.
But so did the one about cursing the Gryffindor dormitories with a plague of maggots and locusts (which as far as Filius knew had its only origins in Gryffindor boys taking food back to their rooms and not putting proper stasis and vermin-repelling charms on it), and the one about setting Hagrid's hut on fire for refusing to give him unicorn's blood (an accident, according to Hagrid: the Barghest had tried to knock him down for face-washing purposes when he was already jumpy), and the unimaginative vampirism one, and the one about washing his hair in chicken fat, and the one about washing his hair in flobberworm mucus.
And on, and on. And that was what Severus proposed to stir up again by dropping himself into it? He thought he was going to teach complex theory to the teenagers who'd grown up on those stories? He proposed to teach their younger siblings and cousins how to use a knife and control a fire and dissect small animals for ingredients?
Filius could, rather easily, see him settling down in the school in twenty or thirty years, when his nerves had been settled themselves down and all the stories about him had been forgotten or divorced from his name. When he had a solid researcher's reputation behind him to settle any doubts and shame any still-immature taunting that tried to push old buttons.
He could also, equally easily, see the boy trying to control a classroom of fourth-year Gryffindors who'd heard about him from their older brothers and the current older students. A classroom full of fire and volatile mixtures and, most likely, Zonko's products. That was an image that made him want to crawl under a chair with his arms wrapped around his head until it went away, preferably with a bottle of something rather stronger than cider for company.
"I have a different relationship with my potential employer now, which would make it more attainable, as would the subject," Severus said flatly, flat-out ignoring his opinion. "If I secure the post before my orders to become close to said potential employer change to orders to become a supplier, then I'm a valuable operative who tenaciously works to obeys orders no matter how long it takes, not one who picks and chooses between sets of orders."
It was such a blatant, grim-faced avoidance of the age issue that he got the impression that Severus had not so much missed his point as stared gloomily at it and then gotten drunk (or whatever he did instead of getting drunk).
Yesterday. And then had Evan invite Horace over anyway.
Which had to be respected, even while it also had to be argued against. Even if Severus had some idea of what he'd be getting into on that front, it wasn't, as a front, alone.
"But you realize, with Horace gone, you'd be applying for two jobs," Filius said, by way of pointing out only the beginning of the problems. He was disheartened to see them look startled.