Still more Dye-Urn, last bit
“No, I mean it,” Evan insisted as Filius chuckled. “Spike, the whole reason they started talking about cutting the grant in the first place is because a lot of people think you’ve gotten it to a place that’s good enough. That’s how they’re going to play it. I know you feel it’s not ready—”
“Because it’s not.”
“Yes, I know, but they’re not going to say, ‘This project isn’t getting anywhere or worth funding so we’re shutting it down.’ They’ll call it a success. A triumph. They’ll call it a miracle that all-right-small-print-might-have-a-few-kinks-still But They Cannot In Conscience Keep It One Moment Longer From Our Poor Afflicted Werewolf Population And Their Long-Suffering Families.”
Severus stared at him in horror. He tried, “But if we explained—we could go to the Proph…er.”
“No, you probably could get an article in,” Evan agreed judiciously. “You were winding up to say something about how Certain Parties want to disimprove what wizard-werewolf relations there are, I could tell. If you’re right, then those levers on the paper wouldn’t get in your way. Might even clear away the Ministry brambles. But what would you say? You’d say, yes it works as advertised but there are horrible side effects. And the Ministry would respond with, “Aren’t our researchers conscientious, bless their hearts, they’re exaggerating of course but we have such scrupulous and caring researchers at St. Mungos, give us money to fund these fine young witches and wizards, they’re completely overstating the dangers but we must expect such silly exactitude from Ravenclaws ha-ha.’”
“I’m not Ravenclaw!!!!”
“You don’t have to howl about it, Severus,” chided Filius, smiling a little. He might have mustered up a scrap of offence from somewhere, but, “I have it on good authority that you wouldn’t have minded.”
“No, of course not, but I’m not one.”
“So,” Filius concluded, rubbing his moustache to hide his mouth, “it’s the expected mistreatment of the facts that you find particularly outrageous.”
“Exactly.”
“Everyone else in your lab is Ravenclaw,” Evan waved a dismissive hand, less diverted, “you’ve probably been contaminated. Besides, any reporter worth their pay could dig up at least twelve schoolmates of ours and eight of your teachers who’d be thrilled to complain at length about what a meticulous little swot you’ve been since you first stepped off the train, no contamination actually required, and it wouldn’t take too much digging to find Cleo or coax a few words out of Reg, either.”
“Eight?” Filius asked, amused, while Severus crossed his arms and glared.
“You never looked as much like he was giving you a headache,” Evan explained, “and there was a lot of trial-and-error involved in working out how to approach Transfigurations, so I didn’t think the Tar—er, Professor Mc, er.”
“McGonagall,” Severus snapped.
“You can’t expect me to remember a name I can’t pronounce, Spike.”
“Mín eaxlgestealla, heo beon na arwierþe weorþlic. 你比这更好的. Ορκίζομαι στο Θεό ότι είστε καλύτεροι από αυτό. In hoc autem casu non postulat placet temptemini et peribunt.”[1]
Filius hoped so, although he wouldn’t have minded a little testing, especially if ‘shield-brother’ was a good indicator of how deeply his agent meant to rely on the thoughtless princeling.
“It just sounds like gargling to me,” said Evan airily.
Severus put his head down on his arms on the table. “Ev. No.” This was not as vehement a defence as Minerva deserved after a remark that offensive, but, Filius supposed, it might well be the sort most likely to be accepted by a young pureblood who hadn’t, as far as Filius could remember, gotten any real scoldings even at school.
Evan shrugged easily. “Anyway, I wasn’t sure she’d agree about meticulous.”
“I’m not sure Horace would, either, as a matter of fact,” Filius noted, leaving correcting Evan’s attitude to the one who was suffering the appropriate contact humiliation from it. “I gather there was a year or two of not entirely admirable experimental procedure?”
“Oh, of course he’d blame that on me,” Severus scowled, jerking bolt upright without uncrossing his arms. “All right, yes, we were a bit slipshod, but Lily was the impatient one, I just, er, didn’t want to say no to her in too many areas at once.”
Evan’s face turned to ice, although his smile was extremely pleasant.
Not having been looking at him, Severus continued on, obliviously but a bit sheepishly. At least, Filius thought he was oblivious. These were Slytherins. It might have been revenge. “Although I have to admit that the sheer rate at which she had interesting ideas may have been a factor in wearing down my resistance.”
This did not improve Evan’s expression.
“Who’s Cleo?” Filius asked, not too hastily, he hoped.
“Perry, really,” Evan corrected himself, giving Severus what Filius would have described as a mildly reproachful look on anyone else, but coming from him was probably a full-blown stink-eye. “Peregrine Blakeney. She’d be in… just starting fifth year now, I suppose.”
“Oh, Miss Blakeney! Yes, of course, she’s tapped to one of your House’s prefects, isn't she?”
“That’s right,” Severus confirmed. Evan blinked at him. “You don’t imagine Slughorn’s gossip with me is about socialites,” he drawled, and asked Filius, “Will she be any good?”
"I can't say I have a clear idea of Professor Slughorn's criteria—"
"Professor Slughorn's criteria," said Severus, nostrils flaring, "have very little to do with individual suitability."
"That's not entirely true," protested one of Professor Slughorn's former prefects. Severus raised an eyebrow at him, arch but warmly so. "He just narrows it down by family suitability first."
"Just," Severus repeated.
"I didn't say it's not at all true," Evan shrugged.
"And I said 'very little," Severus pointed out.
"Yes, but you were being polite and I was being accurate, so the world's turned upside down and maybe we should let Professor Flitwick answer your question before the rug falls down on our heads."
Severus considered, and graciously allowed, "Perhaps." Rosier laughed, and leaned into him harder. "I'm concerned by the selection," he went on, "to be honest. I'd observed her to have backbone and courage, but not anything like a commanding presence."
"Neither did I," Rosier pointed out.
"Save it for the credulous," Severus advised him, and looked expectantly at Filius.
"I wouldn't expect her to try to be the generalissimo type of prefect," he agreed, "but I expect she'll do well with the younger students; she’s very bright and rather sweet. Wants to go into healing, she tells me.”
The boys glanced at each other and grinned. Or at least Evan grinned, and Severus’s face warmed. “How incredibly surprising,” he said drolly, and brushed Evan’s cheek lightly with the backs of his fingers.
“Why do you call her Cleo?”
“Just a nickname. She was rather attached to Spike, as in: by his ankle.”
“Shut up.”
“It’s your own fault for not kicking her.”
“There were,” Severus’s hands spasmed once, helplessly, “eyes! She had a pet mouse. I wasn’t well!”
Evan grinned at him, and then turned the grin back on Filius. “And if you think she’s sweet, just suggest to her that anything bad ever happened to a Slytherin while he was at school that did not involve him personally yelling at them for being noisy, being stupid, or failing to correct bad grammar he’d already told them how to fix. Then run.”
“Not using my suggestions when they were paying me to correct their drafts was being stupid,” Severus grumbled.
“So she’d confirm—to the Prophet—that he can be overprotective,” Filius asked carefully. He was going have to have a good long chat with the Slytherin Common Room’s portraits, preferably before Horace sobered up, got his act together (not necessarily in that order), and talked to Albus. Evan Rosier was clearly about the worst source of unbiased information about Severus that Filius could have found outside of Gryffindor. The paperwork and the dressing gown weren’t necessarily indicative, but Filius should probably have worked it out from the tell-me-tell-me-tell-me look.
“The details don’t really matter anyway,” Evan said with another dismissive hand-gesture. “I could be anticipating the wrong spin. My point is that they have people who do this for a living.” Hastily, he added, “And are good at it.”
Severus closed his mouth, disgruntled. Then he opened it again.
“I know, Spike,” Evan droned, looking at Severus with affectionate eyes that didn’t match his tone very well, “because of how many people get into jobs they aren’t good at, and stay there.”
“But cronyism and—”
“Those things have to be excused, Spike. We do pretend the Ministry feels accountable to the public, you know. Keeps them reassured and uninterested.”
“It’s not very long at all till 1984,” Severus growled in utter disgust at Filius, who toppled over laughing in his chair a bit.
“We’re not that bad,” he protested, recovering himself.
“I demand pitchforks. And my point was, so will they, no matter what the public relations campaign says. They’ll know the research was cut off before the formula got to a point where taking the potion wasn’t guaranteed to ruin their lives. And they’ll notice bloody fast that producing the potion is unfeasibly expensive and the Ministry will, at best, partially subsidize it on an ongoing basis.”
Evan’s head jerked to him in an amazed look—genuine, as far as Filius could tell.
“I said ‘at best,’” Severus added crossly.
“Ah, right,” said Evan, sounding reassured, possibly about his sanity.
“What would you expect, given that production at any volume is unfeasibly expensive?” Severus asked him, sounding rather as if he’d just lost a fight with himself about whether he was going to ask a question whose answer he didn’t want.
“Provide it free for just long enough for the public to lose interest,” Evan said after thinking about it for scarcely four seconds, “then say, ‘everyone’s had a long enough grace period to get on their feet and find work by now.’”
“Meaning those who can’t afford what would be utterly unaffordable on a monthly basis even by the moderately successful are layabouts. Assuming anyone bothers to ask.” Severus finished for him dourly, and turned back to Filius. “Belby always planned and promised to make the final recipe non-proprietary, so they’ll be able to claim that a werewolf will be able to hire any potioneeer to brew it for them. Only, very few will be able to. It’s not exactly a boil cure.”
“You’re saying they’ll feel hard-done by.”
“I’m not saying all of them will notice it immediately,” Severus cautioned, lifting his hands without raising his wrists in a stiff don’t-get-ahead-of-me gesture. “But I am convinced that the overall feeling will, over time, come to be, ‘So, you were just toying with us when you pretended for half a moment there that we had a chance at being even second-class citizens, you utter smug, game-playing, wand-hoarding bastards, comfortable in your beds, think you’re invincible and can do what you like.’”
He let that hang for a moment, his eyes gone particularly obsidian-like, glinting hard and sharp and without a trace of good humor. “And then our absolutely best chance is that it doesn’t occur to even one of them that they’re not the only population carrying that particular resentment. Except—oh, wait!” He leaned back, snapping his fingers high in the air with a look of gentle, astonished revelation, snideness dripping from his voice and every pore. “Blow me down if at least one of them hasn’t sat through the same interminable lessons on the Goblin and Giant Wars that I have.”
“No one had to tell me,” Evan mentioned placidly when Filius shot Severus a warning look for connecting Remus Lupin’s curse with Hogwarts in front of him, named or not. “I worked it out when the gentleman in question dragged me to Spike’s lab as if I weighed as much as a daffodil after I’d mentioned I’d heard someone from the grant committee was popping by. Couldn’t think of any other particular reason he’d have to know where it was, let alone care about the funding, and my stars but he cared.”
“Of course it’s quite possible that even under those conditions Goody Angst-rag No-Spine wouldn’t mention the possibility of an alliance to his fellows,” conceded Severus, lip curling for just a second before his face smoothed into cool analysis again. “He lives as a wizard and as far as I’m aware he thinks of himself as a wizard first, if not as a member of his House and a friend of his friends first.”
“That one,” Evan said, definite about it. “Friend of his friends, then werewolf, then wizard.”
Severus slid a little curling piece of smile at him—which, Filius noted, wasn’t an agreement—and then went on seriously. “It’s even possible that werewolves who were bitten after Hogwarts and the witches and wizards who keep faith with their afflicted relatives wouldn’t remember those lessons or think of them. I think what most people remember from History class is napping in the warm under a droning blanket of white noise. And the Gringotts goblins may not go out of their way to be pleasant, or helpful beyond their mandate,” he added approvingly, “but they’re unfailingly professional.”
“Do you like goblins?” Filius blinked. He was, while not unpleasantly, unnerved by the prospect. Even wizards who worked at the bank and had goblin friends didn’t talk about goblins-generally in that tone of voice.
“I don’t like anybody,” replied Severus, as definite as Evan had been about Remus, “but I think—stop laughing at me, you, or I’ll bite you—don't look pleased, that's a threat!"
"Would you also like to threaten to kiss me or make me that white tea I like?" Evan inquired, interested.
"...Not while you're behaving like this," Severus said repressively, but the chastened cow-eyed look he received in return wasn't remotely serious. He made a sniffy noise and turned back to Filius. "I think it’s laudable that they loathe our smallest molecules and have our economy entirely in our power and haven’t destroyed it even though it’s bloody obvious wands don’t give us that much of an advantage over them.”
“I think the bank likes that we have to come to it as suppliants for our own gold,” Filius admitted, feeling he had to meet that with equal honesty, even if it made him also feel a bit of a traitor.
“Even if we don’t see it that way,” remarked Evan thoughtfully.
“Especially if you don’t see it that way, I expect,” Severus said dryly. “The butler doesn’t spit in his master’s port because he thinks the man will find out. That would be quite counterproductive.” Evan looked at him in alarm. “Don’t be ridiculous, Linkin dotes on you. Besides, he doesn’t have to humiliate you behind your back to relieve his feelings when you annoy him, he hits you with a spoon and calls you ‘Master Evvie’ right to your face.”
“That’s true,” Evan agreed, cheering up. Even more cheerfully, he added, “So do you.”
“I am not your butler. Or your valet, or your housekeeper, and cooking for us does not make me your cook.” He disentangled himself. “And on that note.”
“Are you actually abandoning a guest for the cauldron?” Evan asked, pained, amused, and alarmed as Severus stood. Filius wondered for a moment whether that was a long-standing threat. Since Severus didn’t make a face, he supposed it must have something to do with Horace’s rather forlorn and otherwise inexplicable comment about how when you know you have a glaring fault that everyone looks down on you for, the done thing is to fix it, not use it as bait.
“No, I’m going for take-away.”
“But we’ve still got scones,” Evan blinked.
“First off, I want food,” Severus said. “More importantly, we don’t know whether Potter’s pried himself away from his celebration of his own virility to start stalking me again, or, that matter, whether anyone else has eyes on the street. In either of those cases, I prefer it to look as though Professor Flitwick came to visit you not two hours after Slughorn dropped by, and that my presence was superfluous to your chat if not actually a hindrance.”
Evan looked at Filius blankly, and looked back at Severus. “What are we chatting about?”
“Don’t ask me what you two might have to talk about together!” Severus scoffed incredulously with an emphasis Filius didn’t quite understand, shrugged himself into what was presumably a cooling summer overrobe even if it didn’t look like one, and left.
“It’s a pity that most of his compliments boil down to to ‘you’re on your own,’” Evan observed sadly. “Then again, one hears them so seldom.”
“Do you?” Filius asked curiously.
“Oh, we Sorted together, what sort of Slytherin would I be if I couldn’t catch his meaning most of the time,” Evan smiled sleepily, giving him limpid eyelashes.
“Do you really think there’s much point putting that don’t-care-need-a-nap face on at this point?” Filius asked curiously.
Evan sat up a little, his watery eyes peeling wider and sharpening. “But—I, no, what?”
Filius cocked his head. “I did sit through quite a lot of classes with you, you know, being surprised you were keeping up when I half-expected you to start drooling on your desk any moment.”
Evan drew himself up further, with dignity. “I meant, sir, that I wasn’t insulting your intelligence by switching to public-face. You asked for information so personal it's hard to know how to answer without being rude.” Then he relaxed and laughed, a little sheepishly. “Sorry. I haven’t had to explain anything that brutally since, oh, probably fourth year.”
“Most people wouldn’t think that whether your friend compliments you occasionally is a very personal question,” Filius pointed out, bemused. Evan seemed to think the other had been a snide question, or something in that category, but he’d just wanted to know. Evan had started relaxing into his usual faraway, languishing attitude very nearly the second the door had closed behind Severus, and by the time he’d started answering Filius’s question he’d been an inch away from the disengaged boy Filius had so often wanted to shake in class.
It was thoroughly unlikely that the Evan Rosier Filius had just met and that Severus Snape seemed to know, expect, and rely on should honestly think that Filius, half a minute after speaking with that Evan Rosier, would believe in the slug-a-chair again just because Severus wasn’t there. An absurd notion, and the boy might have Black blood but that was not the sort of ‘madness’ that ran through the line. That was just a calculated enthusiasm for temper tantrums that would preserve the family’s reputation for being an unwise one to cross.
Eliminating the possibilities of Evan being stupid or crazy enough to think he could fool Filius into believing a lie he himself had only just disproven, what remained? Unknown, but he thought that moment of confusion had been real. In which case the relapse into ‘public-face,’ as Evan had called it, might not have been so deliberate as he’d very-nearly implied. What had triggered it? Severus leaving, or some component of being left alone with Filius who was, to him, only an old professor. What had ended it? Surprise, or some component of being faced or confronted with a truth about himself or his behavior in the manner in which Filius had done so.
Ordinarily he’d take a pensieve memory to Albus when he needed help on the fine points of analyzing an interaction like this, but Evan wasn’t a target and nothing imminently depended on Filius understanding this, so it would be a betrayal of privacy. Besides, if Filius was made uneasy by the shadows of captive tyrants in Rosier’s face than Albus would be completely thrown off by then. Severus might have insights, if there was time.
Evan, who was looking at him as if he’d turned into a niffler, shrugged a little. He did not, however, relapse again, which Filius considered to be a significant data point, although its significance was as yet unclear. “So what are you here for? Portrait commission? If it’s for Dumbledore’s birthday, I assume you’re persuading me to get Grandpère to do it; I’m far too green for anyone to believe a client of his stature would seek me out, or that friends who didn’t want to belittle him publicly him would do it with his portrait in mind.”
Filius considered. “Horace mentioned that you’ll be doing an exhibit of pictures you painted during a recent Quidditch tournament?”
“It was just an amateur do,” Evan said, “and of course they’re not living portraits.” Filius got the impression he wouldn’t have shown them to his grandfather with a wand at his throat, but quite a bit of that modesty was false as an obedient Peeves.
“Albus would enjoy a painting of a Gryffindor or Puddlemere United game far more than one of himself. I’m just looking into the idea today, you understand.”
“Quite. The canvases are in my vault at Rose & Yew, but shall I find the photos, as a start?”
“I’d like to ask you a few questions, as a matter of fact, if you don’t mind.” He smiled. “I hope they won’t be so personal you’ll have to dodge so as not to be rude.”
Evan gave him a this is not how things are done look. Filius had seen one very like it thousands of times before, only Horace’s version had descended into clenched irritation lately. Evan’s was all sad reproach, very mild on a long sigh. “All right.”
“What are you doing?”
“…Humoring you? Am I doing it wrong? I have a lot of experience,” Evan assured him, just a touch too earnestly, “but I suppose there must be individual variation to take into account.”
“I’m not asking so you can humor me, though,” Filius told him, good-natured about it. “I want to be sure you have, in fact, agreed to what your friend signed you up for.” He was a great deal readier to believe it than he had been when he came in, but it wasn’t something he could take as an assumption. He could take Albus’s word that Narcissa had, however circuitously, made her position clear, but he couldn’t simply let it stand that one person had volunteered another without some sort of clear indication of consent.
“You’re not going to throw things at me, too, are you?” Evan asked gloomily. He answered Filius’s what-on-earth face, “After Severus came back from his last talk with you, he threw things at me and screamed for nearly half an hour before he’d believe I wasn’t mad at him. At least, it felt like half an hour.”
“And you weren’t angry with him after that?” Filius asked, raising an eyebrow.
Evan gave him the you-have-turned-into-a-niffler look again. “I’m not going to get mad at him for being afraid of things that are extremely dangerous. I suppose there’s a place for friends and allies that aren’t at least that intelligent, but I think I’d find one rather a trial, wouldn’t you? It would take so much looking-after…”
He made a vaguely horrified, hollow-eyed face, like one who’d been forced to watch the last few years of the heat-death of the universe without looking away (or, more likely, forced to have tea with Lucius Malfoy and his bookends), and then smiled warmly. “Besides, he’s not a bad Chaser at all, and he didn't hit me with anything once and I only had to duck three or four times and they were ugly teacups anyway.”
Filius stared at him.
“Extremely ugly,” he was assured. “I think they’d been,” Evan’s nose wrinkled, “mass-produced.”
“...Oh, well, in that case.” Quidditch players. “But you realize that anyone would consider that you’d have had a perfect right to be angry,” Filius hoped. If he still half-meant angry about the teacup-hurling, he reminded himself that a right was not always an obligation.
He was, however, going to have to press the Slytherin portraits closely on the question of whether Severus ever allowed himself to lose control of his temper like that with anyone who wasn’t bigger, or at least older and more powerful, than he was. For a child to throw a tantrum at his teachers was regrettable, but understandable when it was a breakdown in helplessness and not a manipulation.
For two young men to have their arguments physically was almost (almost) a good idea, if they both saw it in the same way. If they felt well-matched, and neither was afraid of the other. Once one remembered that they were both dangerously well-armed magically, at least one had a vicious tongue and the instincts of a clawed prey animal, the other was from two lines well steeped in the Dark Arts, they’d played well together on the same team in a violent sport where half the game was cheating, and that cuts and bruises were far easier to heal than hexes or potion damage, let alone curses.
For an adult to show violence to his wards would be quite another matter. Even Filch only said if-only-I-could as an intimidation tactic, which was repugnant enough but at least kept him from being accused of having pets or getting sucked into any student political games. An unfortunate tactic, but perhaps a wise one for a squib who was only staff and not faculty, and must feel powerless. But Severus wouldn’t be powerless if he were to be brought in, and if this was what he turned to as his go-to means of releasing his feelings, the whole thing was impossible.
“Tell me you understand what we’re talking about,” he pressed, setting school-related concerns aside for later. “Tell me clearly, please.”
Evan sighed. “For a House that’s meant to be clever,” he muttered into his palms. Looking up again, “Helping Severus practice his mind-magic now you lot are starting to experiment. And no, I’m not looking forward to it, but he does what he wants and I’m not going to just let him twist in the wind, am I? Half a tick, I’m just going to take the tray in so Severus can put the food down when he gets back. Do keep your glass,” he added, giving Filius the sort of look that meant if you’re slow enough to ignore that hint, I cannot help you.
Filius therefore kept looking at his cider. A moment after he heard Evan put the tray down in the kitchen, the reflections from the window and the room’s sconces gathered themselves into the letters ICW. And Filius didn’t know anything else that could have stood for but International Confederation of Wizards.
The letters held for a moment, and then shimmered back into natural reflections as Evan came back. The kitchen, it occurred to Filius, was far enough from the sitting room that both rooms wouldn’t show up at once in a pensieve memory, let alone one being seen by legilimency.
“I’ll give you a hand next time, if you like,” Filius said. “As I was saying, anyone would consider you have a perfect right to be angry, being volunteered for mind-magic practice. It can be unpleasant stuff even when it’s not dangerous.” After that ‘meant to be clever’ comment he refrained from anything like emphasis or indicatory pauses. He was afraid Evan would start thudding his head on the coffee-table and then Severus would come back and see the bruises and be cross.
He caught just a flicker of relief over Evan’s face, and rather had the impression he was being allowed to see it. “Well,” Evan explained, “it’s hardly the first time Severus and I had talked about it. He’s done so much reading, history and DADA, you know what he was like with the restricted section…”
Filius sighed. “His parents should count themselves lucky he behaved more honestly about his homework. He doesn’t hold the record for the most stolen, swapped, and forged passes, but it’s close.”
“He’ll be devastated,” declared Evan cheerfully. “Who’s tops?”
“Basil Fronsac.”
“That sounds familiar...”
“Headmaster after Phineas Black. At the time, of course,” he added, smiling but trying not to be smug about it, “he was only an OWL-year Ravenclaw. Done reading, you were saying?”
“Well, it’s a kind of dark magic, isn’t it? Even if it’s not the criminal and nasty kind, it’s not structured, not controlled by anything but the wizard’s will and mastery of their own magic. It can be dangerous for the wizard who’s doing it, especially over a long time. And it seems that Severus sort of does it automatically a little bit.” He met Filius’s eyes. “Can’t just stop breathing the air you’re in and all that.”
“A person can go breathe different air,” Filius mentioned. Maybe Evan knew why Severus felt stuck in England.
“They’d be bringing the same lungs with them, buildup of all the fumes they’d breathed before.” Evan shrugged. “Run away from yourself and there you are, style of thing.”
“Do you think so?” he asked unhappily. If one person couldn’t turn away, once caught up, what were the odds that anyone else could?
“Oh count on it, Professor. Basic biology and all that.” His voice went light and careless and, despite his earlier insistence that he wasn’t trying to insult Filius, started sounding as if he were chewing on something and needed a nap again. “Happily, that sort of dark magic doesn’t have the sort of thing attached to the other sort, where the rotters who started using it out of interest stopped doing anything else to speak of, whether or not they had Houses and families and business concerns to look after and so on. Seems to be awfully absorbing, wouldn’t you say? Not to mention hard on the body as often as not.”
“You know, I don’t think I’d thought about it from that standpoint!” exclaimed Filius, excited. “You may be right! A genuine change in the brain, do you think? Everyone says that the Dark Arts are seductive, of course, but what if they also render everything else anhedonic? Or make it impossible to believe in the sense of solutions that exclude them? It’s in the oldest stories, of course—the Three Brothers break away from each other as soon as they have their meeting with death, and when the second brother began to dabble in necromancy he abandoned all other concerns but his ghostly bride until his obsession led him to abandon life itself. And once Herpo the Foul began experimenting with basilisks he left running his estate to his wife, which was probably the most sensible thing he ever did but quite the scandal in Athens. And of course there was that utter nonsense where Raczidian of Albania tried to use Dementors to win himself a sweetheart. Can you imagine!”
“Well,” Evan drawled, “as Spike says, when all you’ve got is a hammer. Or a ten-foot tall decomposing ghoul, I suppose, although I must say that I’d rather have even the most uselessly mundane of hammers, myself, even if it is letting the side down: at least you can melt ‘em down for sculpture.Not very Slytherin, though, doing the same sort of thing all the time no matter what the problem is.”
“As far as I can tell,” Filius noted, to keep it light, not mentioning that Evan appeared to have something of a one-track mind himself, going by that sculpture crack, “the Slytherin solution to every problem is to have a dinner party.”
Evan grinned. “Be fair now, Professor. Sometimes he has Christmas parties, too, you must admit that.”
“That I will admit,” he conceded, smiling.
“As I was saying, I feel very lucky that with Severus his problem is something that can be practiced, and that getting it mastered will really solve the difficulty.” His voice stayed light and yawning, but his eyes tightened. “If it had been the other sort, well. That’s not the sort of thing one wants happening to friends and family, is it? And it does tend to spread, doesn’t it, speaking historically, according to Severus. Not a bludger you want up in the air and multiplying; quite hard to catch even with a team armed with nets, let alone by oneself. Best not to let it out of the ball-case in the first place, if one can avoid it, saves no end of trouble.”
On the one hand, Filius was glad Evan had, like Narcissa Black—er, Malfoy, found a way to make his position known, however murkily he felt he needed to go about it. On the other hand, he found it drearily ironic that it was only in relation to his work at Hogwarts that he was largely able to avoid being spoken to in Quidditch metaphors.
“I’m awfully glad it’s just mind-magic he’s caught a case of. Be a perfect ass, not helping with something as simple as that,” he added, looking depressed and, if not appropriately overwhelmed, at least serious enough to satisfy Filius he was going in with open eyes as much as anyone ever did. “I mean, he stopped charging me for help with my potions homework all the way back in third year, so even he thinks we’re friends.” He paused, and pressed his lips together worriedly. His eyes were not in on it, although they had nothing on the Albus Twinkle. “Almost certainly. I’m quite sure. Really quite sure. Even if I did still have to buy his history notes like everyone else.”
“That,” said Severus from the doorway, behind Filius, “is because there is a qualitative difference between struggling in a subject and not even trying not to sleep through class. Only one of the two deserves to be punished.”
“I didn’t hear you come in,” Filius noted, annoyed with himself but actually very pleased about it. He wondered whether the door made a noise that the flat’s residents could hear, and whether it had been enchanted to muffle entries by those residents or Severus was just able to walk that quietly in boots. Even under these circumstances, of course, it would be impolite to ask on a first visit.
“I was just in time to hear Ev call himself a perfect ass,” Severus said jauntily. “Quite made my week.”
Evan asked, “Was he…?”
“Oh, yes,” answered Severus, full of dark humor, and floated a basket of fried things onto the table while he put his cloak back on the stand.
“I thought you said you wanted food,” Filius pointed out, poking something that might have started life as a defenseless little onion that had probably never so much as made anyone cry.
“You’re not obliged to partake,” Severus retorted, turning the basket as he sat down so most of the chips were nearer to Evan. Relenting, he added, “I can bring the scones back if you’re still hungry, if you don’t want any of this lot. Assuming they’re not gone because they’re gone. And there’s a fruit bowl in the kitchen.”
“Shall I look at the canvases while you’re eating?” Filius asked Evan. He was curious to see what the lad’s art was like when he wasn’t working to the strict and sacred standards of representational portraiture or making bland sitting-room work. If it was anything like his handwriting, there would be rainbows, unicorns, and the tattered, wide-eyed, winged creatures that muggles thought were pixies, perhaps done in paint with glitter. Or else a fascination with muscular serpents, possibly in the process of swallowing large animals, and striking sunset landscapes featuring haystacks or gritty, jutting, rocky protrusions. Somehow, Filius wasn’t expecting he’d be looking at anything remotely like any of that, although either sort would give Albus a laugh.
“Just before you leave, so they’re fresh in your mind. So if you have all you want, yes.”
“The scones were more than enough, thank you,” said Filius to Severus, making no move to leave their armchair.
Evan sighed, looking a little disappointed. “Well we can be freer again now,” he told Filius, who would rather have liked to know what difference Severus walking in with a basket of greasy alleged-food made. Instead of obliging Filius’s Very Obvious Confused And Inquisitive Face, he asked Severus, “He’s really still stalking you?” The disappointment strengthened and took on folds of indignation. “Now?”
Severus waggled a hand: so-so. “He claims to have charmed the floors at our usual places to recognize my bootprints and alert him when—”
“That spell should not be floating around!” Filius blurted out, appalled. They looked at him. “Distance alert enchantments? That’s one of ours; civilians are not supposed to know about it. Can you imagine the trouble it could cause?”
“I’m going to have to visit every place I’ve ever been in the last two years and buy new boots whilst on the verge of unemployment because of the trouble it could cause,” Severus said dryly. “I regret to tell you that first, Potter is revoltingly good at getting his hands on spells he shouldn’t know about, usually to my personal chagrin, and second, I doubt it’s your spell at all. Far more likely to be one of Black’s design that merely replicates its function. Or Lily’s or both, if Potter gave her a good enough reason for wanting something like that.”
“But he talked to you?” Evan gaped with a fine disregard for international security. Boys.
“That was, apparently,” Severus inclined his head in bemusement, “the point. He said there wasn’t anything ‘weird’ about running into each other at a Diagon chippy. As he was attempting not to be belligerent, I refrained from pointing out that his wife may be expected to still be in recovery from a physically traumatic experience. The salient point of which would have been that Godric’s Hollow was, at last report, in Cornwall.”
“I’m very proud of you,” Evan said, at least eighty-five percent solemnly, and handed him a pickled something or other. It looked like fennel, or possibly celery.
“Too bloody right,” Severus sniffed, and bit it righteously in half. It crunched. He stared at the remainder dubiously, chewed, announced to the basket, “That’s odder than bloody pumpkins, but as it is not insipid, this time you may live,” and took another bite.
“He probably just throws anything he sees at market into the pickle jars and saves it to taunt you with to feel deliciously wicked without getting in any actual trouble ,” Evan said impatiently.
Severus pointed the unidentified pickled object at him, solemnly acknowledging the point. “That I can respect.” Crunch.
Evan’s mouth tugged up helplessly, but he pressed, “What did Potter want?”
“So many things,” Severus snorted, and began counting fingers. The finger he was counting with came down so crisply that Filius half expected to see the rest falling to the sofa as he chopped at them. “He’s owled to MESoP for the abstract on the Draught of Peace. He’s backing off and ‘won’t tell’ unless I prove him right because something garbled about I care about Lily and he promised the Professor even though he thinks the latter is far too trusting. Do not ask me to explain that sentence: I received no clarification myself.If he dislikes one single thing he finds out about the Draught he’s going to break my nose again. I am a terrible influence on his idiot cousin—that’s you, I think,” he added to Evan.
“You’re sure it’s not Reg? It’s usually Reg when they talk about who you’re a terrible influence on.”
“Well, he said I’m a terrible influence on his idiot cousin but he could see probably-you meant well and I should tell you as follows: never ever ever bloody do that again but hello from him and Lily.”
“Ah.” Evan heaved a sardonic sigh. “Yes, I expect that’s me.” Filius was itching to know what that was about, even though he rather thought he had some idea because of the very brief briefing Albus had given him regarding Thursday night’s brouhaha. “Anything else?”
“Yes. He’s absolutely positive that he’s right and Lily and the Professor have it completely up their jumper but he’s prepared to hope he’s wrong and er um uh uh uh thanks for looking after Lily that time that didn’t happen even if I was a complete bastard about it and he will absolutely break my nose again if, Draught, etcetera. That I am, however, ‘a complete lunatic and when somebody saves your life they’ve saved your bloody life, it’s sort of a yes or no thing.’ That he does not in fact care about my position on this issue or want my gratitude, but considers that my position is, I quote, stupid and proves I have a pocket watch or at best a sneakoscope instead of a soul, which he considers a persuasive point in favor of him being right—by which I think he meant right about my political affiliations, although, again, he never specified. That despite his previously avowed intention to back off he will be watching me. That I should know all these things. In addition, mushy peas.”
“Mushy peas.”
“He wanted them. I despair for the child’s palate.” Severus turned to Filius, and asked, “What does this mean?” He hooked his thumbs together and flapped his fingers in a birdlike gesture.
Filius coughed and drank tea. “Flashed that at you, did he?”
“Yes. It was very nearly subtle, too; one assumes he was rigorously trained. I returned it, which seemed to satisfy him. Which is, incidentally, ridiculous, a mere mirroring of the opening recognition-gesture should absolutely not be an acceptable response to it, you need to explain this at once to all parties involved with small words and large letters and, if at all possible, fire and crowbars, but I would like to know what I was claiming.”
He sighed, only partly because of Severus’s rather impertinent fit of well-intentioned temper. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t thought of that; there was just too much risk of certain members seizing on any hint of complexity and becoming too creative for everyone else to keep up with. Besides, no secret lasted forever, and when that one was broken and deciphered it would create an impression of juvenile unsophistication, and they could continue using that false front while actually stepping up security until and unless the opposition caught on.
Despite the implications for either Severus’s opinion of his and Albus’s intelligence or Severus’s ability to believe anyone else could do anything properly or both (though he suspected it was mostly the latter), he was pleased by Severus’s instinctive reaction to the compromise that really did mean security was weak. It might have been overly dramatic, but he’d apparently played along smoothly in the moment, without prior warning (although someone would have to ask James Potter for his impressions), and had then at once come to bring his concerns to his contact.
Furthermore, his proposed solution hadn’t been to suggest a forced policy change, but to ensure that everyone understood the theory that would, in his opinion, have prevented their error. The right sort of instincts, and in more than one way. Which didn’t make any of the problems with his proposition about taking over Horace’s job disappear, but it was a point.
His sigh, however, was also because he didn’t really want to answer Severus’s question. “It’s… a consequence of internal Confederation politics.” They gave him bright-eyed young-person looks, Severus while eating a largish lumpy fish-smelling fried thing with his hands. “Albus can get away with one or two consultants on this matter who aren’t likely to stretch the budget allotted to the British branch of the Confederation, but the other national Mugwumps haven’t conceded that we’ve got enough of a problem to give it as much attention as Albus thinks it deserves, not when the bulk of our attention is already tied up in Ireland, which is unquestionably an international affair.”
“Motto House Gryffindor,” Evan proposed wryly. “It’s forbidden and impossible; what are we waiting for?”
“Motto House Gryffindor,” Severus corrected sourly. “The only benefit will be laurels on my grave—quick, how much are the tickets?”
Filius ignored this, which he felt was the only sane response for a responsible House Head. “There’s not much Albus can do about it in his capacity as Supreme Mugwump, until and unless the threat becomes clear and evident or the rest of them forgive him for dragging his feet when they wanted his help. However, as Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot he’s an officer of the law whose writ extends across the kingdom, and that gives him the right to call up a posse comitatus against a specific, identified threat.”
Severus choked, and they looked at him curiously. “I can’t quite see Professor Dumbledore as a Cromwell.[2]Yes, Professor, I know that’s backwards.”
“So long as you know… although I may say that Albus probably had the nose for it, before it was broken. In any case, the law wasn’t intended for one to operate in any sort of long-term way, but we do seem to be working with a criminal or group of criminals who are biding their time. That makes it appropriate, I suppose. And they’re all volunteers, which makes it doable.”
Severus looked at Evan and said, “This is why I keep saying razing everything to the ground and starting over would be quite a good idea.”
“Do you?” asked Filius, raising an eyebrow.
Evan coughed. “Some people get lost in mazes because they sort of get jostled in that direction and aren’t really paying attention because it’s a trusted and comfortable crowd.” Filius waited for this to make sense, but Evan must have taken his waiting look as an accusatory one, because his shoulders moved slightly in what was, coming from a Slytherin pureblood, a giant squirm of embarrassment. He moved an equally subtle-not-subtle protective centimeter in Severus’s protection and went on with a ghost of truculence that made Filius need to look away from him. “Some people go in even though the crowd isn’t quite so trusted because not only is there quite a lot of jostling but they thought their other option was walking on lava in sandals and they’ve heard a rumor there’s a fountain with a hose in the middle.”
“HAS IT OCCURRED TO ANYONE ON THE ENTIRE SODDING ISLAND,” Severus snarled furiously, apparently without noticing that his hand had curled around Evan’s wrist, “that there is such a thing as a conflict of interest?”
“Spike, I’m sure Professor Flitwick doesn’t care, but you should probably practice, Mum’s right about habits, and you’ve been—”
“On the entire island,” he amended, rolling his eyes. “Why does anyone think for a minute that that man is not our king?”
“Because he’s not?”
“He’s in control of everything that matters.”
“Spike, you knew that.”
“I didn’t know he knew how to exploit it!!!”
“If you feel that strongly about Albus,” Filius frowned.
Severus cut him off. “This is not about one person!”
“It’s really, really not,” Evan informed him, munching placidly on a chip. “He can go on about structural problems in the Ministry and the Good Old Family network for ages, but I don’t particularly care to listen to it again if I don’t get to snog him to make him shut up when he really starts crackling, and he won’t let me if you’re here, so I’m just going to cut you both off before it gets started.”
They looked at him. He smiled sleepily at them and ate another chip.
“I hate you,” Severus informed him resignedly, the hand around his wrist slipping down until their fingers were twined.
“I am by definition part of everything,” Evan agreed, all amiability, and wrapped an arm around his waist. Severus drooped him a look that properly belonged on a basset hound, but didn’t fight it.
“Let’s get back,” Filius sighed, “to what you think the werewolves are going to do.”
“Be more vulnerable to being courted by people they’ll know damn well won’t have their best interests at heart but who they might, at that point, be more willing to use-and-be-used-by,” Severus replied promptly, evidently forgetting that he meant to look tormented and beleaguered. “Why the bird sign?”
Faced with this evidence that Severus was capable of speaking plainly when motivated, Filius nevertheless did not turn his food back into live fish. Largely because the miraculous motivator seemed to be curiosity, and even if he didn’t currently sympathize with that much, he felt he ought to.
Instead, he shrugged and rewarded the unusual concision. “He may not be flaunting them, but he didn’t bother trying to hide what he was doing from the Confederation; that would have been a show of bad faith. They think it’s funny, and they call the group Albus’s undomesticated pets. Since there isn’t much training for them, by Confederation standards. He’s a good sport, Albus is, so he went along with it.”
“All right…?”
“Albus has an undomesticated pet,” Filius pointed out, and braced for it.
“Do you mean to tell me,” Severus said slowly, an unholy glee lighting his black eyes, “that Professor Dumbledore has named his super-secret lionhearted vigilante unutterably noble all-volunteer militia after the Incredible Crooning Torch-Turkey?”
“Most people find Fawkes rather impressive,” Filius commented while staring longingly at the cider bottle and wishing he’d charmed it bottomless.
“Then I take it most people have not been sent to the Hospital Wing because he’s too much of a glutton to take any notice of the distinction between a finger and a cinnamon stick,” retorted Severus.
“Most people find Fawkes impressive enough that they don’t try to give him treats while they’re sitting about waiting to be told off for fighting by their exasperated Headmaster for the umpteenth time that term even though they’re more than well advanced enough in Care of Magical Creatures to know that firebirds sing in harmony with the hearts of their chosen humans,” he elaborated.
“…I think Evan should show you those photos now,” Severus grumped.
[1] Mín eaxlgestealla, heo beon na weorþlic (Old English, best effort; þ is pronounced ‘th’): My shoulder-companion (probably best translation is shield-brother and best modern equivalent is t’hy’la), it be not estimable/honorable/becoming.
你比这更好的 (Nǐ bǐ zhè gèng hǎo de): You are better than this. (Those half-circled vowels are, incidentally, hella hard to pronounce in the flow of a sentence for native-English speakers).
Ορκίζομαι στο Θεό ότι είστε καλύτεροι από αυτό (Orkízomai sto Theó óti eíste kalýteroi apó aftó): I swear to God you are better than this.
In hoc autem casu non postulat placet temptemini et peribunt: In this premise I am satisfied and do not require that the hypothesis be tested to destruction.
[2] Google “Richard Harris Cromwell.” ;) And, yes, wizards might well know about Oliver Cromwell; the English Civil War was two kings before Separation, per DH.