Valley of the Shadow, Act II

“And then I said, well, of course I use an impervious against rain, it’s cast on the hood.  Well, and the cloak, too, of course.  I mean, why should I go on casting it over and over?” Reggie appealed to Spike, the flames that made up his face flickering—not with his distress, but with the draught from the little chimney.  It wasn’t strictly necessary to have chimneys for your bedroom fireplaces in a wizarding inn, but doing away with them was apparently far more of a pain than just protecting them.  Having an indoor fire without a flue was expensive and fussy magic that, according to the innkeeper, also did away with a lovely summer cross-breeze.

At least, that was what their embassy-assigned guide said the man had said.  It sounded reasonable, but given the intermediary, Evan had to distrust it on principle.  Karkaroff might have just gone off and had a drink and laughed about the stupid English tourists with his mates instead of actually trying to address Spike’s concerns about a hole in the ceiling, as far as they really knew.

This was a stance, as Severus kept pointing out, that was using up a lot of his energy and not entirely allowing him to enjoy their trip.  Evan was also afraid it might be giving him squinty, suspicious Severus eyes, but what could one do?

“No reason in the world,” Spike confirmed.  “Up efficiency.  But surely you didn’t expect reason from Ministry workers.”

This time it actually was Reggie’s eyes that did the flickering.

“Reg?” Spike prompted, his tone honing in as his eyebrow slid up.

“What the Reggie-bird doesn’t want to say to you,” Evan drawled, leaning back on the sofa (he missed his own sofa.  This one was comfortable enough, but it was squashy-soft in the wrong ways and the texture of the cover was just… uninviting), “which is to say, to you, is that he didn’t expect them to be reasonable, he expected them to care that he’s Regulus Black.”

“Um,” Reggie replied sheepishly to Spike’s unimpressed look.  “Well.  Yes.  That.  I mean!  It’s not that I think it ought to put us all above the law, Spike, it’s just…”

“It’s just that you think it has, whether it ought to or not,” Spike finished for him, continuing his presentation of Deeply Unimpressed In A Dressing Gown.

“Not exactly!” Reg protested.  “Just, er.  Just, well, just a little bit more than that.  I mean, I just mean… I don’t mean that if I tell them my name they should immediately back off, but, well, yes, honestly, Spike, I would have expected that once they made me prove who I am they would have taken me home to Dad to deal with it there, not turned out all my pockets in the middle of the street and hoiked me into the Ministry to ask me questions for hours.  Not unless it was an Azkaban matter and they were completely sure.  And, actually, even then I think they would have done it at my house without causing a scene in public and used our floo.  Well,” he amended, “I thought.”  

“We get dignity and the benefit of the doubt, not complete immunity,” Evan translated, because Severus had that glazed over eyes-different-sizes look he got at Slughorn parties and everyone else got when he started talking potions.  Accompanied by the start of a little angry tic. “That’s Reggie’s idea.”

“And I don’t think putting your hood up in the rain should make them throw all the benefit of all the doubt out the window just because that’s what—” Reggie checked himself, and then looked warily around him at, presumably, the walls of his fireplace, even though Ev didn’t think Kreacher would have allowed a live ant to live in it, let alone a Ministry bug. “Just because that’s what one group of criminals decided to wear one time!”

“You did say you put it on while you were stepping into Knockturn, Reggie-bird,” Evan had to point out. “Location, location, location, and all that.”

Possibly due to being the one who’d pointed out what that one group of terribly anonymous criminals had worn that one time to that one Auror, Spike had decided not to be interested in this point. Or at least, not where Reggie could make him talk about it. “Dignity and the benefit of the doubt are things everyone should have, except in emergencies,” he said, still unimpressed but with a lower-case u.

“You’re the one who said not to expect thoughtfulness from the Ministry,” Ev pointed out, and Spike sighed and didn’t correct him.

Leaning back instead, Spike tapped his lip meditatively.  “Here’s the bit I have difficulty with.  I know you gave them answers that both they and capital-H He found innocuous, because there you are and I would know,” he pinned the flooed Reg with an ominous look, “if you were only pretending to be essentially all right.  And I know that he questioned you himself afterwards, because he did with me and Evan and there’s more information to be taken from you.”

“Are you sure about that?” Evan asked, nudging him fondly, rib to shoulder, and squeezing on the other shoulder with the rest of his arm.

Severus blinked in that train-of-thought-interrupted sort of way.  “We think it possible Reg has been an eyewitness to things we think may have happened but have never had confirmed,” he said.  “In addition to which, certain favored parties like to brag to him.”

“You realize I’m the one in the fire, if someone has a way to put ears into the Floo network, do you?” Reg asked.  Evan thought he was raising an eyebrow, but it was hard to be sure with his face made of flame.

“If someone does, since we don’t know what their hypothetical method, way is, how would we know whether or not they can hear anything outside the fire or the fireplace?” Spike asked practically.

“Spike,” Evan sighed, “Reggie’s in the Black family townhouse and we’re in a foreign inn you picked in a coin-flip between the two left over after the one our charming guide was trying to get us into and the one he was urging us against and the pretty one with the pool everybody would have thought I would have bullied you into and the really cheap horrible one everyone would have thought you would have bullied me into as revenge for trying to bully you in the first place.”

“…What?” asked Reg, bewildered.

“I highly, highly doubt that anyone knows where we’re staying,” Evan summarized, “and Spike’s warded everything six ways from Sunday anyway.”  

“There’s always pensieves,” Spike said darkly.

“Spike-my-spike, you cannot live your life like that,” Evan sighed, dropping his forehead to Spike’s shoulder with enough of a thunk to underline his despair.  

Instantly cheering up, Spike very smugly declared, “Watch me.”

“Not that I actually want to know,” Reg said in his own despairing sort of voice while Ev aarghed into Spike’s shoulder and tried to sort of chin the dressing down to get at him more directly.  Spike had already washed his brewing soap off for the day, thus the dressing gown, and he was sure to be a lovely seashell pale under just one interferesome layer of black vest.  If Evan was lucky, it might be one of the ones with the straps that unbuttoned and he could very very subtly aargh his way over to the collarbone.  “But what was the bit you have difficulty with?”

“I should think that was obvious: how did you get out?  I can’t imagine they didn’t use some sort of truth-confirming magic, if not truth-evoking, if you were an actual suspect.”

“Maybe you’re just assuming too much competence,” Evan suggested—still into linen, sadly, not skin.

“That auror who—you aren’t fooling anyone, you know—that auror who interviewed us after the Portkey Office affair isn’t an agent to take lightly,” Severus reminded him, the arm sliding around his back making a mockery of the repressive tone.  “Law enforcement isn’t my area, of course; I don’t say I’m a good judge, and we can’t know how typical he is.  And he didn’t even get all the in-reserve information I was willing to let him shake out of me.  However, the only thing of importance that he let me get away with was insisting that Evan is the serial womanizer his clients like to hope he is.”

“Er?” asked Evan, sitting up.  “This is news.  Am I expected to back that up?”

“No,” Severus assured him, leaning his way maybe an inch more. Not just the usual subtle millimeter-or-so: Evan didn’t just feel him move closer, he actually saw Spike’s shoulders shift.  “He knew I was lying.  As I said, he let me get away with it.”

“Why?”

“I presume because he had too many other interviews and thought he could follow up later if necessary.”

“I mean, why did you say I was?”

Severus shrugged, using the motion to lean in more definitely until he was under Evan’s arm again.  Evan himself would reserve judgment on whether he deserved to squirm, because this was clearly him squirming if not actually cringing, insofar as Severus knew how to do either of those things.   Until Ev had decided, though, he was more than willing to take the benefit.   “I had to paint you as useless to explain why we didn’t try to get out, so I said you’d proven you didn’t react quickly when a girl slapped you, and then it… went from there.”

“Did his eyes do the shifty-darty thing?” Evan asked Reg.

“Yep,” Reg confirmed, enjoying the show but probably mostly happy not to be talking about himself.

“Let’s try this again.  Spike, heart, cheesecake on my lamb-chop, why did you lie to the nice Auror about something that was going to make him find out we’re not just flatmates of convenience about five minutes after he starts looking into it, when absolutely no one has bothered up till now?”

“Because he’s not going to bother, either.  He thinks he knows exactly why I lied, and thinks he knows everything he needs to know.  I let him uncover a ‘deep dark secret I was uncomfortable about’ and didn’t want him to find out.  Ergo, he had a very successful interrogation wherein he unearthed The Guilty Secret I Was Protecting. I surely had one, because everyone does, but he’s forced me to disclose mine.  No further investigation required,” Spike said flatly.

“…I beg your pardon?” Evan inquired civilly, drawing away a little.  “Exactly how am I a deep, dark, guilty secret?”

“Obviously you’re precisely the opposite sort of secret from that,” Severus snapped.  “But you’d have to be if we were muggles, as you very well know. I showed him more than enough of me da’s lad for him to think that he was talking to a half-blood from a rough part of town who’s still got muggle ideas pulling his strings will-he nill-he.”

“Oh, you were occlulying,” Evan concluded, relaxing and pulling him back and ignoring the bewildered face and the mouthed occlu-lying?  Well, not so much ignoring it as giving it a nuzzle between the confused, twisty eyebrows.  “Well done, then, although I still say it was odd of you.”

“…I panicked,” Severus admitted, sighing and wilting into him.  “I was trying to support your public-face by saying you’d just proved you were useless in a crisis, and suddenly I realized that I was trapping myself into telling him Lily had been in our flat.  Lily’s not supposed to be in our flat.  So I needed a distraction, instantly, and suddenly there it was, a good way to make him think he had my measure.”

“Why was Evans in your flat?”  Reg asked.

“My mother sent her to shout at me,” Severus misled him gloomily.  “They never stopped being on good terms.  And the last thing I need is Aurors asking her and her bloody husband about it and then he comes to ask me why Lily was in my flat, probably with a mace.”  

Evan was hard put to it not to press him down to the sofa and snog the life out of him, even if it was the wrong sofa and a rather unappealing and pedestrian one at that.

“In any case,” Severus went on, “as I was saying before everyone decided to minutely examine my every life choice…”

“Stow it, Strum Und Drang,” advised Evan affectionately, and kissed him behind the ear.

Severus made a huffy mmph noise and continued, “As I was saying, I don’t underestimate the Aurors after that experience—I hope I don’t. And, Reg, you’re more closely tied to matters on which I was questioned than I am.  It’s not my wish to give offense, but I think it unavoidable: my difficulty is that I don’t understand how you got out unscathed.  And I believe you know what I mean by ‘unscathed.’”

“Well, I feel a lot less offended now I know you talked yourself into a corner,” Reg said, trying dry on for size.  Spike curled a nice try, Sparky look at him. “Anyway, it wasn’t that hard.  Nobody told me about the Portkey Office thing or the giants till after, and how do I know if people bragging is true? That’s just hearsay, isn’t it?”

“I knew someone had been sneaking my books in third year,” Severus sighed.

“Well,” Reg defended himself, “I was thinking about taking Muggle Studies and no one could tell me what the class was like and the textbooks in the library were, er.”

“From the twenties?”

“That, right.  And if I’d asked one of the Hufflepuffs or something to borrow a book, someone would have noticed.  Stealing books from a Slytherin a year up is perfectly respectable, even if it’s a weird book and everyone knows he’s only letting you get away with it because he’s scared of Narcissa.”

“Actually, I was letting you get away with it because presumably-you had returned the first one in good condition and continued not to make trouble for me and good books should be read,” Severus replied.

“He was extremely scared of Narcissa,” Evan stage-whispered, got thumped on the thigh, and grinned.   “Although in retrospect some of them ought not to have been classified as good books,” Spike reflected, belatedly deciding to pretend Evan hadn’t spoken.  “I mention your bibliokleptomania—”

“That is not possibly a word.”

“Steal a dictionary and look it up.  I mention your rampant and outrageous book-theft—”

“Spike, the wards on your trunk didn’t even zing me,” Reg said patiently.  Sort of patiently.  Not impatiently.  It wasn’t really to do with patience, Evan supposed.  It was more that sometimes Spike’s friends got this sort of a smile with their eyebrows high in the middle and sloping off low towards the side of their faces.  Not really a stressed smile, exactly, and not quite either sad or amused, and Ev felt ‘fond’ might have been overstating it a bit.  He thought that meant they were reminding themselves that they’d decided to be friends with him, and this was who he was.

Quite often they got it at around the times Evan was beginning to idly toy with the idea of kissing him as a gentle, efficient, and delightful method of shutting him up, with the added bonus that he usually kept trying to talk indignantly into Evan’s mouth for a good thirty seconds into it. Which was not only lovely but fun to try to decipher when Evan could be bothered.  And then Evan could win points with him later by bringing up things he’d said with his mouth stoppered, which made him absolutely light up.

“I mention,” Spike sterned on at Reg, “your blithely dissipated toffee-nosed assumption that you may appropriate the property of others simply because it does not actively hurt you at the moment you—stop laughing!”  

“Cannot,” Evan managed, and buried his face in Severus’s long, warm throat, arms wrapped all around him.

He was thus ideally located to feel the grumpy noise Spike made, even if he couldn’t quite hear it over his own snickering.  “I mention it,” Spike said in a tone that was just as grumpy, a hand sneaking up to lace into Evan’s hair, “because ‘whether or not it was hearsay matters’ is only a concept in courts with a standardized justice system that does not, in fact, actually run on rumor, public opinion, and patronage.”

“Well,” said Regulus with an air of injured innocence that made even Evan instantly itch to swat him, “thanks to your letting me borrow them, I do know what’s considered good evidence and what’s not.  It doesn’t matter what they think, if they’re wrong about how to tell if something’s true.  If it’s only hearsay, then I know that I don’t really know, so I shouldn’t say I know, because I don’t know.”

There was a long pause, during which Evan seriously contemplated prying himself up to look at Severus’s face in case it had gone dangerous, even though he was really extremely comfortable and warm and Spike’s hand, up until it went still, had been rubbing his neck.  Then—

“Good kitten,” Severus purred.  “Excellent weasel-kit.  You shall have a biscuit.”

“I’m sure it’s dogs that get biscuits,” Evan put in over Reggie’s pleased and whiny Spiiiiiiike!

Then Reggie had evidently remembered he was supposed to be at least not-eleven, if not actually a grown-up, and asked, “What sort of biscuit?”

“A metaphorical sort,” Severus replied smartly.  “We don’t have a kitchen in here, and baking with no other amenities than a fireplace is far more fuss than I can be bothered with, even if it were, technically, baking.  But I shall remember you at the market if you did as well on the other matter.  Weren’t you assigned to help with the planning?”

“Well,” Reg said evasively, “I guess I wasn’t very good at it, and I had to practice occlumency really a lot.  He did say that was the most important.  And Dad’s been pressing me to take over more with accounts and things, and he also wanted me to start getting better at all that greasy stuff Lucius does, and I’ve had an awful lot of background reading and things, and she’s really not very patient, Spike.”

Spike considered this, and then smacked Evan lightly in the back of the head.

“What did I do?” Evan complained, turning his head only enough to meet Spike’s eyes.

“You made me listen to an entire year of Lockhart whinging, O Captain my Captain, because you replaced yourself as Seeker with Reg, when clearly you could have thrown the panting idiot a bone and put Reg as Keeper.”  

Reggie beamed, and Evan pointed out, “Yes, but then we would have lost every single game no matter how well you and Reggie and the whole rest of the team put together did.”

“Granted,” a judicious Severus allowed, “but I wouldn’t have had to listen to Lockhart repeatedly assuring me you had a secret passion for him that made you not want to see his delicate skin be bruised.”

“He said that about Gamp, too,” Evan pointed out, settling sleepily back down as Reggie snickered.

“Yes, but I was tempted to throttle him less and shove him out fewer windows when he said it about Gamp,” Severus said reasonably.  

“Anyway,” Evan further pointed out, “you can win on points with a sorry Seeker.  We did win at least once when I was off my game.”

“Yeah, but it’s a lot harder when the other team knows your Seeker’s rubbish than when a good Seeker’s just having a bad day, Evvie,” Reggie pointed out.

“Even Gryffindor isn’t so anti-strategy as to fail to take advantage of such an obvious weakness,” Severus agreed drolly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Evan mused.  “They’re sprinters, Gryffindors are.  Hufflepuff, now, I wouldn’t want to try it against them.  But Gryffindors throw themselves into everything.  They don’t hold back.  They’d exhaust themselves too early, d’you see.”

“What you’re saying,” Spike said, turning up his drollery, “and I agree with you, is that the only way such a team could win would be to score and score and score until their opponents realized they were so far behind that they’d never catch up, and decided to instead catch the snitch and lose in a blaze of glory.  The problem with this strategy, Evander, is that it is by its nature an endurance match.  The targeted team and its captain must be less willing than the one with the weak Seeker to potentially stay out in all weather, and certainly to miss classes and meals and sleep.”

Evan waited curiously for Severus to finish making his point.

He realized that both Reggie and Spike were looking at him.  Extremely pointedly.

Hurt, he demanded, “What?”

Later on, when the empty fire had died to orange embers and the sky was quite dark and star-pricked, Evan didn’t care how dreary the sofa was, and had forgotten his concern that the sheets might give at least one of them a rash.  He had a slow and steady heartbeat under one ear, a low and lovely voice pouring in the other.

“This verse of gold and black a-written was, which I began, astounded, to behold,” Severus rumbled, contentedly reading something that was probably very unsettling, considering how happy he was with it. Evan was too sleepy to take in more than his cadence, the way baritone could make its speaker thrum.  “For though the sweetness of the one increased my fears, the gloomy second made my heart grow bold!  That one me heated, t’other did me cold.  No wit had I for error, for to choose to enter or to flee would save myself—or lose.”[1]

Evan did smile a minute later when the poem started listing trees, Not that he had the faintest idea why it did, or particularly cared.  It was just that they’d spent so many years revising together that his attention couldn’t help but be caught, at least for a moment, when Spike started talking in a making-lists tone of voice. It had always been so likely that there’d be an exam later.

As Severus started to meander through a purplish bit of verse devoid of plot, cunning and philosophy (as far as Ev could tell, what with not having been paying attention to its context), he thought this might be a good time to start nudging Spike towards the consensus that a good stopping point had arrived.  He hummed peacefully into Spike’s sternum, started thumbing circles under his ear and into the soft place above his sharp hip.

Spike laughed silently at him, and in a try harder voice read on. “Although at once was I aware of Pleasure nigh, and of Array, and Lust, and Courtesy.  And of the Craft that can—and has the might!—to make by force a man to do folly… although disguised was she, I will not lie.”

He dipped his head, the better to purr into Evan’s ear, his own bookless hand starting to go a bit sneaky.  “And, by himself, under an oak, I guess, saw I Delight, standing with Gentilesse.  I saw Beauty, without any attire—Evan?”

“Ow!” Evan had announced, bolting upright as his foot seared.  Indignantly, kicking off the covers, he complained, “There is something very fishy about that man and his timing, Spike, are we sure he doesn’t have some sort of clock with a setting for ‘most inconvenient’?”

Severus was staring at him, wary, eyebrow up.

Evan blinked back.  “Aren’t you getting a…?” He waved at Severus’s left arm.

Spike shook his head, very slowly.

“Huh,” Ev mused, and summoned his clothes.  

“What do you think—?”

“Haven't the foggiest,” Evan shrugged, “and seeing as I’m not his pet student he likes to groom, I don’t imagine he’d think it was adorable and give me a pat on the head if he caught me second-guessing him.  Well, first-guessing, I s’pose.”

“Perhaps not,” Severus agreed in a shut-down sort of voice.  He wasn’t concerned about guessing—or, Ev knew, he’d rather call it hypothesizing—but then, he wouldn’t have had to be even if he’d been called himself.

As he was about to put his over-robe on, he noticed that Severus was still regarding him with grave eyes and a slightly furrowed brow, a slightly pinched mouth.  “Spike, ‘Evvie’s useless’ was just something we’re telling the Aurors, right?” he inquired, tilting a teasing eyebrow up.

“Just… don’t be a prat,” Severus… well, advised, although Evan, surprised, thought his tone might have translated to a begging note in someone else’s voice.  “Don’t… don’t make the mistake with him that Reggie made about the Aurors.”

Evan considered this as he fastened his robe, and suggested, “I don’t need him to like me.”

“Just don’t be a prat,” Spike pressed, all storms behind his wooden face.  He stood up fiercely to not so much kiss Evan as bite him on the mouth, shoved the Auror’s portkey into his pocket, and gave him a savage little shove.

Evan smiled understanding at him, touched his face.  He looked out the window to remind himself of cold things before anything unbalancing could happen.  Then he apparated away and let the summons take him.

The good thing about apparating into a summons was that you didn’t get the nausea and the shaken-up, rattled-around, repeatedly squelched-to-atomic-size-and-stretched-out-to-fit-the-sun feeling that Evan had been assured that practice would eventually smooth out of a wizard’s self-apparitions and even out of side-alongs.  How much practice, no one said.  

There wasn’t any risk of splinching, either, unless you were a complete idiot, because the will and the where were both supplied by a mind that was currently looking at the where.  A mind, furthermore, that if Spike was right might just be, by now, inhumanly focused as well as inhumanly strong.  So all you had to do was remember who you were, without any of the rest of it. And Ev was quite settled in his own body—worked steadily to stay that way no matter how lazy Spike and Reggie liked to say he was.

Granted, if someone (that someone being Narcissa and only Narcissa) had asked him, he would have admitted he rather thought it was a miracle that Spike managed to get anywhere without splinching, ever. So maybe that wasn’t as important in Place Face Pace as creaky old Flashlock had said it was.

The persistently unnerving thing was that one never knew where one would end up.  The Dark Lord had, apparently, decided that one’s headquarters could never be infiltrated or otherwise invaded if they didn’t exist.   Which was hard to argue, but if Evan found himself back in England and had to get back to Bulgaria under his own power, he was going to have a rough go of it, and Spike was not going to be happy.  Was, in fact, going to go out of his mind until Evan could get word to him, because there was no way Evan could just apparate back himself.

Maybe Dumbledore or the Dark Lord could have managed it, but Ev was not going to be able to just pop through national border-wards.  Not a chance.  Some of these European countries even still had ancient city-state wards they’d never taken down, because why would they, when war was never entirely out of fashion?  

Fortunately for Evan, when he emerged from the darknessmovement into the world of shapes and gravity and smells, not only the stars but the trees and night flowers looked the same, and when he cast a tempus charm it was still past ten, not the after eight it would have been in England.

There was a sort of cold prickle at the back of his neck.  He turned on his heel, sinking onto his knee as he turned.

And, as an afterthought, wondered vaguely if he should have tried harder to avoid being graceful, should have fumbled it, let himself be caught by surprise.  If this was what Spike meant by being prattish in the eyes of a Dark Lord who got snarly about Spike writing in perfectly ordinary (if somewhat cramped) quillwork when he knew Muggle cursive that, while considerably smoother, had taken Ev ages to learn to decipher. A Dark Lord who, in other words, clearly had not been raised in a Noble House, whether or not his blood meant that he ought to have been. Whose feelings about his own given name had not led him to encourage other wizards to use it.  

Of course, he was graceful himself, but it was a studied grace. In the same way, perhaps, that Spike’s voice was elegant. Evan wondered if Spike had meant to warn him against seeming to show off that not all his gifts had been hard-won.

But then, Spike thought just about everything anybody did was prattish. A fellow couldn’t be expected to narrow it down just out of the blue like that.

“My Lord,” he murmured as the familiar boot came to stop a few feet in front of his lowered gaze.  He wasn’t especially noticing that they were, while not of the whimsical house-slipper variety, longer and pointier toes than most British wizards under 150 or so went for—although you did see that sort on here on the Continent more often. Evan didn’t see the use of it; they looked more silly than elegant in his opinion, and had to have charms to keep them from pinching and throwing one’s balance off.  It was one of the few things he and Rodolphus agreed on.

He certainly didn’t notice that they were rather badly made of Hebridean Black dragonhide, cut against the grain and dyed a very-darkly shiny grey that was wearing off, as though the leather had been passed off as Ukrainian Ironbelly before being given to a cobbler who didn’t customarily handle dragonhide.

He also wasn’t noticing that there were socks (black) under the boots rather than hose, but no trousers or visible undergarb under the filmy but perfectly opaque black robes that played into every passing breath of air like an illuminator’s dream of Dark Wizardry.  He certainly wasn’t occupying himself with hoping the Dark Lord was wearing shorter pants under there than was the current fashion in under-robes for wizards of his age, and not just because any of the alternatives were ugh.

He simply hadn’t the space to notice anything like that when the moon was doing such interesting things to the gloss on his Lord’s traditional, sensible, ostentation-eschewing, wisely-chosen Ironbelly-hide boots, to the occasional pale stone against patches of dark earth, teaming up with the breeze to help the grass put on a show of rippling like water.

He also didn’t in any way notice (he never did) that the Dark Lord had, more and more since Bella’s attack of disturbing mimicry, started putting a sort of breathy gravity into his voice.  It didn’t just make him sound eldritch in the right setting and creepy in the wrong ones, it was eerily familiar.  

Evan hadn’t quite pinned it down yet (and not just because he hadn’t noticed it), but it made him think of high stones and home and comforting hot food.  It would have been creepy and wrong if he’d ever noticed it, but of course he didn’t because his Lord was talking and of course one had to pay attention to that, even if the Dark Lord was just saying, “Rosier,” and then waiting with a frisson of impatience that wasn’t pompous in the least, because things could only be pompous if the pomp was unmerited.

“You called, my Lord,” Evan replied, since they seemed to be opening with statements of the obvious.  He could have been at home—well, at inn—figuring out what on earth Spike’s fourteenth-century bizarrity was about, if anything.  Or not bothering to figure it out and distracting Spike from it.  Spike had seemed nearly ready to be distracted.

Voldemort said, “Young Black will have complained to you and my knife of being assaulted on the very stones of Diagon Alley.”

Evan thought Snape (and it was probably to everyone’s benefit that the man thought Snape was his something (however revolting that was, which of course it wasn’t); it was an honor) would have called that a supposition.  Evan would have called it a probe, but it wasn’t his business to call it anything.  He answered, “My cousin has told us about his encounter with the Aurors, my Lord.”

The Dark Lord, who had been walking slowly around him like a circling panther (very Spike-like; Evan would have approved if he hadn’t been offended, which he wasn’t, so he did, except that it was so dangerous when the panther wasn’t Spike), spun on his Cuban heel so that his not-at-all-overdone spectral robe floated on the air a bit at the hems.

“How foolish they have been,” Voldemort mused.  Evan detected a distinct note of glee under his grave condemnation, but didn’t wonder at all whether it was for the folly of their enemies or for the discomfiture of their pampered kitten.  “To lay rough hands on the scion and heir of one of our greatest families.  Such a very young man.  So earnest, so well-intentioned.  All feel it, who meet him.  Who would believe any harm of the boy? It is an insult and a threat to every noble family.  Is it not, Rosier?”

The way Regulus had told his story, the Aurors had pounced first, the moment they’d seen a wizard heading towards Knockturn Alley pull a hood over his head, and worked out who he was afterwards.  

Evan was, however, under no delusion that facts, or even the personal truth of the person a thing had happened to, mattered in politics.  “Now that you explain it, my Lord, I can quite see how it could be taken in that way.”

“So shall they all,” Voldemort agreed, satisfied, and panthered around again for a while.  

Evan waited patiently, gazing absently past the Dark Lord’s shoulder and distantly noticing the names of his relatives writ brightly in the sky and most certainly not speculating.  It was as good a way as any of not-noticing the slight spread of silver at Voldemort’s temples and putting off having to decide whether to not-notice or be very impressed by the way his eyes had gone from a warm brown deepening to burgundy to a color that was starting to show flecks of true red even in the dark.  Either way, he wouldn’t be worried by it.  Either it was magnificent or it wasn’t happening, so it wasn’t any cause for concern, much less speculation.

After a moment of looking down at him, Voldemort said, as if the thought had just occurred to him, “My good friend Darius believes I do not use you to your worth, Rosier.”

Evan arranged his face into Vague Attentive Curiosity, without in any way meeting the Dark Lord’s eyes.  Slow beats, he reminded his heart.

“Can you match his skill as an artist?”

“Certainly not, my Lord,” Evan replied instantly.  “He’s my father.”

“Of course, of course,” Voldemort replied indulgently.  Perhaps Evan was imagining the trace of a sneer.  Perhaps long exposure to Severus in classes with Gryffindors had taught him to see those where on other faces the same muscle-movements only meant twitches or tiny smiles.

(Merlin’s close-cropped thicket he was imagining it.)

Voldemort was walking around him again.  He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be looking around nervously to track the movements, or successfully fighting the urge to track the movements, or what.  Spike would probably have had a better instinct.

“Has my knife told you,” the Dark Lord mused with a touch of dark, dreamy whimsy, “what a weapon he hath given unto me.”

“My Lord?” Evan inquired politely.

“What does a muggle wear, Rosier?”

Evan blinked.  “I’m hardly an expert, my Lord.”

“Come, Rosier.  Even so well-protected a young pureblood as yourself must have some notion.”

To avoid forcing Voldemort to bring up either Evan’s family’s hundreds of hours in very muggle museums or Evan’s personal long-term partnership with a half-blood with all its implications, Evan turned up one hand on his knee in a shrug. “Some of them wear those awkward stiff blue trousers, and some of them wear trousers with matching overrobes that are extraordinarily short, if not quite as short as summer capes, and many of the women wear frocks without any overrobes at all.  Their casual shoes can be extremely strange, and boots are comparatively uncommon.”

“And what do they do in bad weather, Rosier?”

“Suffer?” Evan suggested, baffled at least as much by the line as questioning as by the search for an acceptable answer.  “There are paintings of muggles wearing fur, and holding up… sort of cloth shields on sticks against the sun and rain.”

Instead of supplying the words umbrellas and parasols for him, as Evan was 99% sure he could have done, the Dark Lord took another spin around him and demanded, “And what do wizards wear, Rosier?”

“Er… lots of things, my Lord. It all depends.”

“But if a witch or wizard is walking out of doors, Rosier, and you know nothing else about them but that they are a magical citizen of Britain, what do you assume they are wearing?”

Evan decided to let himself be utterly baffled; it felt like the best course.  “Something on their feet, more often boots than not if you don’t know anything about them… if it’s a nice day and you don’t know anything, some sort of robe is all you can assume, really.”

“And if it isn’t a nice day, Rosier?

“Then it might be either trousers and a shirt or undergarb or a frock under an overrobe, or a robe under a cloak.  Or all three, if the weather’s very cold and the wizard prefers more clothing to more spellwork.  Might even be all three layers and a vest,” Evan added, not smiling or thinking about any ridiculous people in particular.  “Or just a caped waistcoat with a cooling charm over a shirt if it’s very hot.  Well, and trousers in that case, obviously.”

“Ah, a cloak,” the Dark Lord said, in the tone of someone who had wanted to say that very thing about two sentences ago and was rather annoyed that the prattle had gone on so long that their chance to say it naturally had passed. “Tell me, Rosier, what is a cloak?”

Fortunately, Evan had got quite good at not giving people the side-eye, given how prickly the thirteen-year-old Spike had been about receiving the raised eyebrow he himself had been prone to dole out at a moment’s notice.  “As you wish, my Lord,” he agreed, in a you asked for it sort of resigned tone.

He didn’t know how to describe a cloak other than either ‘er, it’s a cloak’ or in Spike-language.  Deciding that, on balance, taxing was a safer kind of irritation than provoking, he said:

“It’s a more-or-less-circular outer garment which could end anywhere from mid-thigh to below the heel, sometimes with sleeve-ish things of various sorts, depending on how much the wizard expects to get done while wearing it.  It usually fastens in the front, and might either also have a front-counterweight or just a charm to keep it from slipping off down the back.  They’re staples; you have to have different ones for different degrees of formality unless you’re completely oblivious.  Whether the hood develops out of the fabric in the rain or is always there is up to you and your tailor; some people think they spoil the line or make the line and some people think you can use them as an extra pocket.  The first two positions both have something going for them, depending on your tailor,” Evan added judiciously, “but the third is egregious, even if only for reasons of common sense.  I mean, what if it does start to rain, and you’ve forgotten you were storing your puffskein back there?”

Voldemort was giving him, with his red eyes, the sort of flat, leaden what is the MATTERwith you and why am I inflicting it on myself look that Severus tended to get at the few dinner parties he didn’t duck.

“I mention puffskeins only as an example of wet things that some foolish wizard would not like to forgetfully tip onto his own head,” Evan further added, dipping his head humbly in case his use of second person had been the bad mistake.  “I’m sure it’s mostly Hufflepuffs who do it.”

The why god why can’t I hit it  look went on for another few seconds, and then the Dark Lord pressed an unenchanted breath through his nose.  If it was a bit on the growly side, rather than lofty and unearthly, Evan didn’t notice at all.  “Rosier,” Voldemort said, in a trying-for-patience voice.

Evan honestly didn’t know what that was about.  Voldemort liked Spike, after all; hadn’t it been a Spikeish answer?  Very informative!  Well, complete, anyway, given that Voldemort certainly knew what a ruddy cloak was.  Considering that Evan had no idea which part of the answer he’d wanted, what choice had he given Evan but to give him all the information there was?

“Rosier, how many cloaks do you own, in your undoubtedly vast collection, that have no hoods at all?”

Evan frowned.  “And don’t develop one in the cold or wet, you mean, my Lord?  Why would I have any like that?”

“Do you know anyone who does?”

“I might, I suppose,” Evan said, letting his tone show he was highly dubious.  “It’s possible.  But even Hogwarts uniform cloaks have hoods; even the muggleborns get the idea they’re expected without having to be told.   They’re just… there.”

“Yes,” the Dark Lord agreed expansively, smiling down on him.  Evan was of course delighted to have somehow pleased his Lord, who was in no way a smug git.  “The hooded cloak has been the sigil of the witch and the wizard in Britain from time immemorial.  It has distinguished us since the time of the druids.”

“Ah,” Evan nodded after a moment.  “I see, my Lord.”

“Do you, Rosier?”

“Well, my Lord, I don’t claim to understand your plans, but I do remember Regulus saying that the Aurors decided he was suspicious because he’d put up his hood.  When it started raining.”

“The hood is a shield from the weather,” the Dark Lord mused grandiloquent—er, grandly, “and, as you say, the unthinking right of every witch and every wizard, more so even than shoes, for one can make a hood of some fallen leaf or unused empty sack, at need.  But it has ever been more than that.  Far, far more, Rosier.  It is the mark of the stranger, of the Beyond, of the faithful, of the shadow in the night, of the outlaw and of the noble outlaw.  Is there not, Rosier, something wrong when an Englishman fears a hood?”

“If it’s a green hood, my Lord, it would certainly be a bit strange, I can see that,” Evan allowed cautiously.  He could half hear Spike laying out etymology on the word hoodlum in his head.  He even half-remembered Binns droning…

Something about how easy it had been for young witches and wizards to dodge in and out of the Muggle population around the time Hogwarts was founded, sticking their wands into all sorts of causes, sometimes just making mischief. Everyone had worn hoods then.  Political passion, especially of the drunken variety, had been epidemic in both the magical and muggle spheres, and disappearing into a crowd had been the easiest thing in the world no matter who you were, as long as you weren’t stupid, whether you had magic or not.  One of the reasons Helga Hufflepuff had considered for a while that Slytherin might have had a point, hadn’t it been?  She’d been pretty hot on the unfairness of mugglebaiting and wizards taking sides in muggle arguments.  Spike would know.  Lucius might, for that matter, although Evan was inclined to take Lucius’s interpretations with a dash more salt.

Voldemort loomed down at him, his robe billowing out behind him in a frankly unnatural way, magnifying him like a menacing blowfish.  “And are we not green?”

“Well, there is that,” he agreed, rather reluctant.  He was frankly more afraid of the Sherwoodly tantrum Spike would throw if the Dark Lord mandated a uniform of green hoods (especially if it included green hose) than he was of getting hexed into a screaming lump.  It might have been silly of him, but you couldn’t help what you were silly about.

“There is,” the Dark Lord agreed—rather hissily, in Evan’s opinion, except that he didn’t have an opinion, “and we are.  And if they are so foolish as to pin their fears on such a common thing, on a thing shared by us all—why, we must show them how to fear it, Rosier.”

Evan wasn’t even trying to catch up at this point.  As far as he was concerned, all he could hope for was to save them all from bare stockings. “Mind you, my Lord, a tribute is generally better received if it doesn’t actually cross the line into outright mimicry.  At least, that’s how things are in art.  But you see what I mean, my Lord.  The one is flattering and can create allies, the other only makes enemies and outrage.”

Enemies, outrage, Severus deciding he would actually rather die than be forced to walk around with practically bare legs.  Wilkes having far too much fun walking around with practically bare legs.  Lockhart noticing that people were walking around with practically bare legs, not noticing what they were doing, and presuming-himself-desired at people until some moron, sadist, or person who hadn’t met him actually let him join.  The mind boggled.

“Quite right, Rosier,” the Dark Lord agreed, straightening.  His robes were just robes again, and he appeared again, at least for the moment, rather more like a rational being.  “And now, Rosier, I shall ask you again, in a different way.  Of course,” he flipped out long, pale fingers dismissively, “you will not compare your talents to your father’s.  But tell me this.  You are aware that I do not allow all of my Death Eaters to know each other’s names and faces: that you know only those whose identities you could have guessed without being told.”

“I did suppose it, my Lord,” Evan admitted, wary again.

“Naturally you know, in the main, largely those of your own age.  Then if I set your father a task and tell him ‘do this for the Death Eaters of your generation,’ and tell you ‘do this for the Death Eaters of yours,’ can you do work he would be proud of?”

Evan shifted his weight backward on his heel a bit, and blinked.  “Well,” he said slowly, “if you’re talking about making them portraits, of course, although in my experience you’d have to hold Snape up at wandpoint.”

“That is not the task I have in mind.”

“Then I couldn’t promise you anything without knowing what you mean, my Lord,” he shrugged candidly.

Voldemort told him.

Evan fell back from his knee onto his heels.  Tilting his head, he said, “…Huh.”

He apparated back to the hotel soon after that, without any strain at all, so they couldn’t have been too far away.  It was just as well, too, because his mind was almost too full of silver to focus properly.  Quicksilver, maybe, darting, curling, the gleam and the dark and the negative space…

Snape was looking worried, and had overprepared, naturally.  The fire was roaring and the sofa blanket had gone all greyish, which probably meant Snape had done something nice to the texture.  There was a plate of stuff and some sticks on the side table, maybe toasting forks.

“Are you all right?”

The door to the bathroom was open, and there was all scented steam coming out, and Evan caught a glimpse of a tray of potions and some bandages or something of that sort.  And then he could see that there were candles in the bedroom, which meant probably there were other nice things in there, too.

“What did he want?”

He gave Snape a smile, which could possibly have been on the distracted side, and settled down to work, sending the plate of bread-and-things off to the mantle with a flick of his wand and enlarging the side-table to a good writing-desk height.

“Evan?”

Of course, he could only do first drafts of sketches without having even pictures of faces in front of him, although his memory for faces was quite well trained.  He should be able to at least make a start when it came to the people he knew well.  Malfoy and Regulus and Bellatrix especially.  His own partner would take more thought, especially since he was under special and very sarcastic instruction not to burden Snape with anything heartrendingly beautiful that would, due to being striking, get him noticed and killed even if he’d agree to wear it.

“Evan?”

At least, he should be able to make a start with contour, if not with design, but did he need to start with contour?  Yes, he probably did; you didn’t want to force a design around pre-existing curves or angles you hadn’t properly accounted for, you wanted to weave designs around those shapes.

“Evan, can you even hear me?”

But he could conceptualize, at least.  Take Malfoy: platinum on black.  All that floaty hair, those albino peacocks: a study in striking, whether it was advisable or not.  Liked his hunting, oh, didn’t he just.  Evan didn’t know whether he or Rodolphus Lestrange had actually gone so far as to go Wild Hunting with muggles yet, but he wouldn’t have been at all surprised.  A touch of Herne?

“Ev?”

Rodolphus would just be solid, solid, solid.  Placid, pleased, calm, not half so dramatic—

A flash of green was Evan’s whole world.  When it cleared, his parchment was black ash.

He turned to Severus, slowly.  His hands, he could barely feel through a curtain of numbness, were starting to shake.  Severus’s face was dead white, his jaw dead set and his eyes blazing black ice, the way they went when he’d decided he couldn’t care if he threw his whole life out the window.

In a voice so steady it surprised him, Evan inquired, “Did you just avada my sketches?”

Severus looked, if possible, even more furious.  “Try not to be more insane than you can help,” he snarled, his throat so tight every word looked and sounded wrenched from it.

Evan’s own throat was spasming a bit, too, but he just about managed to get out, “Priori incantato.”

The wispy ghost of a crackling lightning bolt slipped away from Severus’s fingers.  Hung in the air.  Faded.  His wand was sheathed at his side.

Evan looked at it.  “That’s the spell you hit Lockhart with when he tried to kiss you.”  

Actually, it hadn’t hit Lockhart.  Lockhart had been faster than Severus’s draw for once, although the disbelieving shocked outrage had probably helped him out there.

So Evan didn’t know what it would do it if ever hit a person.  He did know what it would do when it hit a solid slab of warded oak: Flitwick and the elves had had to make the Slytherin sixth year boys’ dormitory a new door.  There had been a lot of charring, and Evan didn’t know if Severus even knew if he could control the voltage.  

Evan wasn’t made of even naked oak.

“I wouldn’t call it a spell,” Severus grated.  “What did he do to you.”

“He didn’t do anything to me,” Evan said evenly.  “He gave me a job.”

“Lightning is electricity,” Severus said flatly, eyes burning.  “Electricity disrupts magic.  You didn’t hear me.  You barely saw me.  You didn’t hear me.”

“It was an interesting assignment,” Evan told him, possibly just a bit more emphatically than evenly.  “If you thought I was under a compulsion, you could have used a finite.  You didn’t have to destroy my sketches!”  

He supposed there might have been one.  Wandless magic existed, and so did silent magic, and the accidental magic children did was both.  He wouldn’t have had to remember being put under a compulsion for it to have happened, although he couldn’t imagine why Voldemort would have bothered.  

He also couldn’t care very much right now.  He didn’t know whether Severus could control the voltage, or knew whether he could.  That flash of light that had filled his vision had been green.  

Severus might be strange and morbid enough that the thought of Evan killing him quickly and painlessly and by surprise made him happy, but Evan could only feel sick and weak and shaking.  All he could think about was the terrible spiral that could so easily happen if Severus reached for him at night and he flinched.

He was terrified that he might flinch.  He hadn’t been afraid of being hurt, back out there on the grass.  But for Severus to threaten him—even to shake him back to life—to threaten him with the loss of all his senses, of all feeling.  Even his boggart wasn’t that frightening, because it was Severus that he used to smile his boggart away.

“They were disturbing.”

He very deliberately placed his palms on the sofa on either side of himself, and took in a long breath.    “They were supposed to be disturbing.  Being disturbing was the entire point!”

Severus’s face didn’t change—certainly not to regret what he’d done.  The only change was that his eyes actually managed to go even more incandescent with rage.  “For this,” he whispered, nearly strangled, his nimble, sensitive hands tautening into hard and homicidal talons.  “If for no other reason, for this.”

Evan just looked at him, his supply of patience and understanding at an all-time low.

“My craft,” Severus said, very low, shaking, “is easily perverted.  So easily corrupted.  So easily.  So easily even muggles have known it for centuries.  So easily even muggles can do it.  I knew he’d try.  I knew he would.  They would. I knew they’d make me.  But yours.  That anyone should force filth into yours.  Should turn the work of your hands.”

Quite a lot of Evan’s anger wearily drained away.  “Oh, Severus,” he sighed helplessly, raising his hand to his temples, rubbing away the last swirls and eddies of it and the painful headachy dregs. Leaning back into the sofa, he forced the limp, scraggly, aching rags of his feelings into something like a smile, though he knew his tired eyes had stayed sad.  “You’re such a samurai.”

Severus didn’t answer him, except with a panicky little jolt forward, instantly contained, that proved he had no idea what Evan meant and was turning it, in his head, into something so self-scathing that Ev wouldn’t even have understood if he’d explained.

“Spike, I know how you feel, I do, but just because we make a thing, just because,” he trailed off, groping.  “Just because we’re its creators, just because, because creation is magic and we’re part of that, I know that you… I know you feel like there’s a weight to that as well as a… but it doesn’t…”  He turned his palms up on his thighs, wanting Spike to come to him, even if a part of him wasn’t ready just yet, was still quailing.  He didn’t want to flinch.  He wouldn’t let it in.  “Sweetheart,” he appealed, “you can’t live like there are eyes in every shadow—”

“Even if there are?” Severus asked, miserably trying for droll, his own spines and snarls collapsing like dry sand in the ebb and wake of Evan’s tight civility.

“Even if there are,, Spike. And you can’t treat every rock and every scribble and piece of doggerel like it’s got a soul with integrity that has to be respected.  Spike, they don’t.  Spike, my dad’s been telling him to use me more, and this is a job that isn’t the job they made Reggie do.  This is good, and there’ll be ways to take advantage of it if we aren’t stupid.”

“It’s your art,” Severus underlined stormily.  “It’s not whether the individual pieces are good, by any definition of that word.  It’s whether the process itself is kept free of shame.”

Evan, who had never seen any particular use in shame to begin with, tried to think of how to say what he wanted to say without badmouthing Evans.  Or, if not her now, her insistence at school that there were no other approaches to anything but to embrace it or decry it in full voice from the rooftops.  Which might have been less currently controversial, but would have brought up more old, bruised feelings.

In the end, he settled on, “I don’t see any need to be ashamed, Spike.  Saying no would be stupid, sabotage would be stupid, but there’s an advantage to the side we want to advance built right into the job as described. What he wants gives us an advantage. We don’t even have to do anything stupid.  The only reason to be ashamed would be if I didn’t capitalize on it, or if I threw a fit and threw the opportunity away.”

“It’s your art,” Severus repeated, his eyes anguished in a hollow face.

“It’s not my medium?” Evan suggested.  He didn’t think it would help, and it clearly didn’t.  Instead, more firmly, he tried, “Spike, I’m not going to let you have tea with Evans on your own any more if you come away thinking it’s not allowed to be a Slytherin samurai.”

“It’s not,” Spike quipped with an attempt at insouciance, instead of pointing out that it was Ev who’d had his arm twisted into a very upsetting cuppa with Miss Earnestine.  “Samurai and ninja are entirely mutually exclusive.”   The act might have worked better if the anger hadn’t, in his case, left the shakes to fend for themselves, along with fear and a sort of woundedness that wasn’t anything like hurt feelings.

Evan thought he’d better not answer that remark, given that it wasn’t just Severus’s hands that were trembling but, ever-so-faintly, his mouth.  Evan had not hurt his feelings.  Evan did not, himself, feel cut at all, but here was Severus in front of him, bleeding.

Keeping silent, keeping his hands more or less still in their welcome, seemed to have been a wise decision, although the results were rather more upsetting than being yelled at or even having his sketches cursed.  Severus took a hesitant step towards him, and then another, and then dropped to bury his face in Evan’s lap.

“Stoppit, Spike,” Evan said softly, laying a gentle hand on the back of his neck.

The no that made it up to him was muffled.

“I’m still mad at you,” Evan informed him.  “You made me think you aimed a killing curse in my direction. Within a foot of my face.  You did it on purpose, Naj.”

Severus looked up at him.  He was still very white.  “You were gone,” he said, his jaw set again.  “You hadn’t come back.  “You were gone and you were cold.  It was worse than summers at school.  You’d been gone less than an hour and you came back gone from me.  What am I for?”

“You’re not for what you can do for me, or anyone,” Evan told him, annoyed and exasperated, and then told his instant offended glare, “no matter what Mum says.”

“I say,” Spike further glowered at him, mulishly.  “My hearth.  Mine.”

Evan tried—really, very hard—not to melt.  Horrible, dangerous, life-threatening behavior should not be encouraged.  Knowing he was fighting a losing battle, he suggested, “You could have just slapped me, you know.”

“Wouldn’t have worked,” Severus declared, sitting back and looking at him with a challenging tilt to his head.  Because Spike absolutely was a smug git.  He wasn’t git enough to smile, though.  He didn’t even seem to want to: was being a git, yes, but one as tired and sad as Evan felt behind the stubborn set of his chin, not smug at all.  He was just sure he was right.

Evan sighed again, but just to himself this time.  “Because you thought whatever compulsion he might have had on me was stronger than that?”

Spike scoffed, standing, and offered him a hand by which to be pulled up.  “Because you’re Slytherin, Lance.  Why would anything throw you hard enough to work well enough twice?”

Halfway up, Evan let himself turn into dead weight, eyes narrowing.  “And exactly where do you think flattery is going to take you, Severus Prince-Snape?” he demanded.

Severus curled in, hauling him further up, nearly nose to nose.  “I’ll go where I choose, Schwarzrosiger, thank you.”

“And where would that be?” he asked, since it seemed to be expected.

Spike let his free hand open.  A long band of thick, plush,  charcoal-colored velvet unrolled.  “Shall I surprise you?”

The blindfold wasn’t even on and suddenly Evan was alive to the slide of his clothes on him, the smoky crackling of the fire, the tempting, earthy smell of bread warming.  Severus’s hand in his was all strength and skin dutifully maintained like the precious tool it was, stretched over the prickly, anxious, fervent, ferocious magic that Evan wanted to carry cradled inside his bones, a tonic more clean and fresh by far than the sluggish black sap of his marrow.

(Even when Spike was being a complete set of horse’s hindquarters, Ev acknowledged to himself ruefully, overly dramatic swishy tail most decidedly included.  Or at least, probably far more quickly afterwards than would make other people sanguine about Evan’s mental health.  But it was Spike who’d used the word ‘codependent’ first, all the way back in fifth year, so that was probably all right.  

Besides, it wasn’t as if either of them had ever had any mental health to begin with.  Or were even likely to be able to make a positive identification if anyone asked for an introduction.  So there you were.)

“I think you owe me a lovely surprise,” Evan decided, letting Severus pull him up and in.  That was fair, and it might stop him letting the wrong sort of connections settle in his head.  This last surprise Severus had given him, even if it had been needed (they’d probably never know) had been… terrible.  

It had been particularly unkind considering that Severus kept on insisting and insisting that they didn’t know for sure that portraits worked the way they all believed (hoped), didn’t know at all that the people in portraits had feeling the way people with nerves did.  Evan had always believed that he was sure, and it was horrific to find out how afraid he was that Severus was right  

At least this time he’d kept his hands on the couch, and hadn’t punched his heart in his mouth.  He added reproachfully, “A foot from my face, Spike.”

“Damn the torpedoes,” his cobra said flatly, cupping his face with fingers like feathers, or flames.  “Whatever works.”

[1]Not only is this translation of Chaucer’s Parliament of Foules (Fowls) my own, I am taking a bit of a liberty with this paragraph/passage to try and compensate for starting in the middle of the middle. It would more properly read, ‘The one increasèd all my fears,’ and I also put in the ‘gloomy.’ You really need the preceding two verses, but I thought there was probably a limit, no matter how appropriate…