Innerspace (Bulgaria)
To Severus's extreme surprise, securing an interview with vampires was nearly as easy, in the end, as Karkaroff had promised whatever-they-wanted would be before hearing what it was, though not half so simple. 'Of course it can be done,' what nonsense. As if Severus was some happy-go-lucky Ravenclaw who thought it natural that the wheels of Scientific Progress might roll merrily on without being greased and shoved and ruts dragged down all the roads for them.
He agreed with their unspoken premise, of course. Since humans liked to consider that having brains raised them above all other species (never mind that, in the wizarding world, humans knew as a matter of experience if not awareness that many other species also had brains capable of sapience, reasoning, and complex emotion), it would be rational for humans to celebrate thought and honor the explorers of questions at least as much as they did explorers of territory.
The premise was perfectly sound. It was the assumption that humans in large groups were capable of extended periods of rationality that was hopelessly naïve. Whether it was more or less naïve than the notion that anyone could accomplish anything without either some equivalent of Slughorn's pineapple baskets or a very large club was a question from which Severus winced.
Evan had wanted to Make Comments, later, about the way Karkaroff had choked after hearing what he needed to arrange. As flattering and amusing as Ev's Karkarovian insanity was, however, Severus had been bound in justice to point out that if anyone else had choked on finding a task like that popping up in their to-do list, Evan would have sided with them at least enough to remark that Severus, in blindsiding them with it, had been rather unkind.
"But I wouldn't have sided with them really," Evan had argued. He'd looked a little offended, to Severus's mind. This was absurd, since it would have been quite true. Which, under the circumstances, made it rather difficult for Severus not to feel almost grovelingly grateful.
"No," Severus had agreed, more successful in managing his face than his feelings, which was a drearily common occurrence. "You would have understood that unkindly denying someone time in which to sabotage disagreeable but vital plans is occasionally necessary, especially when the plans are ultimately for everyone's benefit."
And Evan had paused, and gotten that funny, quirky this will be good smile he sometimes spilled out all over Severus, and asked, "Your paper is for everyone's ultimate benefit?"
"Understanding unshakable viral curses is to everyone's ultimate benefit," Severus had reminded him, vexed. "If a process is developed wherein they can be shaken, then the vampiric and lycanthropic conditions change from incurable diseases to either curable ones or life choices."
"You won't be happy until you've burnt the world down and cartwheeled all over the ashes," Evan had remarked, both slanderously and irrelevantly.
Severus could have considered that the use of such a fond tone and expression to accompany such a bizarre and uncharitable statement might well indicate clinical insanity. In fact he had to suspect that Evan was being either metaphorical or extremely Black at him.
Not being sure which it was but hoping for the former, he'd settled for, "I doubt I should cartwheel," which seemed to him to be suitably noncommittal and made Evan laugh.
He was trying hard not to try overly hard to make Evan laugh or otherwise be unusually nice to him. It was very clear to him that, after Evan had terrified him by being so unresponsive after meeting with the Dark Lord, he had not merely shocked Evan awake but actually frightened him.
He couldn't regret what he'd done: it was his responsibility to pull Evan back from numbness as surely as it was to feed them both. Which latter he felt possibly-inappropriately smug about: he might be a hopeless case, but Evan never looked pinched and pale.
Evan trusted Severus to jolt him awake when he was drifting—had explicitly trusted him with the task—as staunchly as he relied on Evan to be an axis of easement at the center of the spiteful, spitting static of his world. He would never be sorry for doing what was obviously necessary.
Even when it turned out that he might have overshot slightly and created unfortunate side effects. He could certainly be sorry for, one might say, an error in dosage. He could, without any moral discomfort whatever, apologize for any mistake that had been a mistake, and not a luckless exigency. And he could deeply regret it when, as now, he hadn't been able to think of a better solution. Of course he could. That was a failure.
Even in the time since, though, he still hadn't been able to think of anything that might have worked better. Evan had suggested Severus should strike him with real force, as opposed to all the smiling swats they were wont to use between themselves instead of spoken speech, but Severus thought he might have vomited onto the rug before he'd even fully drawn his hand back.
Then again, that might have served.
Then again, Evan would probably yelled at him for even longer, if he'd forced himself into something that would have made him sick with himself. And, too, if it hadn't served, the nightmares would never have ended even if Ev had eventually surfaced on his own, or from some other effort of Severus's.
But it was one thing to make himself sick with something that reminded himself of home—no, of Spinner's Row—when Evan didn't mind it.
It would be another—quite another—to frighten Evan and shake him and then fall into that disgusting thing he'd seen a thousand times, not only in his own home by any means, where the men were a little more sober and a great deal more considerate and fawning for some short space of time after their wives started to wear their hair down or their sleeves long or, if they could afford it, their face powder heavy.
He'd given Evan the best treatment he could think of. He was guilty of nothing but misjudgment, or, more properly, he thought, of failing to anticipate a side effect. That was his responsibility, not his fault. He refused to insult Evan and discount him, belittle him, diminish him, reduce him to a receptive subject, by suggesting that a second act could unmake a first one, could undo its effects.
He'd promised Evan and himself once that if Evan ever hit him in anger again, he'd hit back: that he wouldn't become his own mother. This hadn't been like that time. Or, if it was, it was alike in that they'd both been moved by fear and fidelity, not malice—although Evan really had wanted to hurt Severus. It had been the only way it had occurred to him, in that moment, to scream out the strength of feelings he hadn't understood.
Severus had just wanted Evan back.
Still, having given that promise, he found himself struggling uneasily with a nagging voice, somewhere in the back of his mind, that said he owed Evan the opportunity to present him, in turn, with at least the illusion of a near-death experience. After all, it had only been the suggestion of an avada kedavra, not the death spell itself, and the green lightning spell was in no wise the panicking, unmoored thing he'd first plucked out from his outrage and humiliation to hurl at Lockhart. That, or to give him some other free shot of some sort. A voice that…
That sounded a bit like Lily at her most annoying and least sensible, he'd have had to say in order to be both scrupulous with himself and fair to her. But a voice like that, telling him that to let Evan hit him back in some way would be the 'honorable' and 'sporting' thing to do.
He rather wanted to find that voice and hold its mouth underwater until it promised to stop wielding words at him that didn't bloody mean anything, and certainly nothing that he agreed with in context and that didn't make him gag. That was a shabby trick for one's own mind to pull on one. He was quite indignant about it. It wasn't even sensible at all, really. Eye-for-an-eye would not have served justice in the least.
Evan had been quite clear that he wanted restorative and not retributive justice. He had asked for what he wanted, gotten it, and given every indication (really every indication) that his generous and gentle heart was satisfied and considered the matter closed.
Severus couldn't consider the matter closed, even after he'd told himself at least three times that it ought to be up to Evan to decide. He simply couldn't, because for a painter, Ev was bloody fantastic at squeezing his eyes shut and jamming his fingers in his ears.
It probably came of growing up in a beautiful, sprawling manor with no one to talk to but your nanny, some goats, the roses, and empty seats full of the shadows of parents who didn't even have enough sense of love or duty to stand by a child who was everything they could have asked for, and certainly not enough of a trial as to make them go periodically mad and dive into the cups and
O2-three-four-five hold CO2-four-five-six
and
O2-three-four-five hold CO2-four-five-six.
Whatever the reason, Severus couldn't believe it was as over as Evan wanted it to be.
All the observations of his childhood, however, told him that punishing himself was likely to lead to that vicious spiral of guilt-shame-resentment-explosion with which he was intimately familiar, which he did not wish to revisit from the inside. He therefore felt he ought to dissuade—or at least distract—himself from pointless remorse and consider, more usefully, the problem of reparation.
Even if Evan did seem to consider that reparations had been made, even if Severus could understand his position. Severus had performed an action that unsettled Evan unpleasantly: had done that to him. Then he'd performed one that unsettled Ev in all the ways he liked best: had given that to him.
It hadn't been solely about pleasing Evan to make him feel better after an unhappy experience, but rather reaffirming his relationships both with Severus and with feelings that weren't placid comfort. Once reassured that he hadn't been changed into someone who feared either of those things, Ev was happy enough to be going on with, in his own opinion.
This was only to be expected. Evan thought in the short-term and on the small-scale where he himself was concerned: Severus would have done the same. Seeing one's own greater picture was a rare talent. Difficult to be otherwise, really, considering how close one was to it.
Seeing the greater picture of an intimate friend was also difficult, but at least one wasn't quite at the heart of the storm. One was at least at enough of a remove to be able to walk around, if not to see from afar.
Severus wasn't nearly distant enough that he had the foggiest idea what to do, or even to be certain that distance was, really, what was needed. But he did think that crucial one-step-away had given him the perspective Evan was shutting his eyes to: that Ev was afraid, now, of a thing he hadn't realized before that he feared, and that it was Severus who'd made him know it.
Although he wouldn't have admitted it, it rather baffled Severus—no. It utterly flummoxed Severus to suddenly learn that Evan was afraid of being dead. He couldn't wrap his mind around it at all. He could understand fearing the moment of passage, in times like these when he knew some of what people were doing to each other, and suspected he only knew the least of it.
And he could understand when Muggles feared unpleasant or difficult reincarnation, or hell. Although the latter made less sense to him the more that was learned about neurology and the more that was discredited about soul weight studies. Muggles didn't have dementors and couldn't see ghosts: their every scrap of credible evidence led in the direction of pure cessation with the death of the brain; they had nothing but (admittedly powerful) folklore and tradition to suggest they would end in anything but nothingness.
There was no suffering in nothingness, so what was there to fear? One wouldn't be aware of being forgotten, or ill-spoken or having one's wishes overturned, or the world marching on regardless in other ways, or of anything. Nothing that could be feared would be experienced. Not even peace would be experienced, never mind fear or suffering.
Severus didn't assume that human life did end in nothingness. He'd conversed often with ghosts, had his homework marked by one and spent his childhood under the eyes of portraits. The accounts of dementors he'd read included sources he considered credible. Had grown up on his mother's stories of them, and found their existence no harder to credit than the existence of functional airplanes, space travel, open-heart surgery, and hoovers.
He was equally familiar with the theory behind the function and makeup each of these five things. Which was to say: somewhat but in no great detail. He felt he had a reasonable idea of how to keep from making a dead fool of himself in regards to each of them should he ever need to, and had personally encountered none of them outside of pictures, moving or otherwise. He had, at least, spoken to people who had personally encountered both hoovers and dementors, and he felt he could tell the difference between a DADA lesson that was kept terse due to an instructor's ignorance as opposed to the same instructor's shellshock and recurring waking nightmares.
He thought a life might well dissipate into nothing, if no portraits were painted and one didn't decide to become a ghost. It was only his opinion: he didn't delude himself that he knew or could know—although the fact that ghosts insisted they'd had an opportunity to make a decision was interesting. Even, perhaps, persuasive.
Muggles didn't have even those indicators that anything of humanity existed beyond and outside the human brain. Still, they feared.
Wizards, as far as Severus could make out, believed in a soul that was, in some respects at least, bipartite. Or, say rather, a soul that could without trauma be separated into two parts in death. Described in the Greek tradition, one's psyche would depart unless it chose to remain as a ghost, but one's thymos, one's vital, energetic personality, would be bound to any portraits that were made: portraits were no mere eidolons, not listless lingering shades but true continuations of the dead person's mind and self, if not their essence and soul.
Whatever that really meant. Severus had difficulty with the idea that a mind and soul might not be entirely synonymous, far more than he did with the idea that a soul might be wiped clean of the conscious memories of a past life, perhaps leaving deeper resonances of a former self's experience that could not be, exactly, remembered, but which still shaped one's instincts and the drifts and eddies of one's feelings. He had, after all, created magic that could do that very thing, in small.
Evan liked to describe things more as the Egyptians did, but Egyptian soul-words were written to account for the solid, three-dimensional posthumous entities that might interact with the living world, like shabti and some forms of the bau. Not for two-dimensional portraits or intangible ghosts that only talked and did not, for example, bring ill-luck or plague.
Severus would have told Evan his terminology was confused, except that Evan was using words that had become the jargon of his profession. However far they'd deviated from their original meaning, it was not Severus's profession. He had to grit his teeth and tolerate it.
Whatever words he used, though, Evan, or so Severus had always understood, put his faith in portraits. Severus might think they were at best a cruel prank magic was playing on wizards and at worst a gilded eternal prison at the mercy of the whims and politics of the living, but to Evan they were safety and the home of his—their—future.
The prospect of waking up in his portraits too soon should have shaken Ev, yes. It should have made him angry that Severus would have threatened him—although it certainly hadn't been meant as a threat—with cutting him out of the world before he'd done everything he wanted to. Before allowing him to finish a portrait they could live in together, or even a complete portrait of Severus's own.
And Severus did, honestly, understand his feelings on this issue. Nevertheless, the idea of eternity, especially in a world against whose inevitably recycling horrors he, as a painted shade, would be powerless to pit himself, was so ghastly that he simply could not bring himself to agree.
In either case, the prospect of death shouldn't have made Evan fear for his life in the way a muggle would have. It shouldn't have made him fear being extinguished.
Evan might consider that he'd received the justice he wanted and the incident was over, but Severus knew they had aftermath to address together. His idiotic side, which he liked to think of as his Prince side so he felt less hysterically compelled to slice it out of himself with a cheese-grater, wanted to turn to Evan and tackle the issue head-on, but that was his idiotic side. Since Evan was satisfied, making his own feelings Evan's problem would be a mewlingly unfair shoving away of duty, as well as counterproductive.
His Slytherin side was still thoroughly at a loss. Fortunately, that was his patient self, and could wait until he had a chance to talk to Narcissa, or perhaps one of the older witches and wizards he'd recently come to suspect probably wouldn't kick at his fingers for fun if they found him clinging to a cliffside.
He was also thoroughly at a loss about how to even think about coaxing any information at all out of vampires, much less information they were so unlikely to want to give him as what he needed for his research.
Here at least, however, he was on firmer ground. Nobody ever wanted to talk to him. People from whom he needed something not wanting to talk to him was the ground state of his existence. Of course, usually people wished that he'd go away, not to kill and eat him, but they did say variety was the spice of life.
He instantly regretted allowing that phrase to come to mind in the context of vampires.
Although it wasn't by any means his biggest problem, Severus did consider that being the sort of person whose brain often made him want to hit himself even when others weren't already clamouring to do it for him was one of his more recurring ones. That, however, was his own personal humiliation.
A similarly recurring and problematical embarrassment which he considered to be an unavoidable consequence of attending Britain's foremost magical public school (and, really, one had to expect some drawbacks to such a staggering advantage) was that he did rather tend to think along House lines—and not merely in the matter of House warfare. Everyone he knew did, so this one, he considered, was not his own fault.
It wasn't even that one thought along one's own House lines. The embarrassment had nothing to do with being too much of a this or not enough of a that for any given person, including himself (that was a separate embarrassment).
No, the problem with Hogwarts graduates, in Severus's opinion, wasn't that the simplest and stupidest of them blunderbussed ahead doing things in the style of their own House. The simplest and stupidest of any sentient species always blundered along unquestioningly doing things as their own culture had trained them to. That wasn't unusually problematic.
What was, however, was that when even the most intelligent and facile of Hogwarts graduates faced a problem, they would begin to speak in terms of, "How would a Ravenclaw look at this?" Or, "That might be a bit of a Gryffindor way to go about it," or "Doesn't that seem a bit, well, Slytherin to you," or "Oh, really, now, let's not be complete Hufflepuffs about this."
It wasn't exclusively a Hogwarts problem, of course.
Mingyue's grandmother talked about everything in terms of yin and yang, even when she didn't use those exact words, half the time. When she talked about people, she didn't describe their intelligence, trustworthiness, or creativity first, second, or third: she emphasized how well she knew them, and how connected they were to her family and her friends.
Severus's father's friends judged other men, on the most overt level, according to a metric of what they liked to drink (which could make up for the wrong sort of job) and how long and how loudly they could talk about the footie (and how hot they got over what teams, of course) and what they thought about Jim Callagan. Or, apparently, now, Margaret Thatcher.
—Who Severus was rather gleefully looking forward to pretending to support on the grounds that she'd been a chemist now that he and Da were talking again.
Because he was absolutely going to do that. Despite his strong opinion, as a research worker who was about to go into teaching, that privatization combined with tax cuts was an invitation to pitchforks and, further, that Samuel Smiles and his self-satisfied Self-Help should have been left to survive penniless in Whitechapel for six months and then cuffed and hung upside down (by his own bootlaces, of course, the better to pull himself up with using only his teeth) until the weight of gravity disarranging his circulation forced a little extra oxygen into his brain. Thrift and industry were indeed the best of weapons against personal poverty when there was work to be had and nothing was stealing or seducing all one's income away. This was, to put it delicately, not the case everywhere at all times.
Severus was keenly curious to find out whether, once he had devil's advocated Da into shouting this opinion at him with enough fervor to convince even himself, the clawed and lingering ghosts of the alehouse might come to have a bit less power. He didn't rely on things turning out that way; his parents' house seemed to have more or less settled itself, and it wasn't entirely his business any more, in any case. But it seemed a worthy experiment, and far more likely to do some slight good than much harm.
This line of thought, he considered ruefully, might well fall into the category of 'blunderbussing ahead doing things in the style of one's own House.' But Slytherin, more than other Houses, acknowledged not only that its members were individuals but that their individuality should be honored by themselves and taken note of by others. Subtlety was a tool with which Severus had never felt quite at home. You needed, he felt, to grow up with soft words in your ears to be able to understand them, let alone wield them.
Then again, maybe it was his defaulting to words like 'wield' to begin with, instead of ones like, perhaps, 'wash,' that was his barrier. That was what confused Madam Chang about him: Míngyuè had convinced her that Slytherins should be thought of in yin terms even when they were men, and when he spoke at soft volumes and was what she called an herbalist, she thought the matter was entirely settled. Evan's third-year obsession with the classic—or, rather, modern—dualistic diagram had taught Severus that there was always a seed in everything of its opposite, but he felt lonely about remembering this.
Not quite so lonely, perhaps, as he'd felt when 'the lads' at home were making it clear about what made a good bloke as opposed to a queer 'un, but it was all the same really. Living outside your local box was dangerous. Being the sort of person who knew the 'box' was really a 'turtle' and the turtle was in fact a Roman shield formation and that's why venturing outside it was dangerous, if potentially rewarding, was dangerous.
But at home, you belonged or you didn't. Sometimes in turns, or, perhaps, at once; there was that strange state of 'he may be a psychotic and questionable insert-adjective-here we'll beat at the drop of a hat but he's OUR insert-adjective-here so don't you dare look at him crosswise' that made up Severus's life no matter where he lived.
Which, he gathered from Regulus, was quite like being the younger sibling of a brother who was congenitally incapable of not bullying anyone he didn't worship. This was quite cheering: it was nice to think one had a tribe, however scattered and cowed and burning with passive-aggressive resentment and most likely incapable of pulling together on absolutely anything.
At Hogwarts, on the other hand, the box was not a single entity. It had four walls, but they were, collectively, just as looming and inescapable. Even Severus, who had spent the two summers between the opening of the Nelson public library and his first summer job gorging himself on every thought he could get his hands on that the Hogwarts library had never heard of, still incessantly caught himself thinking, "Stop being such a manebrain," or, "what is his priority of loyalty," or "what's her obsession?"
He reminded himself, whenever he could, to try and identify the philosophy that whoever he was dealing with might have most identified with if wizards under seventy or so knew what philosophy was. To remember his classical strategists, and apply their methods.
But he had been raised and taught by those who had raised and taught him, had grown up among the harridans and ogres and slyboots he'd grown up with, and not any others. He knew how to read between the lines of the Prophet better than other newspapers, and no matter how hard he racked his brains, he could think of no way to punish without exposing himself to a fight than to exclude the object of his displeasure from something they wanted access to.
Which was not a tactic he generally had available. That very gentle, kind, miraculously inoffensive face of Evan's that said Oh, don't worry, I know you didn't mean it quite the way it sounded, I don't mind at all if you'd like to try again was also not something he was able to use to good effect. It simply did not work on his face. The one time he'd tried it where he thought it would be safe, Reggie had kicked him. If it hadn't been a very serious kick, it had been a quite serious stomping-off-in-a-sulk afterwards.
However, not being Slughorn didn't make him less a Slytherin. Somewhat to his chagrin, it didn't even make him less one of Slughorn's Slytherins, because it seemed that when he couldn't do a thing properly his only answer was to find someone else to do it.
He had decided to blame Slughorn for this, because the alternative was blaming Evan and Narcissa. If he blamed Evan and Narcissa, he would be blaming it not on learned tactics but on exposure to the inbred laziness of his rich friends who could buy labor. And that would be insupportable, and then he'd have to go find the cheese-grater. Wizards didn't even have cheese-graters.
In either case, over the past week and a half, while Evan had painted and chatted and chattered and maneuvered and maneuvered and painted and eaten enough pastries and stuffed peppers to seriously annoy Severus for reasons he hadn't quite managed to put his finger on yet (he liked watching Evan enjoy food; there was nothing to be annoyed about), Severus had gotten absolutely nowhere.
Well.
He'd put together the bones of a curriculum that he was quite proud of and wasn't going to get to implement, since he was only going to be helping Slughorn. Although he might be able to wiggle a few things in, here and there. Might well, if Slughorn decided that it would be safe for him to unload any real responsibility onto Severus, as opposed to just tedium, and float off like a plum-colored velvet balloon to more parties than he could normally have done.
And Severus had gathered a few thoughts on the subject of keeping order in a classroom full of children who were guaranteed to challenge his authority, and more than a few on the subject of looking after a common room full of feral alley cats who each thought himself king and had the parental and financial backing to prove it, at least to his own satisfaction, while that common room was under siege and on fire.
And he had, on the basis of quite genuinely wanting to page through every used bookstore in the country with tomes he could read or put to translation spell until his fingers bled, acquired probably-flawed blueprints (or, more properly, vellum-etchings) of the castle for which he needed blueprints.
And he'd even found what he needed for his little personal quest. His excuse for this search had been, in his own opinion, less convincing than 'why are you looking at me like that, I like books, I like maps, I like history, would you like written testimonials from everyone I've ever bored,' but Karkaroff had questioned it considerably less.
Karkaroff was something of a mystery to Severus, and Evan's only explanation for his weird behavior was neither plausible nor even sane. Which wasn't a denunciation: Evan's existence was a deeply reassuring proof positive for Severus that sanity was highly overrated. That this overrating was done by the vast majority was irrelevant; he had overwhelming evidence that an entire community which was satisfied on the subject of what and who was sane and sensible could be, to a man, miserable, unfruitful, and self-destructive.
Severus was, just, prepared to believe it possible that someone might enjoy his company more than Evan's. Evan did, which made it impossible to call the thing impossible. Even Reggie, who was less unique, had never displayed any particular interest in spending much time alone with Ev. Dumbledore, of whom so many thought so highly, had the extremely poor taste to apparently not even like looking at Evan.
Severus had noticed this during his NEWT years. He'd found it, confusingly, both intensely satisfying and remarkably offensive. It shouldn't have mattered to him at all, since it didn't seem to put Evan at more of a disadvantage than any other Slytherin, but it itched, somehow.
While Severus was prepared to believe that Karkaroff might be among the handful of deeply socially maladjusted people who liked him better than the only deeply good person with both intelligence and any strength that was real strength currently living and quite possibly the only one the planet had ever produced, Ev's explanation for Karkaroff's alternately twitchy and overly eager set of microbehaviors was still extraordinarily silly. Since it was the only explanation Severus had been offered, Karkaroff remained something of a mystery.
However mysterious his motives, though, Karkaroff's preferences were clear enough that it hadn't really surprised Severus that his thoroughly lame excuse had worked. 'I'm just looking for artistic craftswizards that we might perhaps find for Rosier to talk to if he runs out of clients before I run out of professors and brewers to talk to so that he won't go wandering around the city by himself, oh, I do beg your pardon, I didn't at all mean to imply that you as his assigned guide would be so unprofessional as to leave him to get lost unguarded,' should not have worked.
Well. It shouldn't have worked so well as to pass unexamined. But Karkaroff was an emotional man. Severus had, depressingly, proved justified in his cynical decision not to bother thinking of a backup explanation.
He was pleased with his plan. Very pleased. It remained to be seen whether he would regret it, but in this case he thought his anxiety on the subject was largely instinctive. Evan would be pleased, too, he was almost sure.
Almost. Enough to follow through with it. Probably. At least enough to collect a vial of blood while Ev was sleeping, and hide it in with all his other vials of protected amber glass.
In any case, it wasn't correct to say that he'd gleaned nothing from Bulgaria thus far.
On the subject of how to politely ask a vampire to contribute to his research without getting his throat ripped out, however, he really had got nowhere.
And then he opened the window to the owl that wasn't from home.
Nephew, or so I will call you, as you are not quite so much younger than I as to persuade me that strict truth is more important than brevity, wrote the madwoman with the bluebird hat.
Severus had stared at it, feeling his eyes go different sizes, for what had felt like half an hour and must have been a good three minutes of real time before Evan had noticed the waves of sheer disbelief rolling off him and asked what he was reading.
"Mrs. Longbottom does not wish to be reminded that she can be addressed by any familial title including the word 'great,'" he replied, rather dry. "It's so important to her that she must open her first written communication with someone who might do so with the dictate that he is not to think of it."
Evan came over, looked, grinned his little crinkly-eyed mouth-tugged-down smile that was Society's version of snickering, and noted, "I thought when we met her that her hat was too twee for her."
"Decidedly," agreed Severus, and kept reading while Evan insinuated his way in between Severus's back and the sofa.
"Well, go on," Ev prodded him comfortably. Which was to say that Evan poked him repeatedly in the ribs with a knee. It was quite uncomfortable, and thoroughly intrusive, and Severus was profoundly glad and grateful that Evan was not thinking even once, let alone twice, before annoying him like that. He did not let those feelings stop him from swatting Ev's leg back in mild irritation, because the whole point was not to allow them, as a them, to become distorted.
"Nephew, excessively detailed and defensive definition of her use of the term et cetera," Severus reread obediently. Evan snickered into his hair, and he leaned into the much more pleasantly yielding backrest than the still-alien fabric of the lodge's sofa. The sofa never wrapped its arms around him, and if it had, he would have blasted it into smithereens and jumped out the window.
"She isn't older enough really," Evan pointed out, being fair.
"And I don't especially object to omitting a syllable," Severus allowed. "Omitting a word or syllable whose presence in the sentence can be assumed is done all the time. Taking three lines on the page to insist she's not old enough to be a great-aunt and then claiming she's acting in the interests of brevity is ludicrous."
"Does she go on being ludicrous?"
Or, at least, Severus thought that was what Evan had asked. The words were rather squashed into the hollow under his ear, such that he felt more than heard them. It was probably a safe assumption.
"Nephew, et cetera, my sister has been dropping hints the size of the Giant Squid that I am, unlike her, magically unconstrained from contacting you and she'd rather like me to."
"No, what did she really say?" Evan protested, his lips long in a grin against Severus's neck.
"'It having been the case,'" Severus droned, pitching his voice high in a pinched enough Yorkshire accent to make Evan regret asking that translation be dispensed with, "'that, following our chance encounter with you and your companion Master Rosier at the convention in Dartmoor, my good sister Julilla has several times remarked upon the mischance of—'"
"All right, all right!" Ev laughed, arms tightening around him in surrender.
Severus rearranged his shoulders in satisfaction and leaned back more. Semi-gracious in victory, he resumed his own voice. "The upshot being that Mrs. Prince is anxious about my well-being, having been reminded of its existence. She doesn't, it seems, think she's barred from owling you, per se, but has suggested that if I were to paint 'Severus's dustbin' on some new box, some more direct communication could be arranged. Or, at least, more direct contact. She was never able to write to Mam, as far as I'm aware, just to give us things. I suppose some tacit code might be put in place, but unless the possibility of real communication formerly existed and was not exploited, one imagines that misunderstandings might occur."
"Probably not if she just wants to send you biscuits," Evan pointed out, still smiling.
"Assuming that is all she wants," Severus countered, cynical. "Have you had any word from Linkin on the subject of how she is, in fact, magically or legally constrained?"
Evan shook his head, glumly saying, "Protego, protego, protego."
Severus tried not to internally translate that into roadblock, roadblock, roadblock, but he couldn't help it. Evan almost certainly didn't care, but it was a bad habit. "Too soon to ask, or is that odd?"
Evan unwrapped an arm to waggle a hand in the air. "Not necessarily too soon, but not odd. The argument is still about whether or not the solicitor's allowed to let your grandfather know someone's prying. I'm trying to work out whether we'd have a better or worse chance in the end if you made inquiries in your own name."
Severus nodded silently. He had worlds more right to know about how thoroughly he was barred from the House of his blood than Evan did, by almost anyone's definition, and about his grandparents' marital contract. Evan, however, had a far better inborn set of tools for prying any wizarding question open, and no black marks against his name.
"What will you tell her?" Evan asked.
Severus blinked. "…Do I have to tell her something?" he asked warily, twisting around until he could see something solid, familiar, mostly-comprehensible, and soothing.
Deep-water eyes crinkled, and Ev rubbed their temples together. "Sorry, Spike," he confirmed unapologetically, and cast his gaze up to the ceiling in his tormenting-Severus-with-his-own-words face. "Hullo, Malfoy," he singsonged, "Rosier says civilized people write to each other, but I don't know why he thinks I ought to try it…"
"So I don't know why," Severus corrected him grumpily.
"Impress your nice auntie," Evan tyrannized heartlessly, tucking a grin into Severus's shoulder.
"She's not nice at all."
"Good, you'll get along famously."
"You're not nice at all," Severus lied, more grouchily still.
Far too cheerfully, Evan hissed between his teeth. Severus sighed, slumped pitiably, was not taken pity upon. Because he had lied, and Evan was not only quite nice but also no fool.
Rather, he was a ruthless ginger carrot-wielder, who thought he could get Severus to do anything with the reminder that no one else's hand would have been permitted anywhere near his shirt buttons without being subjected to instant gangrene. Palm hot on Severus's vest, thumb moving comfortingly between the bones under his throat, Evan kindly ordered him, "Throw your grandmother a bone, Naj."
Sighing more and slumping more, Severus complained, "I don't know what that means."
"She's reaching out to you," Ev explained instead of scoffing or getting impatient, because he was an appropriately halo-haired space alien and not your garden-variety-horrible homo sapiens. "It might be real or she might be playing a game, but either way, your best option is to along with it and give her a bit of what she wants. You don't have to fall on her neck blubbing; she won't even think you might. Honestly, Spike, even if she hadn't met you now, anybody in your position would be on guard, I'd think. She'd be stupid to expect anything else."
And of course, because Severus was a Hogwarts alumnus, he instantly felt a Comment About Hufflepuffs bubbling against his lips. It wasn't in the least because he in fact thought Hufflepuffs were, as a group, stupid or in any sense worthless. The world ran on Hufflepuffs, and 'someone has to do it and I can' was the sort of thinking he in fact respected above all others.
It wasn't even, he thought but was less sure, because he was especially prone to Making Comments. He thought that he was, in fact, not: his were just noticed more than those of others, either because of confirmation bias or because his choice of moments was less judicious or his word selections more idiosyncratic than those of his yearmates, who would almost all have thought a Flying Circus was one done on brooms.
Not even because he was, especially, a Slytherin. It was just, he was almost sure, because he'd gone to Hogwarts and hadn't been a Hufflepuff.
Oh, he would have been tempted to make comments about Gryffindor out of personal experience with its ignoble hypocrisies and corrupting self-delusions, there was no question about that. But most non-Gryffindors, even in a complete absence of personal animus, made mild jokes with tolerant eye-rolling about posers and fools rushing in where angels feared to tread and space aliens wouldn't see any good reason to. Non-Ravenclaws shrugged their shoulders about eccentricities and bluestockings and dull obsessives who couldn't tell when others weren't interested in their jobs or their little hobbies but clever, of course, couldn't do such-and-such without them, all in the same dismissive tone.
Severus doubted that anything anyone had ever said about Slytherin hadn't been sneered in his face already. It was, surely, impossible that he hadn't already heard it all. He didn't have to guess at the mild version when he'd been repeatedly slapped with the foetid, rotting meat of it. Surely.
And even he, who had been for interminable years the picture in the dictionary under House Prejudice, who quite respected the culture of Hufflepuff as he understood it. Even he, who had found Sprout's no-nonsense, down-to-earth briskness unendingly reassuring (if rather heavily peppered with 'chaps' and 'blokes' and exhausting heartiness) and had reason to be grateful to her.
He, who was staring into the grey stones of the lion's gullet again. Who this time would be responsible. As he never had before, even in the small way of a prefect. Who would be given the tools of power, but no allies at his shoulder or lurking in his shadows. Who would have a position ambiguous both in its newness and his probationary ability to be thoroughly overruled by all the authority figures the students were more accustomed to and had not heard so roundly abused.
"It's not so frustrating as all that really," Evan said comfortingly, rubbing him with broader strokes. For a moment that was as startling, thrilling, and terrifying as it was profoundly unsurprising, Severus was convinced that Ev had read his mind through the side of his skull, without even eye contact. Then Ev went on, "Just tell her you're well, give her a couple of picturesque details that'll let her make a nice picture in her head of Spike-vacationing-abroad. If you want to let her think she can earn your favor, give her something she can do for you."
So he'd purely been reading Severus's body, and not his mind at all. This wasn't merely reasonable: it swamped Severus with something at once like wonderment and being just slightly bruised all over, but not in a way that hurt. It made him want to turn completely around and get under Evan's shirt with him, so that they were both wearing it, held closely together by it, their heartbeats muddled.
That, however, would have made no sense in the context of the conversation. There was a piece of him, tucked away at the back of his mind, that thought he would have done it anyway if they'd been home. They weren't.
(They never would be again.)
"What could she possibly do for me?" Severus scoffed. If she was telling the truth she was helpless, and if she was lying she was false, awful, and trying to trap him into god-knew-what. In which case Severus didn't want anything from her anyway.
Would not want anything substantive even as a means to the end of making her reveal herself. Not even if it would be useful in its own right, not even though every rational view of the question would mean he would owe her no gratitude or debt at all.
(And he was supposed to go back among the cold stones and let the drakelets look up to him. In how many ways could one be an imposter at once?)
"What could anyone do for you?" Evan asked in his just-being-sensible problems-what-are-problems voice.
Severus turned again to look at him. First dubiously and then just a touch speculatively. Evan wasn't looking unusual or augmented in any way—the sun hadn't sparked off halos or rose-tone rainbows in his hair or any such nonsense.
There was, however, still a fading crease high on his cheek from the pillow, and his smile had crinkled his eyes in a way that made Severus imagine him with uncrumpled-parchment skin and white hair. He'd be heavier by far by then, almost certainly; he had the sort of broad bones and easy, healthy bodily strength that always did thicken and settle with age, even when an athletic man tried to keep in shape.
Severus was expecting attacks of vanity on that front, but considering that he himself was already constantly skirting the line between spare and gaunt, he thought it would probably be just as well if at least one of their skeletons had some padding—although a clinging cauldron would be unsettlingly and unpleasantly familiar and it was also just as well that Ev had put Severus in control of their meals.
He planned to preserve the red-gold, though, to the extent that it was within the power of potions. Ginger hair wasn't as unusual in the wizarding world as the muggle, but it did still stand out, and each family's shades tended to be particular, or at least to fall within a certain spectrum. Evan didn't make enemies such that unique hair was a vulnerability for him, and the shade of it was not only visually appealing but, after years of unshaken trust, an instant Evan to Severus: an instant pleasure and tranquility even when it was just an unexpected glimpse of a satsuma in someone's fruit bowl, off in his periphery.
He was loathe to give that up at the mere suggestion of nature. Let time slowly blur their skin and play little games with their metabolisms, if they were so lucky; the pace of that seemed to be so slow that there would never be a time that they would look at each other in surprise, never think you look different. Rather, the younger-them in pictures would be the ones whose appearances were jarring, who didn't seem quite who they'd each chosen every day since.
Time would do what it would. Severus would keep them as healthy as he could. And though he was no artist himself and had no blood-House of his own and no coat of arms to bring or to give, he could, he thought, protect the colors of their selves for each other.
"Oh, well, yes," Evan said as if Severus had told him something he could agree with, his amused eyes softening and warming as his arms came up Severus's back, hands turning tender. "I could do that."
More often than not, Severus cared more about making Evan feel what he wanted to than about anything else. That was why Ev, who had had the opportunity to try probably everything under the Hogwarts sky before bewilderingly turning his face to Severus for more than moments at a time, didn't get bored with him, he supposed. He himself, when he was being selfish in the way that wasn't all about Evan, was extremely dull. All he ever wanted, when he let himself need, was Evan's eyes and his weight, his mouth and his skin and the clutch of his hands, the pulse of him so deep Severus could carry it away with him, a nest of hands or broader, steady, heartbeat-housing flesh to sheathe his face.
Usually Evan wanted to see him and kiss him at these times, too. Sometimes, though. Sometimes.
Sometimes Evan thought Severus needed that weight to be at his back. To give himself over completely to trust.
Here, away from everything, staring down the maw of the castle like a rabbit in headlights, with monsters stalking the future and no home to go home to.
Severus shattered.
Heavy, yielding, and impenetrable, his skin and his shield and his blood kissed away the salt. Too quietly in his ear, surely, for any listening spells to catch, the embers of the hearth crackled, "Got you, Spike."