Melelune (Lyulyak Lodge, Bulgaria)
When Severus realized he had woken, his right lung area felt strange and he was being moderately crushed by a moderately hairy ginger giant who was slobbering into his neck.
More properly, one might say it happened like this:
When Severus woke up, it was to the snuffling and belly-growlings of a sweaty body on top of him that smelled like charred herbs. Not to mention a whole host of aches and twinges, the jarring realization that the sun was far too high through the curtains, and the distinct sensation that his heart was playing panicked, sychopated backbeating snares to someone else’s sedated bass drum.
What Severus himself experienced was being jolted awake by the icepick of realization.
Namely: that he needed to send a message to the Embassy immediately, because Karkaroff was going to knock on that door at ten o’clock if no one told him not to, and Severus had been completely unprepared for the conviction that if anyone violated this… this not merely frail but totally illusory bubble of sanctity that was the saturatingly lavish shock of waking to Evan’s skin warmly reassuring against his with the newborn revelation of Evan’s heart resonating in the right-hand hollow of his chest and Ev’s stupid, shiny hair tickling his nose precisely as usual, Severus might blast their throat out.
Which was to say that he was more than half afraid he might really blast Karkaroff’s throat out. There was no good reason for that sort of a mess.
Merely the thought of dragging himself away from the bed was horrific. This was disturbing in and of itself; Severus had lived in a room with Evan since he was eleven and shared a bed with him since they were sixteen. Never once had the idea of getting up carefully, dressing quietly, and leaving alone been anything other than part of his morning.
He might take a few moments to bask, or stroke, or even make Evan wake up for a few minutes if he had time to make the interruption to Ev’s sleep-cycle worth his while. But one went to bed, slept, and got up. A warm bed in the sunlight didn’t normally have the same black-hole hold on him that Evan seemed to revel in.
The thought of moving away, even just for long enough to trot down to the lobby and have a note flooed, was enough to make his blood chill, to make him want to crawl inside Ev’s skin and curl up in the quiet spaces between his molecules.
Maybe the rings nonsense wouldn’t have been such a bad idea. One could look at one’s hand, and not get the same sort of questions about Do You Need Medical Attention one would get for clutching one’s chest like the proverbial maiden auntie.
(Severus didn’t know where that turn of phrase had come from. In his experience, no one so marginalized as a spinster could afford to be easily shocked, and an unattached dependent within the family would be under far too much pressure to make herself useful to be sheltered and escape exposure to life, unless she were fortunate enough to become independent and manage life on her own.)
Maybe if he cut off some of Ev’s hair, and braided it very fine? That was traditional, wasn’t it? And Ev had enough of the stuff.
But no, the point was not to have external markers, not to make their attachment first-glance conspicuous. Besides, he was already fortunate enough that Ev had forgiven him for the blood-collection. Collecting anything else while Ev was sleeping would be to start a very creepy habit out of a one-off necessity.
He sighed. Clutching every scrap of personal discipline he’d ever built, he eased himself away from the only place of warmth or meaning he could imagine, even though it clutched at him in its sleep and whined sleepy protest.
He bent down to press a kiss and a soft, “I’ll return momentarily,” into Ev’s temple—and smiled: even sleeping, this seemed to confuse his friend who knew him, knew his habits. Just for a moment, and then Evan’s dream moved on.
It was astonishing how cold he felt in the corridor, even in a shirt and trousers and dressing gown. It was less astonishing but something of a problem how drawn his hand was to that slow roll that was new in him, was only technically on the wrong side of his chest. A droit.
One of the things that he’d miss about Bulgaria, noted the part of his mind that ticked on regardless (except during the scorching seconds under the cruciatus, the lack of exposure to which was another thing he’d miss), was that no one expected you to walk about beaming affably. It was considered not only civil but quite friendly enough to be getting on with to nod at whomsoever one passed, without smiling. Smiling without pressing cause was for lackwits. Severus entirely approved.
One was not put into the position of forcing cheer and fellowship regardless of one’s mood or relationship with the passerby on pain of damaging one’s reputation and getting scolded by Narcissa. One could look as impatient as one felt, and move as quickly as one liked, and no one took it personally. One wasn’t unpleasant; one had things to do and was therefore quite likely to be in demand and competent, if not actually important.
If he hadn’t been ablaze to get back to Evan—and if his feet hadn’t been very nearly literally on fire with itching because he’d been in too much of a hurry to put on proper shoes or remember to move his soothing, vampire-infuriating sole-pads of British clay into his slippers, damn it—he would have savored the freedom as blissful.
By the time he got to the desk, the second pulse-rate had started to change its tempo. He gathered, with a private smile that he neither allowed onto his face nor bothered to label as smug, tender, delighted, stalkerish, or anything else, that Ev had woken up. When the pulse went quick and startled and then dropped to a beat nearly as slow and dragging as Ev’s sleeping rate, it was Severus’s own heart that skipped, even though he told himself that assigning disappointment to a drumbeat was nonsensical. He would have liked to be back before Ev had had to wake alone on this particular morning, very much so, but Ev usually did wake alone, and was certainly accustomed to it.
Nonsensical or not, he hurried back from sending his message almost as quickly as he’d gone—and then, when Ev’s pulse started pounding and jumping about in a way that could not possibly have meant he was having a mopey wank, Severus started moving a hell of a lot faster.
When he got to their door and heard banging and crashing behind it, he slammed it with a silent alohomora, threw up a protego, and dove in.
It was a good thing he had thrown up that protego, too, because otherwise the first thing that happened would have been the vicious removal of his face. When he could focus his eyes again through the adrenaline and look at the source of the bristling lightning-swift swipe the circumference of his leg, as opposed to just where it was and how it was moving, he saw the same damn kind of terrifying thorny monster-vine that had nearly shredded him yesterday.
It was also the same kind of terrifying thorny monster-vine that had swarmed out of Ev’s skin to help Ev yell at Gamp about whether Severus was allowed to hurt himself after their first Quidditch game together, but that was quite beside the point, at the moment.
This vine stopped attacking instantly, however. Evan said, “Er. Um. Hi, Spike. Um. I thought you’d gone for the morning.”
“Are you mental?” Severus demanded, staring at him. It wasn’t entirely out of disbelief at the stupidity of the remark. Ev was wearing a… a… Narcissa or Luke would have known whether to call it a chiton or a tunic or even a toga; fashion was not Severus’s focus when he was reading history; but it stopped at his knees and the tree tattoo on his arm was on full display. Not in full leaf and flame, as it would have been if Severus had been touching him (an omission which needed to be rectified instantly), but fully visible, as was the vast majority of his skin.
Maybe not really. But far more than usually was, apart from in the obvious moments. Including his feet. He had bare feet, with all his toes out and his sensitive arches also on full display. Something, presumably a thorn, had scratched one of them. Severus was going to set it (the thorn-bearer, not the foot) on fire until it died screaming plant-screams.
More to the point, the vines, this time, weren’t growing out of Ev’s body, but had crawled all around the room from out of one of the glass bottles Severus knew Ev had blown himself, and they had clearly been attacking him enthusiastically until Severus had barged in.
At which point they had stopped.
Severus was under no illusions about the breadth of his vocabulary, which was why it was especially irksome that it had, at the moment fizzled down to the single demand: What.
“Probably?” Ev weakly answered the question he’d asked out loud, and asked, rather plaintively, “Is something wrong? I thought you’d gone for the day.” The vines started un-growing back into their bottle. It went rather quickly, once it had begun.
“ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?!” Severus (he sadly acknowledged with his ticking-on mind) shrieked, slamming the door and locking it with a flick of his wand before putting the thing away. He barely noticed his feet, currently more sensible than himself, stepping sockless into his unlaced boots as he stepped away from the swing of the wood.
He did notice Evan glancing down with his oh-good-you’re-taking-care-of-yourself-without-nagging amused look, but he pretended he hadn’t. Full to the eyes with the roiling, pressurized, overwrought reaction to shock that he’d long since trained himself to feel as angry indignation, he couldn’t devote attention to inconsequentials like that. “I went to floo Karkaroff to stay away unless we called for him! And then,” he finally did let his hand fly where it wanted to go, “your heart-rate started doing Wronski Feints! And there was crashing! I thought you were being attacked!”
“Well, I was shadowboxing,” Evan admitted, with a face that belonged on the most ovine of sheep before it went shy and Ev sort of swayed a step or two towards him. “I probably should have warned you about that when we were talking about the pulse thing, only I didn’t think of it—you told the bug-eater not to come, Spike?”
“If you have an opponent, it isn’t shadowboxing,” Severus said, and only a lifetime of yelling at people when he was unbalanced kept his voice from wobbling. It was probably out of relief as the itch in his feet faded, and certainly wasn’t due to any looks of growing surprise or pleasure in soft, hopeful eyes. “You should have warned me about that then? That was weeks ago. How long have you been doing this?!”
Evan went sheep-faced again. “Erm… since about three weeks after you started cooking for us? Spike.” He lunged over and grabbed Severus’s arm, dragging him over to the hotel’s wretchedly inadequate sofa, into his arms and his lap.
“Since we moved in together,” Severus said flatly, even as his treacherous hands struck at Evan’s arms like hungry snakes, slid up his neck and pulled him tight enough that Severus could smell sweat and bed and the ghosts of Ev’s proper soap under the stronger ghosts of burned flowers and smoke that they hadn’t been able to completely wash off last night.
Back at school, Wilkes had liked to talk about people having their own smells that weren’t soap. She’d certainly had her own, and Severus hadn’t gone tense when it was Lily walking up behind him, which was better evidence in favor of Wilkes’s premise than any preponderance of opinion, as far as he was concerned. And if he had tensed when Narcissa or Regulus approached unseen, it wasn’t out of fear so much as the certainty of having something asked of him which might or might not be reasonable.
He didn’t consider that Evan had a smell, though, results of exertion aside, no more than one did oneself. It was the air away from him that had something wrong with it. For example: until Ev had folded him up and began stroking his back and his trembling started to wear off, he hadn’t noticed he’d been shaking at all.
“Since you started working?” Ev corrected, rubbing his cheekbone into Severus’s eyebrow as he stroked. “Or, you could also say,” and now the sheep-face had migrated to his voice, “since I started noticing that you like to cook for me like I’m still on a competitive Quidditch team and, er, I’m not.”
Severus pulled away just away to look at him. Sheep-face on the long, gilt-tanned wedge of those strong bones, and just the first hint of smile-lines digging around his eyes as his embarrassment displayed them. Severus was going to get to watch until the habits of good nature painted them in around clear pools as indelibly as rays in a child’s drawing of the sun. He could (glumly) imagine what his own face might look like by then, but he didn’t know what it was doing now.
“Sorry, Spike,” Evan told him, clearly feeling back on firmer ground now as he nuzzled between Severus’s eyes. “I know you like to imagine I spend all my spare time lazing in a sunbeam or whatnot, but I do really like to try harder than that to be ready to have your back.”
“I do like to think about you lying in sunbeams,” Severus confessed. If his voice had gone just a bit unsteady now, wasn’t that all right? “When Patil was whinging on about the records that oughtn’t to matter at that hour of the morning, or Lovegood had one of her more brain-bending ideas, and I hadn’t had enough coffee yet to think about how to tell them to stuff it without making them quit. It was… good. Thinking you were sleeping. Warm.”
“Spike,” Evan breathed, hot against him. Severus was so dizzied by the mouth at his throat that he didn’t realize Ev had banished all his clothes but the dressing gown until its thick tie was undone and broad hands were sizzling up his stomach.
“I don’t understand why you were right,” he heard wrenched out of him, not even in the complaining voice he would have wished, when he was so lost in the sweet wrenching lightning-and-velvet of enfoldment that he didn’t know whose hands were whose and certainly didn’t care what sort of thing they were doing or how simple and adolescent it was.
Evan found nothing to say at the time that didn’t sound like either crying or one of the nonsense phrases he liked to use because (Severus supposed) he considered Severus’s name either too long or too formal for certain occasions.
Later, though, when they’d physically finished shaking and crushing into each other but Severus was wondering if he’d ever remember what it felt like to be stable and sure and cool in himself (and also wondering if he ought to curse Perenelle just a bit for her astonishing fairy-godmother gift, because he’d felt like this with Ev a few times as a teenager, and the doubt, the fear, the feeling of being skinless on a hot and cloudless day under a magnifying glass with only one distantly curious green-blue eye between him and the sizzling sun—that vulnerability had been quite real and not one of the few things that had made those years bearable), it turned out he had heard.
“What did you mean,” he asked lazily, carding through Severus’s hair as though it weren’t a tangled impossibility, “you don’t understand why I was right?”
Although Severus really hadn’t wanted to explain at all, Evan was horribly patient, and if he laughed it wouldn’t be at Severus. Or, at least, not with cruelty. Smugness, quite possibly, but not cruelty.
With a sigh, Severus forced himself to explain as much as he could bear to. It wasn’t very much, but everyone knowing Ev was dim and loony, as Severus had told Blakeney, only meant that Ev not only was clever enough to value being underestimated, but had enough canny perseverance to preserve his advantage in a long game. There was no point in holding back willfully, not with the most bullheaded Taurus to ever chew daisies and make long-lashed cow eyes at all his red-cloaked prospective enemies.
He said, reluctantly, “You said… you said it wouldn’t be redundant.” And then, disgustingly, he couldn’t quite bring himself to hit Evan for the long smile he could feel broadening against his forehead. Even though it would only make things worse, he admitted, “I got up to send the note because if Karkaroff had walked in I knew I’d splatter the splinters of his spine against the hall wallpaper, close the door, and get back in bed with you. It doesn’t make sense. We’ve lived together since we were eleven. I’ve considered us wed nearly since we left school. I already trusted in that before we did all of the ritual things.”
“But not ‘nearly since we left school,’” Ev noted drolly.
“Hypotheses need proving,” Severus reminded him. It was both gratifying and a horrific ramping-up of the magnifying-glass feeling to see Evan instantly understand the risk Severus had just admitted to, to see his wry face melt away. Severus hurried on. “It was all terribly dramatic, yes, but nothing’s changed.”
“Apart from some extremely fundamental, not to say primal magic,” Ev suggested, in something of a holding-back voice that didn’t sound as amused as Severus had expected, but also didn’t seem angry, or even annoyed.
“Yes, but we knew I was yours, you mine, and we ours two days and two weeks ago. I don’t recall any spells taking place yesterday or last night that ought to have made me confuse you with bloody oxygen or relocate my perception of gravity, and I think I should like to register a complaint.”
When, thoroughly disgruntled with himself, he dared to look at Evan again, Ev wasn’t laughing. He was very nearly in public-face, with that tilt to his head, except that his irises were barely a millimeter of green around pupils at least half the size of knuts. “Well,” Evan said thoughtfully, “this isn’t terribly like you, so I probably oughtn’t to rely on it happening again and take full advantage. They do say ‘take advantage however you can,’ you know.”
“What do you mean?” Severus asked suspiciously.
“I mean I might be capable of giving you up to, oh, five minutes, but more likely two, to prepare yourself for the sort of day that you, my nose-grinding worker bee, cannot normally tolerate without fretting yourself silly. At which point I will get back in bed with you.”
Eying him even more suspiciously, Severus demanded, “What is it you want, exactly?”
“Oh, I’m not making requests,” Evan assured him, giving him a comfortable squeeze, and then a comfortable squeeze rather lower. “Whatever strikes your fancy will be lovely. I might suggest, though, that for a proper morning in you might like to have some Amberella handy? It’s not quite the sort of endurance match we usually do.”
“No bludgers,” Severus half agreed and half warned. As much as he enjoyed one-one-one Quidditch, its place was outside, where there was room for it and no damage deposit to be considered. He’d known you could never quite tell with Evan before he was disillusioned on the subject of two-hour-long daily morning naps.
“Er, per se,” Evan mostly-agreed, his mouth twitching. “Come to think about it, though, if you do decide on, er, no bludgers, at any point, keep the dressing gown on, will you? I’d quite like to see that, I think.” He sulked playfully at Severus, adding, “I shan’t ask to paint it just now.”
Severus pushed himself up on Evan’s shoulder. Perhaps belatedly, because it was certainly for no good reason he could think of, he felt rather blindsided as he stared down. Down at Evan and his rioting red-gold tangles and his outrageous (though, perhaps, not quite so unfair as Severus had previously supposed) secret-sneaked-in-morning-training muscles, and the sparse, bright little glints interrupting them, the keeping of which Severus never had quite seen the point of when Evan was rather more meticulous about removing his facial hair than Severus would have preferred, and his damp self-training outfit he’d probably made out of a bedsheet.
Unless it was a piece of clothing he’d had commissioned and had in fact secretly owned for years and kept secreted under his pants (clearly not in his socks-and-hose drawer, because Severus was always matching a laundered sock for him with one that was mysteriously stretched out on the floor somewhere) because he apparently did this every morning.
Just like all the other idiots at school who’d been embarrassed by their own fundamental merits. The pretty, popularity-obsessed twitterpates who’d tried to do all their revising in secret, so as to get good marks without looking like swots. Who didn’t understand or couldn’t face that the ones whose opinions mattered to their futures, and whose opinions were worth having, valued studiousness and commitment and theory-backing-substance-fleshing-out-style, valued effortless suavity and facile fact-spewing not one whit.
Except that Evan did understand. He understood, and played them like gobstones and go.
“Always,” Severus didn’t even hear himself say. He only felt his mouth move, and the awe moving through it.
Evan frowned. “Sorry, Spike?”
Forcing his mouth into a smirk and cocking an eyebrow, Severus told him, “All of the ways. I shall have you in all of them.” Then he hopped off in a blue swirl of dressing gown and did not run but stalked for the bedroom door, closing it behind him to a cloud of happy cursing that, because Evan was ridiculous and inhuman, never quite managed to lower itself to the level of profanity.