Nurmengard, Bulgaria
Their last day in Bulgaria found Evan staring up, rather dauntedly, at a grey stone castle that would have made Hogwarts feel like a cozy toasting-fire even if Hogwarts’s architects had built it as an identically grandiose Gothic horror.
Although they’d meant to get this out of the way far earlier in their stay, their delay hadn’t all been reluctant procrastination. Severus was claiming now that one of them must have realized, on some unconscious and intuitive level, that the ritual in the Devetashka caves could potentially make the errand easier, by making them both related to Grindelwald, however distantly. Evan was letting him get away with it, but suspected he was just trying to convince himself he didn’t need to be embarrassed.
Similarly, he was Refusing To Be Embarrassed about not having realized that on the morning after his own handfasting, business-as-usual wouldn’t have its usual draw on him. Evan had let him get away with get away with pretending that he’d woken up that morning and very calmly made the decision to tell Karkaroff to keep away from them on pain of extraordinarily splattery death. He considered this to be very nice of him, and he was only doing it since Spike hadn’t been ass enough to try to be aloof and unemotional with Ev while explaining (or, more properly, Ev suspected, trying to make sense of) his ‘unexpected’ attack of humanity.
It had, actually, been unexpected, but only briefly. Which was to say that Evan had thought Severus would realize his assumption that nothing would have changed was ridiculous and made arrangements to stay in bed before going to sleep.
Seeing as Spike wanted to be an abacus or a piece of technomancy almost as much as he liked to call Evan an alien, so Ev should probably have been less surprised to wake up alone. And also, since Spike was in fact in no way either a whirring silver thing on Dumbledore’s shelves or a muggle robot, less surprised to have his morning warm-up interrupted.
Not that he had any complaints about the warm-up he’d ended up with.
And—not ‘even better,’ but certainly icing on the cake—he felt, now, that he’d had a certain measure of deliciously well-chilled revenge. Not for the green lightning thing from last week—Spike had Spike-apologized for that so intensely and earnestly that Evan’s smiles still went heavy-lidded whenever he remembered it.
This made Spike paranoid, because he couldn’t believe that Evan felt good now about something that had scared him so much at the time. ‘Forgiveness’ wasn’t in his vocabulary, even though he didn’t know how to stay angry at Evans longer than the next time she smiled at him, no matter how hard she’d kicked him in the teeth. He couldn’t trust it, coming from other people, and showing how sorry he was for something only made it worse.
Ev didn’t think he’d ever seen a more horrified Spike than when Evan had assured him yes, it was bad, but it’s all right, you’ve made it to me now. Which had taken some serious untangling. Two pots of tea later, Evan still wasn’t sure he understood. It seemed to be about the idea that one could make up for a mistake by doing something nice for the person who’d been hurt by it, but it didn’t make any sense.
While Ev agreed that an apology, however lovely, didn’t mean the memory was erased and nothing had happened, he didn’t think being afraid of being forgiven was called for. Spike seemed to think forgiveness was some kind of dark potion: take errant human, add forgiveness, poof: instant soulless monster who will never care again about hurting other people. Severus would have killed anyone who’d said Reggie should be treated that way, or Narcissa, and been seriously indignant if anyone had even said it about, say Wilkes.
When confronted with this probability, Severus had asked what good Evan thought forgiving his darling cousin Frivolous had ever done Dumbledore or the world. Ev had said that first, it had won Dumbledore insane loyalty. Severus had interjected that ‘insane’ was well emphasized and the loyalty of someone who couldn’t be aimed or disciplined by either your will or their own wasn’t worth calling loyalty. The ensuing very dynamic explanation of ‘loose bottle rocket’ had distracted Evan from his second, more important point.
Namely: Severus wasn’t the sort of person who made mistakes because he couldn’t control himself (unless certain Gryffindors were involved, but that was their own fault). When he didn’t like the way a cauldron had exploded in his face, he’d remember from then on not to add thestral mane into a copper cauldron over a flame at blue or violet heat. Every time. And shriek at anyone whose fire was even edging towards robin’s-egg.
So this revenge wasn’t for the green lightning. Evan was perfectly happy with what he’d been given in repentance for that one. He was finished with being upset over it, no matter what Spike thought.
No, this revenge was for years and years ago—for that wistful little remark Severus had made after Ev had lost the plot and hit him for getting himself hurt. This revenge was for ‘it’s a relief to know you can feel things after all.’
It was a good revenge, cold and sweet and unexpected as a peppermint ice-mouse after lunch in July. To have Spike go to bed relieved to get out some benighted, irrelevant formality Evan had incomprehensibly insisted on herding him into’ of the way and wake up rattled and affected and so full of feeling he couldn’t stop himself being openly clingy—revenge didn’t come nicer than that.
Ev had been entirely chuffed about it. He’d even gone so far as to let himself feel pleased with himself for having such a good idea and then making it happen—although not, of course, to rub it in or even point it out. That would have ruined his own lovely, lovely morning.
But Spike, who was called that for several ruddy good reasons, had then woken up the next day and, after a cozy and mutually-smug interval, announced, “I suppose we’d best be getting along to prison, then.”
Sometimes Evan envied Spike’s facility with terrible language for which Linkin would have beat Evan to a puddle with a wooden spoon. Spike seemed to find it so cathartic. Evan also, on rarer occasions, envied Linkin the spoon.
And he had the sinking suspicion, looking up at the grim grey walls currently being mocked by charming puffy clouds in a bluer-than-blue sky, that he was going to want some catharsis before the end of the day. Everyone had assured him, when he’d directed their being-painted chatter into war stories, that Bulgaria was a civilized country and there were no dementors at Nurmengard.
That was hard to believe, standing in its shadow, watching Spike’s shoulders do the re-setting that meant his brain was currently being clawed into ridiculousness by its not-terribly-secret inner feral kitten and needed a ball of yarn. Since he also rather wanted to delay the inevitable until he felt a bit more settled about it, Evan remarked out loud on how unlikely the absence of dementors felt.
Spike obligingly failed to resist the temptation to speculate, replying, “Even Hogwarts has a poltergeist, Ev. Even if there aren’t any unhappier ghosts here to chill the atmosphere, the pent-up frustration and resentment of so many wizards must be having some effect. Especially as the residents aren’t having their energies drained and their perceptions confused.”
“Residents,” Evan repeated, leaning into the warmest little flicker of wanting to smile that he could dredge up, and also leaning into Spike’s shoulder. “Gracious, Master Snape, how diplomatic.”
Spike slid him a dirty, lime-sour MESoP masteries do not count and that is the only thing that has been said that I will dignify with any response look, and resettled his shoulders again, this time more deliberately. “We ought to be getting on,” he said. And he said it repressively, but Ev’s shoulder had got bumped during the resettling, and not in an angry sort of way.
“How do we get on?” Evan asked, trying to be more curious than dubious or daunted as he eyed the passage into the castle, so tall and narrow that it could have been an ant’s-eye view of the world’s most ominous wand. They had odd eyes, ants, and the way the castle was nothing but gradations of darkness was probably what they would see, in something so tall.
The tortured-iron gate read, ‘за доброто,” and when Evan looked at it without activating his Bulgarian-translation enchantment by trying to read it, it was so short and official looking that it would have seemed more like the castle’s name than a rallying cry that had killed thousands, if it hadn’t been twisted into writing a bit too much like Spike’s for anyone’s comfort. “I mean,” Ev added, “I hope you weren’t planning to sneak in, Spike. I know you found those blueprints, but…”
Spike arched a go-on eyebrow at him. Being neither a yes-I-did-what-of-it or a don’t-be-absurd eyebrow, it left Evan full of the horrifying conviction that Spike’s plan—his actual plan!!—had been to broom-handle his way through.
He was still fighting the urge to accuse Spike of letting proximity to Lily shred his hood into a mane when Spike said, suspiciously mildly, “If you have any better ideas, I should be delighted to hear them.”
“Turning around would be favorite,” he remarked, which made Spike’s eyes flash momentarily, expressively, skyward. “Well, I don’t know what sort of ideas you expect me to have, Spike, but given who this castle is meant to contain…”
“It was built to contain muggles, primarily,” Severus pointed out. Ev was sure he didn’t believe himself; he was just being contrary, and probably purely out of reflex. “And it’s current residents are wandless.”
“If wandlessness was enough to keep all wizards helpless, Azkaban wouldn’t need dementors,” Evan pointed out.
“Does it need them?” Severus asked silkily. “Does it really?”
It rather made Ev want to jump him and apparate back to their hotel bedroom at once. Of course, he’d already wanted to apparate back into bed, but the monument to oppression they were faced with was enough to let him resist even Spike’s most spine-tingling voice.
(Barely.)
“Well, they keep invaders out, anyway,” Evan had started to reply reasonably. Then he heard himself and smacked his invasion-planning forehead in soft despair.
This admission of having walked into a trap with his eyes open was not enough to stop Spike smirking at him, but it did, apparently, prevent the point being belaboured. All Spike said was, “I would be delighted to hear it, Ev. If you have one. Honestly, I would.”
Flashing his hands up in exasperation, Evan repeated, “What kind of idea do you think I’m going to have?”
“Well,” Spike said, just as reasonably, “she’s your aunt.”
Evan tried to think of some response other than blinking stupidly at Spike. In the end, he blinked stupidly at Spike.
“Madam Bagshot,” Spike supplied. “I don’t know her.”
“She nags you about scribbling in books and what kind of fish you should be eating as brain-food,” Evan reminded him, still feeling stuck in the blinking-stupidly stage.
“I don’t know her well,” Severus conceded gracefully, which was to say: irritatingly. “I certainly don’t know why she’d send an emissary to her great-nephew.”
“I,” Evan said, and then tried, “Spike. You.”
“Mm?”
“I am going to bite you,” Evan announced, tilting his chin up and wondering if this was what it felt like to be Reggie, always lost in admiration, ten steps behind, and terrified to his great-grandfather’s boots..
“Are you?” Severus raised a dubious eyebrow. An evaluative one, though he tragically didn’t seem to be currently evaluating whether the cobblestone path was suitable for shagging Evan on. Which it wasn’t, although the grass off to the side under the lemon tree looked nice, apart from the bees humming around the long-fallen fruit. They both knew charms to send those packing, if they chose.
“Yes,” Evan informed him, rallying. “On your face.” In the light of Severus’s eyebrow, it had occurred to him that it was usually Spike who responded to being rattled with that kind of a faux-strike. But then, it was usually Spike semi-resentfully admitting Ev had out-thought him. Besides, they’d woven their magic together six subtle ways from Sunday in that sunlit cavern, so it was only natural for Ev to start picking up more Spikely instincts. He thought it might even be fun, as long as he didn’t let it go too far.
“Well,” Severus shrugged, letting the thing go (for now; it was always only for now with him, because he was steadfast and patient and clever and that patch of lemon-scented grass really did look quite soft…) “it seems to me that the alternative to sneaking in is to be escorted in. Because I don’t think that breaking in is likely to go well. And I certainly can’t provide any excuse.”
Ev narrowed his eyes at him, leaned in, and repeated, “On. Your. Face.”
Spike kissed him, but it wasn’t especially mollifying. Spike hadn’t meant it to be, anyway; it was a statement of fact, not an apology. At least, Ev acknowledged, sighing in, it hadn’t been some patronizing sort of a you-can-do-it.
Of course he could do it—and, in the end, he did, even though it turned out that Auntie B sent the defeated Dark Lord owls three or four times a year.
The guards, who didn’t let the letters pass to their prisoner unread, were initially rather skeptical that she would have sent her great-nephew a visitor without telling him so, or clearing it with them. Evan felt strongly that they were entirely right, since Auntie B was every bit as punctilious as one might expect.
When it came to formalities, at any rate, and historical facts. Not when her garden was involved. Punctilious was not the word once she got her fingers in the dirt. It was an attitude of which Evan thoroughly approved, but he would never, never approve of putting tiny little delicately white-glowing flowers as powerful as moly in as a filler for the giant sunflowers she would keep letting go to seed and grow where they liked.
He was just opening his mouth to suggest that her feeble British owl might have been eaten by one of their mighty Bulgarian birds of prey when Spike butted in.
“While Madam Bagshot no doubt has great affection for her nephew,” Severus said coldly in a tone that doubted Madam Bagshot’s great affection, somehow managing to look down his nose at a burly ash-blond a whole head taller than he was with shoulders that might just have been twice as wide, “she is not such a fool as to give notice to a Dark Wizard when she intends to send an emissary into his very presence. Not to a Dark Wizard such as Grindelwald, whose power may be diminished but whose remaining shrewdness cannot be measured from afar. I am astonished that anyone would expect it of a witch so perspicacious that her magnum opus informs the curriculum at four of the premier wizarding academies of the Western world.”
After a moment, Ash-blond’s even taller, wirier partner said, rather blankly, “Kakbo?”
“He means,” Evan didn’t-exactly-apologize, although he did let them have the long-suffering Spike Is Like This And We Must Accept It smile, “Auntie Bathilda didn’t think it would be safe to give your prisoner time to think about how he might use me.”
He hadn’t bothered to listen to the echoing magical translation of the taller guard’s very obvious what? in his head, but he did pay attention to Ash-blond admitting, “That is wise, Piotr. The fox takes on the white of old age against the snow.”
The taller guard seemed to have taken offense at having his partner looked down on by an overeducated wizard half their size, though, and suspiciously demanded of Spike, “And who are you?” He didn’t add any specific insults, but he didn’t really have to. Especially since he was talking to Spike, who tended to hear them even when people were being perfectly and even genuinely pleasant.
Spike shot him back what would have been a normal Spikely-polite quarter-smile, except for the frozen glint in his eyes that turned it gorgeously nasty. “I,” he said, his rather bloodthirsty little smile widening marginally, “am Master Rosier’s wand and his shield.”
Piotr seemed about to take this as a challenge, but Ash-blond took his arm, murmuring urgently that everyone who had read stories of King Arthur and his crazy knights knew that the English were very strange about feudalism and Piotr wouldn’t get anywhere by taking offense at the pride of a bodyguard.
Not looking at them, so his words wouldn’t translate, Evan murmured, “Did you make him think that?”
“I don’t think so,” Severus hedged cautiously, sotto voice, his face still a mask of hauteur.
“I can’t believe you said that all in Bulgarian,” Ev noted while the guards argued, his own face falling into familiar lines of stressed fondness that felt comfortingly out of place in this dismal entryway. Spike shrugged in what Evan felt was a particularly continental way. He considered making a remark about how being rude and arrogant wasn’t going to convince the Bulgarians Spike was one of them when his accent, while admittedly less blatantly British than Evan’s, was still decidedly not native.
He was more than halfway to deciding against it, even though he thought a little teasing might settle the porcupine-hackles and thereby establish that the more intimidating of them wasn’t an imminent threat, when the guards came to their own conclusion. Pleasingly, it was to start bringing out the secrecy sensors and Dark Arts detectors.
And then, after they’d walked what must have been two miles through the twists and turns of the clammy stonework, Severus got far enough to glance through the humming crystal door of the cell, and then froze and wouldn't let him near it.
“He’s not dead, is he?” Ev asked in some alarm—and more hope. It would simplify matters for everyone if even the Dark Lord had to admit their respective missions had been doomed from the start.
Nor was it an unreasonable conclusion. Evan had only thrown up once in potions class during ingredients preparation, and it had been so early on in their third year that he and Spike had barely been more than friendly acquaintances mutually tugged along in Narcissa’s wake. And he’d told Spike it was because he’d been sitting too close to the ingredients table where the leech juice had fermented and was incredibly smelly. Which would have been retch-making enough on its own, but he’d already been walking around with a moderately sick headache half the morning. It had had nothing to do with the harvesting-fairy-wings assignment.
Nonetheless, Spike had fastened onto the notion that Evan’s artistic eyes were too sensitive to look at nasty things. Evan had tried to disabuse him of this fantasy several times. Spike had not been at home to the idea that the one way he’d found (at the time) to indulge his looking-after-people thing in Evan’s direction wasn’t useful.
(Evan had been mostly glad he hadn’t tried to indulge it at that mockery of a picnic in Dartmoor, awful and sick-making as it had been. Since absolutely nothing even potentially memorable had happened when they were riding horses at Dartmoor, however, Evan definitely only remembered what a lovely ride they’d had.)
So if Grindelwald was hanging rotting from the ceiling by his bedsheet, or even rolling around in a puddle of his own bile speckled with spattergroit, Spike was definitely not letting him in there. Ev couldn’t think of any other reason unless security at the fabled Nurmengard was secretly abysmal and the man had somehow got hold of a wand. Or had got control of his jailors and was sitting complacently in a plush armchair in front of a roaring fire with said wand in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, stroking a pet erumpent.
Er.
Evan didn’t actually think this last scenario particularly likely, even omitting the erumpent. The jailors hadn’t given him any impressions to support it, even when he ran through his memory more suspiciously.
The wand, though, that wasn’t completely incredible. Half the people Ev had painted scoffed politely at the idea that Grindelwald was a real prisoner. They mostly seemed to think he was submitting to a form of voluntary house arrest in his own castle as part of an informal agreement that would keep Britain, in the person of Dumbledore, from over-strenuous interference in Europe’s affairs. Which made sense to Evan; the grounds were so extensive that someone like Spike wouldn’t have been much bothered by confining himself to them. Not if it meant safety for enough people he cared about and he got a lab and all the books he wanted.
Therefore, Evan obligingly flattened himself against one wall, so the cell’s occupant wouldn’t see Spike had backup and Spike wouldn’t start panicking. He did hiss, “What’s wrong,” but very quietly.
Spike said, illustratively, “Erm,” and then fell silent, looking awkward.
“Who’s there?” a strong voice demanded in Bulgarian. “Is it you, Piotr, Josephus? Have you brought my breakfast?”
“Schatzi sent you your morning meal an hour ago,” Ash-blond-who-was-possibly-Josephus scolded presumably-the-fallen-tyrant.
“Perhaps she sent it astray,” the voice suggested while Severus turned to Evan, one eye twitched smaller than the other, and mouthed The cat sent it?
Evan held up a hand, signed back, E-L-F / N-A-M-E, and gave Spike a your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine shrug. Then, since Ash-blond was getting ready to scold some more, he mentioned, “I wouldn’t mind a spot of tea. Don’t suppose your hospitality would stretch that far for a poor beleaguered messenger-bird?”
Ash-blond looked at him as if he were crazy while the inside voice fell silent. Calculatingly so, if Evan was any judge of silences.
Severus, speaking low, put a hand in one of his more obvious pockets and ‘explained,’ “The prisoner’s temper is legendary and Professor Bagshot has charged Master Rosier most sternly with the importance of his cooperation for her latest book. Any sop to protect Master Rosier from his displeasure during this private interview would be,” the hand in his pocket made a subdued clinking-metal sound, “most appreciated.”
The guards looked at him, respectively shrewd and suspicious. It probably helped that Spike had positioned his body rather solidly between Evan and the doorway, suddenly looking much more wiry than bony. And that Ev was rolling you’re so overprotective, I’m not made of glass eyes at him. Just like any silly-ass young fool anxious to impress everyone with what a strong, grown-up wizard he was, any at all.
“You will leave your wands here,” Ash-blond said finally, pointing to a shaped hollow in the stone wall, for all the world as if it hadn’t been something he would have demanded of them anyway. Evan approved.
Severus, visibly, didn’t.
“The wands cannot be summoned from their nook,” Piotr told them witheringly, “and no hands but the ones who put them in can take them out.” He sounded impatient, but he was watching them eagerly. Evan had no doubt that no few would-be visitors had backed away from this demand, unwilling to be unarmed against a dark lord. Ev, however, thought it only sense not to bring any wands into any room with him in it. The old man was notoriously tricky, and at the very least he had his own blood and nails to lay spell-traps with. Expelliarmus wasn’t the only way to convince a wand you’d won it.
“If you wouldn’t mind demonstrating,” Severus demanded flatly. His shoulders hardened and widened, emphasizing that he was between Evan and the two of them, as well as the prisoner. It was ridiculously sweet, considering the cloud of contained menace boiling out of his every pore. Even (or maybe especially) if he was telling himself it was only because he had to maintain the role of a bodyguard.
The guards (very patiently, in Ev’s opinion) took turns trying to take each other’s wands out. When neither of them could reach into the hollow for the wrong wand, Severus put his own in and failed to do a wandless accio before making Evan try to fish it out. It was as if the hollow was an illusion: the smooth line of the stone wall was unbroken to his hand. Finally, Severus took his own wand back before grudgingly nodding his agreement to the guards.
“The tea will come to you, in ten shakes of a golden lamb’s tail,” Ash-blond said, “and we will return for you in ten minutes.”
Severus pursed his lips at this price. “A golden lamb would be greatly weighted down by its wool, its movements greatly impeded. I should think it would take it two hours, at least, to shake its tail ten times.”
“Surely in even one hour it could shake at least twenty times,” Piotr proposed, philosophically but not very sweetly. Spike did have that effect on some people.
“Oh, twelve, at most, I’m sure, in two hours,” Evan disagreed thoughtfully, because his experience in wizarding Bulgaria had taught him that haggling was not only expected but possibly the national sport. In the end they settled on fifteen galleons to make the guards feel they’d won. One hour, with tea-tray.
Severus failed horribly at not wincing, which probably made Piotr feel better about it. Ev, however, was perfectly happy to pay the price of a decent pair of shoes to avoid failing obviously at the first obstacle that wasn’t even really an obstacle. He’d seen Severus come back from training sessions even when the Dark Lord was happy with him. Besides, it wouldn’t be elegant.
And then, when Piotr had pointed his wand at the door and possibly-Josephus had touched a stone at the edge of the crystal, stopping the humming and making the door slide smoothly into the floor, Severus still didn’t want to let Evan through. “I can handle it,” he said unconvincingly. “You should stay out here to make sure…” He hesitated, but refrained from insulting the guards’ integrity outright, finishing, “Just in case.”
“You can keep watch if you like,” Evan offered with an amused smile, brushing past him and brushing his wrist on the way. Somewhere below that scowl, under all the staid, colorless cloth, roses were blooming. It was enough to make a fellow feel he could manage anything.
Once inside, though, he knew at once why Spike hadn’t wanted him to see. Spike wasn’t wrong. He didn’t want to see it.
It wasn’t that the old fox presented any sort of a grisly appearance, although the stark interior of the cell represented a very clear compromise between the positions We Hate You and We Want Everyone To Know Via The Occasional Photo-Op that We No Longer Mistreat Prisoners.
The two thick blankets, the pile of mostly-English books that, unless they were under glamours, was a mix of quite old philosophy and quite old history and extremely trashy and well-thumbed romance novels, and the neatly folded stack of warm-looking robes suggested to Ev, in fact, that the guards had taken bribes from well-wishers many times before. Hopefully, the desire to keep their jobs was enough to ensure they also examined these gifts for Potential Mischief before delivering them. Ev wasn’t especially worried about that, though; Severus didn’t need his wand to act as a human lucifer or salamander, and Ev could pull at least one trick himself if things went sidewise.
What did concern him was the extremely solid and ugly desk with all the parchment and the wax crayons on it. As long as they weren’t pure beeswax, they couldn’t do much harm magically. And it seemed unlikely that they were, given the extremely garish yellow and green cardboard box most of them were in. The word that was presumably the brand name was both unfamiliar to Evan and in Latinate letters, not Cyrillic, and those letters were extremely rounded. Not a wizarding label at all, even discounting the lack of movement.
But the crayons didn’t have to be the sort one could write powerful runes and arrays with to be dangerous. Given another twenty years, Evan was slightly concerned that Narcissa might be able to run the entire world even if all she had was parchment, a pigment-smearing stick of any sort, and one owl. All the terrorizing would be for everyone’s own good, probably, mostly, but not everyone would be pleased about it even if she confined her totalitarian reign to their fashion choices.
Grindelwald had already ruled as much of the world as he seemed to care to, once. As Evan had told Lily, the first time they’d had a conversation more than five minutes long and having nothing to do with the proper delegation of prefect duties (ie: away from Evan), there were all sorts of reasons to follow a movement. Even if the vast majority of those reasons had to do with the follower’s personal needs and ambitions, there would always be some devotees that believed.
There would always be some that believed so much in their leader that they didn’t care what that leader looked likely to to be able to do or to give them. It wouldn’t matter to them if he were or imprisoned, or dead, or even openly renouncing everything they’d stood and fought for. Some people’s wouldn’t care about that, would never be able to believe it. Never most, but even a few fanatics were always dangerous. ‘He’s lying so he can go on working for us in secret,’ they’d say. ‘His spirit will keep on as long as we keep faith with him, keep fighting,’ they’d say.
They’d say, ‘Of course we’ll have to be careful with our letters now, but being locked up just gives him more time to plan his comeback!’
Evan had really hoped this was going to be easier. Given everything he’d heard about Azkaban, of course he approved when a prison was run with higher-minded principles, but still: inconvenient to the point of potential catastrophe.
That wasn’t what Spike had wanted to shield him from, though. Nothing like so sensible. No, what had make Spike flinch was this:
Curling licks of gold like koi fish under ice, darting through the retreating, wispy white hair. Powerful bones locked into a frame that was trying to sag with hardly any flesh on it, moving with the habits of confident power to pin them with pouched stone-blue eyes, creased into arrowheads of permanent hauteur. A full mouth lined with old sternness, distorted inwards, set in a long, Nordic wedge of a face under a small, straight nose…
Absently, Evan ran a thumb over his lips, up to touch where his nostrils met his cheek, down towards his chin. All his teeth were where they ought to be, and if he had any lines at all starting, they were wider, smilier. No bags under his eyes, either, thank you.
He supposed he could guess why Aunt Bathilda had chosen to only use woodcuts in A History of Magic, rather than any photographs. It had probably been considerate of her. It had probably saved him a lot of suspicion at school, maybe even afterwards.
Spike was just behind his shoulder, fiercely radiating heat through the hand resting lightly between Evan’s shoulderblades. There were broad-blooming, thorny roses on those strong arms, Ev reminded himself, but the capable hand on him was only one thin stroke of warmth in this very chilly cell. He felt more than heard himself whisper, “No one told me.”
“Bastards,” Spike hissed back, stonily steamed indignation in his ear. In, not through: he didn’t have any holes in his. He fought the strong desire to reach up and make sure. “Bloody Binns.”
The old man looked startled himself, if not so shaken, as his granite eyes raked Evan. The hard gaze dragged from his thickly waving, rosier hair in its club, down his most businesslike plum-black and silver-smoke mantled waistcoat with its dashing diagonal close, which brought out his hair and had felt somber this morning but now felt like a dangerous satire, all the way down past his soft trouser-cuffs, the ever-so-slightly swishy sort you could wear with or without a robe, lingering on shoes that had also felt comfortable and sensible this morning. Evan suddenly felt Spike’s worst, clunkiest schoolboy work-boots would have been a better choice.
The eyebrows—not bushy or white, but so close-set and old-gold they had nearly faded into his skin—went up, turning the forehead into a field of disdainful lines. Evan kept his own face smooth and faintly smiling, the purest public-face he could drag over his own long bones.
But when Grindelwald spoke, Evan’s shoulders released. There was nothing that struck home in that voice honed to sooth and impress. Something familiar, unquestionably: the tone was charismatic, compelling, could have been called coaxing if it hadn’t been so confident. But it wasn’t Ev’s father the velvet-over-sandpaper voice with its clipped and gentle accent reminded him of. It was his father’s dear friend, who Evan (he was supposed to think) couldn’t afford to disappoint.
“No one would come here only to play a very bad joke,” Grindelwald mused, eyes raking lazily over Evan again before spearing Spike over his shoulder. “What do you want?”
“What do we all want?” coolly countered Severus. He was so close that Evan could hear the rush of hair over his collar as he tilted his head. “Freedom, safety, comfort, glory.”
“No, you will not make me think you are mine,” Grindelwald frowned. Severus blinked. “You have come for a purpose.” His eyes narrowed. “Perhaps not for your own purpose, English.”
“No,” Severus agreed blandly. Evan knew from long exposure that his lips had quirked sardonically when he added, “I must begin by giving offense, in saying we are come from the greatest wizard in the world.”
Obviously ‘must’ was a bald-faced lie: no one had told him to say that. He’d just decided, probably on a split-second-but-carefully-calculated whim, to see what he could provoke. Certainly it was a provocative thing to say to a wizard who’d tried to be an Alexander and very nearly succeeded, and offense was to be expected. Evan was still astonished by what he fished out of the old man:
Grindelwald screwed up his mouth and spat onto the floor. He followed this with a stream of outrage and disgust in what sounded like German. Evan didn’t know any of those particular words, but he could feel Spike, behind him, swallowing down a snort of rattled amusement. “Surely,” Grindelwald glared at them after he’d wound down, “he is not so far gone as to say so of himself!”
“No-o,” Spike drew out judiciously, his voice still trying not to smirk, “but I don’t think he minds much when other people say it.”
There was another incensed flurry of German. It began with the word ‘that,’ and Evan’s own German, picked up travelling with his family, was sufficient to let him pick up a few choice bits. Such as ‘childish,’ ‘crooked nose,’ ‘knows very well I let him win,’ and ‘smelly-footed whore son of a dirty nanny-goat.’ Evan assumed the rest was too unkind for Linkin to have let him be exposed to.
“I believe there’s been a misunderstanding,” Severus said in a voice choked with repressed triumph at so easily maneuvering Grindelwald into showing his position, if not his hand. He was managing to make it sound like laughter that admired the prisoner’s mastery of probably-profanity, and he was speaking loud and halting German whose accent betrayed that he’d learned it by reading but was perfectly comprehensible. That warmed Evan up, just a little, although he couldn’t really have said why if anyone had asked. “It isn’t Dumbledore to whom I refer.”
Grindelwald stopped pacing and turned to glare at them—more offended yet, if possible.
“There’s no need to look at him like that,” Evan said mildly. “He told you he had to.”
“Shut up, badger-brain,” Severus instructed hypocritically, but he didn’t mean it. Ev could feel the eager intrigue in him as they stood there, back to chest.
“You told my imprisoners that you come from my aunt,” Grindelwald noted, eyeing them assessingly.
“Well,” Evan said, smiling judiciously, “I have seen the lady recently, and if there’s anything you’d like to tell her, I’d be happy to pass it along…” He hesitated, then screwed up his nerve. Meeting the grubby old prisoner’s eye, he half declared and half admitted, “to m’dear old Auntie B.”
Grindelwald scowled, turning chillier as Evan claimed what rights and protection the thin blood between them could give him. He demanded, “Who are you?”
“Unimportant,” Severus said, somewhere between smooth and wry.
“You will give me your names!”
Evan was right: Grindelwald didn’t need a wand to be powerful. He flinched.
Spike didn’t. Shrugging, he said, “You may call him Occam, and me Murphy.”
“Nobody could possibly call you Murphy,” Evan protested, making a face at the sound of the name, at the same time Grindelwald said, puzzled, “Occamies I know, but what is a murph? A beast that changes?”
“Never mind,” Severus muttered in a frustrated my-joke-has-been-thwarted-by-idiocy sort of way.
Evan hoped, probably in vain, that he wasn’t visibly rolling his eyes. “You’d make a better occamy,” he rushed in suggest to his very own feathered serpent. “He can call me, er… Hawthorn? Runespoor?”
He was getting narrow-eye-stared at from front and back, and told Spike, “Look, not everything has to be clever, all right? We’d best get on with it, hadn’t we?”
Spike hummed dubiously. If Evan knew him at all, he was thinking that occamies were prettier and a three-headed snake that was so self-critical it often died as two-faced as Janus suited him better, but he didn’t argue. Which was just as well, because insisting on getting it exactly right when they only had an hour to do loads of things was about as feather-headed as it got.
“Yes,” Grindelwald said sharply. “Do not waste my time, little serpents.”
Now Evan could practically hear Spike not-commenting about what the man might be so busy with that he couldn’t have his time wasted. Instead of stepping on Spike’s foot to stop him actually saying any of it, he merely agreed, “Right-o. In any case, as he said, as far as I know Dumbledore’s still not the sort to give himself airs like that.”
“Just addled ones,” Severus muttered. Someone who didn’t know him might have thought he was griping because he couldn’t help himself, but there was a definite note of fondness in it. It was so definite that Evan was sure Grindelwald was meant to hear it—and seemed to; he narrowed his stony eyes a little more, but his eyebrow twitched in a sort of can’t-argue-with-that movement.
“You might say,” Evan continued affably, “that we’ve been sent by the Knights of Walpurgis.”
“But have you?” Grindelwald asked, eyes glittering in an unnervingly Spike-like sort of way. He sounded almost prepared to be impressed enough to grant them an iota of respect.
“A derivative group,” Severus said. Evan couldn’t quite name that tone as either modest or wry. “The original order has been somewhat… subsumed. It’s last, or latest, leader is the wizard on whose orders we’ve come.”
“And does he have a name?” Grindelwald asked—a bit snidely, in Evan’s opinion.
“His name is not to be spoken,” Severus said with a bit of a sneer in his voice. The sneer was not for Grindelwald, and Grindelwald was clearly supposed to notice that, and did. “I think we may call him Basilisk.”
Grindelwald leaned back in his… chair? It was chair-like, and in front of the writing desk. Like the writing desk, it had clearly been transfigured from the floor. Evan wasn’t sure if a shaped piece of floor that was still solidly part of it could properly be called a chair. Grindelwald sat back against it, in any case, and stroked his chin. Evan wondered whether the guards occasionally shaved him, or how that worked.
He didn’t have to wonder what Grindelwald was thinking, though. Spike’s signals had been almost brazen enough for a baby Hufflepuff to suss out, and this was no naïve badgerling. Grindelwald didn’t take any bait yet, though (not that anyone had expected him to), but only asked, “Then what does he want of me, this ‘basilisk’? They do nothing but kill and eat, these monsters.”
Evan considered this to be an extremely fair point, but Severus said, smoothly, “Like any great serpent, like any dragon, they also protect what is theirs, or theirs to guard. The basilisk holds you in high regard, sir. Speaking in broad strokes, he wants what you wanted, for his own people, for the wizards of Britain.”
“Freedom, safety, comfort, glory,” Grindelwald mocked. Evan expected him to fold his arms and sneer, but he didn’t. The remains of Germanic discipline, maybe.
“Freedom to be great, without scuttling about like cowed dogs, hiding from the mundane world,” Severus agreed. Evan heard the hair-rustling as he nodded equably. “Freedom to make safety from the ever-advancing, ever evolving march of cold iron. Freedom to live as we wish, to use the gifts born into us openly, to make as much of ourselves as we can dream and as our natures permit—not merely so much as we may, insofar as we don’t make dare to make lesser mortals the least bit anxious or envious.”
“You are eloquent, Occamy Murphy,” Grindelwald said, stroking his chin again. It made Evan a bit queasy to watch long, square-tipped, shrunken-skinned fingers pass over a jaw too much like the one he saw in his mirror every day. Even, or maybe especially, since it was a rather jowlier one than even Dad’s, let alone Evan’s own. “Are these words writ down for you, or do you believe what you say?”
“No one ever tells him what to say,” Evan told his… his cousin. It was all natural; they were related, even if it was a distant tie. This was his cousin, not a cursed mirror. “I mean, they could, but why on earth?”
“The silvertail tells me what to say all the time,” Severus contradicted dryly, moving out from behind Evan so as to more easily quirk an eyebrow at him.
“Oh, well, dinner parties,” Evan dismissed this airily. “Of course she does; you’re rubbish at those.”
“Answer my question,” Grindelwald commanded impatiently.
Severus pursed his lips. Ev was worried that Grindelwald would think his pause to narrow down on a precise answer had been to figure out what Grindelwald wanted to hear, but Spike’s customary Accuracy Is God tone carried the day for him. “There are some who agree with your decisions completely, within our organization,” he said in his most I-must-be-fair-and-accurate-but-am-surrounded-by-crazy-people voice, “and want war of one sort or another. To dominate, or destroy utterly. There are those who want complete secrecy—to be entirely unentangled from the muggle world, our communities ours and only ours, no contact and no mingling.
“We both think,” he indicated himself and Evan, “that the muggle world has grown too large, too ungainly, too complex, and too sensitive, since the turn of the century, for the dream of dealing with them in any simple manner to still be achievable. What the Basilisk truly believes, what he hopes to achieve in the end… I would not dare to speak for him. But this I can say: more than others in our world, he understands that sprawling, disconnected adversary.”
He tilted his head again, regarding Grindelwald sardonically. “Do not ask me for details, but it’s my firm belief that when your puppets came for London, the Basilisk learned first-hand and up close to respect the power of the muggle bomb.”
Grindelwald was thinkingly quiet for a moment, his wolf-statue eyes trying to pierce Spike’s head (Evan could have told him not to bother). Finally, he said, “In America, they punish the mixing of blood very harshly—or they did once. In your England, they do not make of it a crime, but I remember much contempt.”
“Much,” Severus agreed quietly, his own eyes slitting into cautious knives as he met that grey gaze.
“We do not think this way in Europe,” Grindelwald told him. “It is distasteful to lower oneself to consort with the creatures of dull clay, but strong magical blood can come of this sacrifice, out of lines whose light is dimming.”
“Families don’t survive without new blood,” Severus allowed, noncommittal. “Stale blood, mixed and re-mixed, does not lead to healthy outcomes.”
“We know in Europe,” Grindelwald agreed, “that magic is magic. That every magical child is ours, no matter what filth it came out of. You have the word ‘mudblood,’ but mud can be rich soil, and what grows out of it can be, itself, pure and bright.”
“If you start a dissertation on the distinctions between mud, loam, and clay, again,” Evan told Spike hastily, “we’ll never get out of here unless I sit on you.”
Spike’s eyes flashed to him—with good humor, although ‘merry’ wasn’t a word that could really be applied. Back to Grindelwald, he murmured, “There were changelings once in Britain, too. Some think there should be again.”
“Are you one of these?” Grindelwald challenged him.
“I find it an extreme solution to an admittedly difficult problem,” Spike said carefully, his eyes darkening.
Evan couldn’t have said what, exactly, it was about the old man’s expression that set him off. He just suddenly felt impelled, quite strongly, never to find out what I will understand you better and better until you’re mine looked like on a face that decidedly was not his own and never would be. “It’s quite a young order,” he therefore said affably. “Diversity of opinions and all that. All work itself out in time, no doubt. After all, there’s surely room for minor differences of opinion when everyone’s on the same side, what?”
Now they were both studying him, which was infinitely preferable. Grindelwald just wanted to know whether he was naïve or not, and was probably not (Evan hoped) being helped to any conclusions by the sleepily complaisant smile he was getting back. Spike, on the other hand, had been surprised and alarmed by what he sometimes liked to call a ‘whiskery old military sod-ism,” and was trying so hard to get into his head that Ev could almost feel his skin prickle.
Ev would have liked to take his hand and give it a possessive-and-reassuring squeeze, but that didn’t seem quite the thing at the moment. He didn’t even really want to angle himself towards Spike, like they might have at school when they thought they were alone but weren’t sure, in case Grindelwald understood that sort of thing. It might be useful to tell him how they stood together at some point, but he didn’t want to just let the information fly for nothing.
Instead, he let his eyes flicker even sleepier as he turned his attention inward. Without the least idea whether it would have any effect, he imagined his heart-rate pounding louder, slower, deep and contented. Remembered, with all the concentration he could muster, the warm, blissful, weighty exhaustion of curling up around a Spike all rattled by the momentary inability to care about anyone but him.
After a moment of continuing to look dubious and paranoid at Evan, Severus jumped in his skin, just a little, and his right hand moved as if it wanted to plaster itself over his heart. Just a tiny twitch, but then his shoulders dropped, and his eyes turned a softer midnight. This completely ruined Ev’s ability to keep his heartbeat loudly soporific, but he supposed that was all right if Spike had already gotten the message.
“Really, Runespoor,” Spike complained, his eyes having moved back to Grindelwald once they’d finished filling Ev up with hot mulled wine. “There’s never any such thing as a side, only people willing to deal and compromise to get what they want instead of going to war against each other.”
“That’s what I said,” Evan complained mildly, letting himself smile a little at his clever cobra, who was taking his vague, insipid, meaningless platitude and turning it into an implied promise to treat a prideful old man who’d (apparently) lost everything with respect, as an ally, to never tell him you must be with me in all things or I’m against you. “Isn’t that what I said?” he appealed to no one in particular, although Grindelwald was welcome to pick it up. “I’m sure that’s what I said.”
“Perhaps you think I do not speak English,” Grindelwald said irritably, “but it may be you who does not. Or perhaps you do not appreciate the value of time. English red-heads, you are all the same.”
At least Spike looked as baffled as Evan felt. Well, he didn’t look baffled, exactly, but he blinked twice very fast and his left eyebrow furrowed down.
“You have admitted to me that you have lied to the guardians of this keep,” Grindelwald snapped. “I will call them back and tell them so if you do not get to the point! The novelty of strange company is nothing to me: I told you not to waste my time!”
Spike opened his mouth to snap back, probably because there was an misprint in his mental dictionary even Evan, Narcissia, Lucius, and Reggie all working together had been unable to correct. It defined ‘correspondence’ as ‘silly ego-stroking social dance with no real purpose because politeness is fundamentally not useful.’ He might not have entirely missed the significance of Grindelwald’s full writing desk, but he clearly hadn’t grasped its full potential. It would never have occurred to him that a prisoner could be a legitimately busy wizard.
Evan hastily and loudly said, “Someone else seems to be spending theirs rather liberally. Where’s that tea at?”
As he’d hoped, the elves had just been waiting for someone to say the word. No sooner had he spoken but a tray appeared on the floor. It had a pitcher of water, a pot of jam, and a plate with slices of unappetizing white brine cheese and a pile of some things that looked as if plain, uncooked scones had fallen into the frying pan. The pitcher, tray, pot, cups, and plate were all wooden, and they had runes carved in that enchanted them to be feather-light, soft on impact, and unbreakable.
Spike glanced at the desk, saw the stony expression as Grindelwald watched him look, and shrugged, abandoning the idea of eating at a real table like real people. He squinted at the tray. As a frost-white stool formed under it, lifting it to a height that would let them eat comfortably if they sat on the floor, the room quickly began to feel less clammily humid.
Grindelwald’s chapped lips pursed.
“I have no intention of sitting on ice,” Severus said irritably as he settled himself down in the Japanese style. It was just like him to take that expression as a criticism, when it was so clearly a refusal to be impressed with his wandless magic. Crossly (which was different from irritably, although Ev would have been mildly interested to know whether Grindelwald could tell), he added, “So much for tea.”
“It wouldn’t have been to your standards,” Evan commiserated. He didn’t drop any comforting arms around Spike’s shoulders as he himself dropped down on crossed legs, much as he wanted to.
“Perhaps they think you will make your own,” Grindelwald told Spike sarcastically, sitting down with very little grace.
Evan resolved to not only tell Narcissa but act out for her the way that Spike, rather than saying anything sarcastic back, took on an I am an idiot sort of chastised look, put the pitcher down on the stone floor, and brought it to a simmer with a touch while fishing a linen pouch and a tin of tea out of a cloak-pocket.
It took about all he had to say, “Oh, ta,” just in a strangled voice, without bursting out laughing. Especially since Grindelwald was giving Spike the what is WRONG with you eyes-different-sizes look that Spike had, to date, gotten at some point from absolutely everyone he’d ever met with the possible exception of Dumbledore and the slightly-less-possible of Evans. Ev hadn’t seen her do it, but was really quite sure she had. He himself certainly had, although probably not very often since third year.
Blowing on his tea, Evan watched carefully as Grindelwald looked, still slightly cross-eyed, at Ev’s sulking Spike. Eventually, the fascination had ebbed enough for the prisoner to take a cautious sip and then give it, too, a confused look, though not a displeased one.
Ev wasn’t surprised. Bulgaria didn’t know how to do tea properly. Apart from the Turkish variety, they weren’t all that strong on coffee, either. Admittedly, living with Severus left a fellow more than a bit spoiled in both these departments, but here they really did seem to put more effort into brandy and fermented grain drinks that weren’t even alcoholic.
“Well,” Ev said comfortably when he judged Grindelwald was about ready to stop staring suspiciously at his tea and start snapping again, “We’ll blame it on my hair if you like, but I must admit you’re quite right that getting straight into a matter’s not usually the thing. Still, if it’ll make you and Occamy happy—”
“It might,” Severus put in dryly.
Evan grinned at him before continuing, “I don’t mind. What is it you want, then?”
“I think it is you who wants something,” Grindelwald pointed out, sour, and sniffed his tea as though he suspected a will-weakening potion.
“We’re emissaries,” Severus reminded him. “All we want is to go home, which we’ll do at the conclusion of this visit regardless of its success.”
“You’re lying,” Grindelwald accused immediately, scowling.
Evan grinned again, delighted. That’d teach Spike to be sulky in public. “He’s just mad because he had to give up his flat for a new day job and hasn’t moved into the new place yet,” he explained. “We really do only have today; we’re back to England tonight and that new job starts tomorrow.”
“Ugh,” uttered Spike with clean disgust. “It doesn’t really start till Monday,” he reminded himself forlornly. “I get an orientation.”
“With twinkles,” Evan reminded him, still grinning. “And walrus-face.”
Grindelwald’s faded eyebrows furrowed. Slowly, he said, “On Monday, September begins. You will be at that school, you will be teaching? How old are you, boy?”
Ev and Spike glanced at each other in surprise. “I won’t be a professor,” Severus said slowly. “That was… quite a leap, sir.”
Grindelwald dismissed him with a bah noise. “Do you think you are the first to call your teachers these things?”
Evan was unrepentant. He’d learned something, and the information was about to be in the public record anyway. If working it out made Grindelwald feel smug with himself, so much the better.
“So, then: what you have come for is information on Albus Dumbledore. Tell the truth, boy: is it for you or for your master?”
“That’s not what we were sent for,” Spike said, still slowly, “but I’d certainly be interested to hear anything you had to say.”
“Look at you, learning the value of gossip,” Evan smiled, bumping his shoulder by way of a distraction for their audience. That had been next-door to a lie, and Grindelwald had already called Spike on untruthfulness when he just resented the truth. “The silvertail would be so proud.”
“Oh, shut up,” Spike groused. Turning back to Grindelwald, he said, “In any case, we don’t expect you to hear us out without an assurance that we can give you return value.”
“Can you help me from this place?” Grindelwald demanded.
“I seriously doubt it,” Spike replied bluntly.
Although Evan was ready to thunk his head on the ice-table in despair, Grindelwald looked pleased. Of course, he was the one who’d had the prison built. “Good,” he said curtly, “you are honest. What, then, do you imagine you can do for me? I have such comforts as I require; your soft English luxuries do not interest me.”
“I imagine,” Ev said thoughtfully, itching at his nose with his knuckle (Spike had really used a lot of air-moisture to make that table, and probably wouldn’t have been able to make stools for them even if anyone had wanted a cold seat. He was going to have to hit the lotion hard, the way his skin was feeling), “that you’d like to be able to communicate more conveniently with your followers. The anti-avian spell’s carved into that window quite deeply, and I already know your guards are nosy fellows who’d like more reading material about the place to keep them busy.”
“And how do you think you will do that?” Grindelwald fired back, leaning forward keenly.
Ev gave him an airy shrug, and assured him, “No trouble at all. I need to talk to some of them m’self, I’m sure spreading about a bit won’t be a problem.”
“Ahhhh.” The old man’s very straight back eased out, just a little. He was looking at Evan piercingly, but Ev had grown up with Spike, Narcissa, and all his aunts and uncles. This was nothing. It might have thrown Reggie and Uncle Orion a little, but Ev just smiled back at him lazily.
He wasn’t the one who swung it for them, though, in the end. Later, smiling under the open sky again, he commented, “I don’t think conjugal visits is a promise you can keep.”
Instantly horrified, Spike very nearly sputtered, “I didn’t make any promises, and if I’d promised anything, conjugal visits was not it! I threatened him with suspicious threatening activity-monitoring visits!”
“Sure, Spike,” Evan laughed, “but that was what he was angling for, so there you are.”
“I can’t believe he put his experimental-muggle-vivisecting-prison in a lemon grove,” Severus boggled, looking as if he’d be ill once he’d finished wrapping his mind around it.
“Well,” Evan tilted his head, sliding in around Spike’s neat, warm waist, “to be fair, I think it was more that he planted the lemon grove around the prison. Thumbing his nose, quite likely, since I don’t think he was living there at the time. D’you think he had the hives brought in on purpose?”
“Wouldn’t have needed to, bees and wind are some of the more common lemon tree pollinators and Bulgaria’s stuffed with them,” Severus and his Herbology NEWT shrugged. “I want to know if that’s why he’s losing his teeth.”
“Oh, Spike…”
“No, really—if he’s got an addiction to those godawful sweets or to lemonade and they’re not giving him any dental charms, that’s something we might be able to offer him, isn’t it?”
“That’s a bit ruthless,” Ev noted, not really judging it one way or the other.
Spike blinked at him. “You don’t think we ought to ensure someone we’re trying to make our ally can keep his bloody teeth?”
“Well, when you put it like that,” Evan laughed, and pressed him down against the sedate, nicely-earthed roots of the nearest tree, with it’s classically-shaped, glossy, bright green leaves and the vibrant smells that the soil and Spike’s herbal notes complicated gloriously.
Six hours later, the unspeakable danger of Spike confronted with two separate sets of snippy bureaucracies had been finally smoothed over. The Scottish sun was rouging mountains so familiar that Evan’s brain was wrung taught and jangling between barely noticing them at all and running around in circles screaming, and they were looking at quite a different castle, with gates that looked far more welcoming but were in fact far more darkly foreboding.
Evan hesitantly put his hand under the squared brickwork pillar under the Faithfully Vigilant piggywing that sat gazing benevolently out at the Forbidden Forest. “You sure you’ll be all right, Spike?”
Severus’s eyes darted, as if trying to find humor, to the not-quite-lacily spiky ironwork of the gate. “It’s just the school,” he said dryly. “It’s not as if it’s the hunting-grounds of werewolves, entitled torturers, or sadistic, giggling, ravening marauders.”
Evan looked at him helplessly, his hands opening and closing as if a wand could help.
Severus smiled more dryly still, then reached up to touch his face, and leaned in to kiss him, and pulled quietly away. Addressing the piggiwings, his face falling hard, he declared, “Severus Snape, Research Fellow, coming home.”
The gates swung open, and he strode through without a backwards glance.
Evan watched his narrow back until the tall, hard oak doors swallowed it. Swallowing himself, he apparated home. To his own gates, outside Rosier Hall. He wanted to walk through the gardens, to touch every rose, to walk the limits of his land as he and Spike had done at Lammas.
He did keep his shoes on, though.
Linkin joined him before he’d walked more than five minutes or so, dressed in a tunic-like object Evan recognized from an old curtain, and a very tall grey top hat over his pointy ears. Honoring Evan’s mood, he wrapped his long, spindly fingers around Evan’s wrist and squeezed once before slipping something that was probably a biscuit into his overrobe pocket, and didn’t speak.
When, an hour or two of slow meandering later, complete with a pause to sketch Linkin dusting the gazebo, they’d made their way around to the front doors though, he scowled ferociously and demanded, “Master Evan will eat?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Evan said listlessly. “Mum and Dad aren’t home, are they? Grandpère’s in his rooms over the studio?”
“Young Master and Mistress Callisto are in Brazil, painting things,” Linkin said dismissively. “And Master is staying in his suite in London, as usual. Twist is looking after Master, and Mistress Callisto is looking after Young Master. Master Evan will have hot chocolate, or onion soup.”
“Soup, I suppose. You’ve set up my room?”
Linkin looked insulted. “Young master’s suite has been prepared for him all month. Linkin has cleaned it every day.”
Evan smiled, a little wanly. “I’ll have it there, then.” He paused. “Two bowls, Linkin. Just in case.” Linkin bowed, and Evan pretended not to see him smirking.
He made his way back to the door of the sterile little room he’d grown up in—
—and stepped into the slate-grey, maple, and sky-paintings of his flat in Diagon. Everything was just as it should be, except that the window looked out onto the riotous flower-beds of his House’s garden, and there was a squared-off, empty space in one corner where the china cabinet had been. Not the one with the tea things; that would be in the kitchen that had formerly been Evan’s closet.
Evan put his hand in his pocket and took out the little package from Dumbledore that Lily had given him and Spike in the caves. He re-opened it, settled it carefully in the corner, and tapped it with his wand. “Engorgio!”
The tiny wardrobe swelled until it was proper-furniture sized. Evan smiled, running his hand lovingly down the harmonious Celtic carvings, the knotwork and runework, to see that Dumbledore had had it made in maple. He opened its door and stepped through.
In a grey stone-slab room hung with the calligraphy from his office at St. Mungo’s and lined with faded tapestries, shelves stuffed with potions books and journals, and ancient wall sconces, Severus was looking harried at a writing desk that wasn’t significantly less ugly than Grindelwand’s even if it wasn’t actually bolted to the flagstones. He seemed to have clutched through his hair more than once, and the bed they’d given him managed to look forbidding even with curtains all around it.
“Have you eaten?” Ev asked, eyebrows up scoldingly.
He was rewarded with a look of pure, startled relief, flatteringly (he’d never say pathetically) grateful. “I tried,” Spike defended himself, “but Dumbledore and Slughorn kept talking to me, and the new Divination professor is an inveterate gusher and the new DADA teacher’s apparently heard I was also interested in his job. In any case, there’s a lot to prepare for, and only tonight and tomorrow to do it.”
“Well, come through and eat at home,” Ev said, folding his arms by way of warning Spike that the next step of the invitation would be to get physically dragged. “You can read all that lot on the sofa with me, can’t you, there’s no need to ruin your eyes in this poky dungeon of an office. Come on, Linkin’s made onion soup.”
Spike hesitated, but it had to be for the look of the thing. “With sage and thyme?” he hedged.
“Well, I told him two bowls, so I’m sure he made it just as herbishly inedible as you could ever wish.”
He held out a hand, but it was his forearm Spike took in the end. Over his tree, where the ribbons had bound them fast together. “Oh, all right, then,” the git sniffed loftily, and let Evan, laughing at him through a kiss, pull him through the Vanishing Cabinet into their family’s House.
Spike took one long, slow look around at all the pale wood and the cool wallpaper and furniture, their shadowy blue-grey sofa and armchairs still smooth, soft glove leather until winter drove them to wand-tap the spectrolite inset and turn them to suede. His gaze drank in Evan’s paintings, the window that opened onto the bird-and-cricket riddled roses and trees through the window instead of the bustle and noise of a busy street, all his books that didn’t have (much) to do with work. Down the hall, where the only door missing was to the second bedroom, which had never seen much use anyway.
All the tension hemorrhaged out of Severus’s body, as if only the soles of his shoes had been keeping it in and they’d suddenly been vanished. He collapsed limply on the sofa, still clutching Ev’s wrist, and breathed, “Thank Merlin fucking god.” Linkin hadn’t even made it back with the soup before he’d curled up around a squashy armrest and fallen asleep, hard, pulling a bemused Evan semi-diagonal.
Evan would rather have liked some help deciding how to describe their visit to Grindelwald to the Dark Lord. He was hardly going to wake Spike up for a triviality like that, though. Not even for Linkin’s excellent and homely soup, if Spike’s body was that sure it needed sleep more. So he just changed the order to a single hot chocolate, summoned the worn old blanket Severus had stolen from the common room when they’d left school (time to get a new one now?), scooped his eternally frazzled snidget up into the cushioning shield of his body, and lit the hearth.
This was far from a perfect evening. For one thing, it was both vexing and fretful to know his parents might come back at any time and become more the masters of his House than he was. It left him feeling like a child again; every day he’d ever spent in his own house had been just like that, because Mum and Dad didn’t believe in schedules. His theory was that they’d wanted him to be afraid of ordering Linkin to serve him pudding for breakfast, in case they popped back home in the middle of it.
Besides, he’d been longing for their own, familiar bed, which Linkin was sure to have in its proper state: aired and cool and smelling just slightly of sandalwood. He’d also ended up quite looking forward to that soup, and the Dark Lord, however ultimately unimportant, really was a nagging worry.
More pressingly, Linkin would keep whatever he liked from his parents unless they gave him direct orders otherwise, but Evan would definitely have to explain himself (which was to say, Spike) to Grandpère, and soon. Linkin wouldn’t be blind to or able to ignore someone smelling like Family who hadn’t before, and Grandpère had never been entirely convinced on the merits of Severus Prince’s prickly, penniless, half-breed grandson even as a friend for Evan. With Narcissa’s support he wasn’t worried, exactly, and he expected the recent work Spike had put into his sunlit career and his de Medici connections to help, but it still wasn’t a conversation he was looking forward to.
Still, it occurred to him as he drifted off with his world safe in his arms, he’d never, not once in his life, been quite so much at home as this.
He woke with the scent of roses drowning the air through a window he certainly hadn’t opened, dawnlight and gauzy curtains streaming in and silver-green feathers bubbling over in his heart: Severus had turned them around overnight and was curled all about him, a possessive hand splayed under his throat with a finger at his pulse, sleepily kissing the small of his back over and over. He might very well have been imagining it, but he thought what Severus was mouthing almost silently against his skin (a habit formed to combat humiliating pensieve evidence, as if his general demeanor wouldn’t have embarrassed him enough) was my beautiful, my brilliant, so lovely.
Which was awfully generous, coming from someone who’d gotten his head wedged between a sofa and a ribcage and whose legs were almost certainly faster asleep than he was, due to being trapped under the rather solider bones of the bloke he was being so sympathetic about.
Equally generously deciding to live up to his name, Evander made sure Hogwarts’ one and only apprentice professor was only almost late for his very first breakfast at the Staff Table. And then, rather grudgingly, he gathered up his best-warded sketchbook and went off to talk to bloody Voldemort himself.