Hovering between graduation and the opening shots of war, two Death Eaters will work towards their masters' degrees—if they can find time between All Of The Feels and bickering about the rent. Perhaps unexpectedly, it's the art student who's burdened with Ancient and Lethally-Forbidden Secrets, but Severus's biggest problem in life is always being someone else's solution.
Disclaimer: Profitless fanwork
Dedicated to Lupin5th, who wanted to know All About The Art, and to psyche_girl, who is not only the most encouraging of betas but was very, very sad to think that Evan might not have done a certain something before Igor Karkaroff's trial. (I already knew he had, it just hadn't come up.)
Warnings: Implied history of trauma. One-sided communication-by-thumping within an intimate relationship: no one is hurt, put in fear, or intimidated by it. Potentially disturbing interactions of magic and faith. Tooth-rotting fluff. The author does not always feel that anachronism* is enough of a reason to prevent Severus from snarking.
Notes: This story is a one-shot set between two fics in its arc: The Wicket Gate and Valley of the Shadow. While reading either of these would answer any characterization questions (like, 'would Rowling recognize this person called Severus?' Answer: See, she made him and she owns him and she made him strong, conscientious, and clever, but she doesn't seem to think one can know and like him at the same time. Which is about par for the course with his masters, at least one of whom he's got completely fooled...), you don't need to read them to understand the story.
This is the Wizarding Britain you know, not an AU. The Death Eaters are a thing, though not an active army. If these guys aren't quite in the fold yet, then they will be soon and they know it.
It's just that no one thinks it matters much. After all, that's just politics. You humor the rich old fanatics who can help your career, and then you go home to your real life, right?
Now their way lay just upon the bank of the river: here, therefore, CHRISTIAN and his companion walked with great delight; they drank also of the water of the river, which was pleasant and enlivening to their weary spirits: besides, on the banks of this river, on either side, were green trees, that bore all manner of fruit; and the leaves of the trees were good for medicine; with the fruit of these trees they were also much delighted; and the leaves they ate to prevent surfeits, and other diseases that are incident to those that heat their blood by travels. On either side of the river was also a meadow, curiously beautiful with lilies; and it was green all the year long. In this meadow they lay down and slept; for here they might lie down safely.
—John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress
November, 1978
"I'd think you vain if I didn't know you," Severus said, "and, knowing you, I think you're terribly vain."
Evan slowly turned his hands, eyes fixed on the embroidery at his wrists in the mirror as the angles changed and the light swept over newly exposed millimeters, stitch by stitch. "Should I say, when I find you chopping up things you've got no reason to or chance of using all year, that I'd say I think you're looking for reasons to be anti-social except that I know you are?"
"No," Severus corrected him, mellow with his arms over the back of the armchair, eyes not on him but on his darting brushes. "You'd say, 'except you don't need a reason.' How long have you been at this?"
"A few hours, I suppose, going by the light," he said indifferently, raising his arms to get the full-frontal foreshortening in, moving his hands and fingers in all the twisting exercises and at the approved treacle pace.
"Evan."
"Spike-my-Spike?" He peered closely at the shadows under his fingernails. By and large a sort of dull, dark orchid flush, as expected, but with a paler reflection from the nail that he hadn't noticed before, very subtle…
"This is like me practicing knife-sharpening when I have a theory exam."
Evan drooped—but made sure he watched the way the fabric shifted at his shoulders and arms as he slumped and his hands fell, the light slithering down the folds of cloth. Severus sighed behind him. If Evan was any judge, there was just a note, buried in all the long-suffering resignation, of appreciation for his vision and his drive and quite possibly even his form.
"There isn't a deadline," he protested feebly, but even as he said it he was sending the brushes to soak in their cleaning solution. He didn't know what it was made of and he wasn't asking. Severus kept making it for him, it smelled better than turpentine, it didn't eat the glue, and if he didn't use it there would be Weeks of Unspoken Resentful Hurt Feelings. That was all he needed to know.
"And if, every time he did it, you didn't shrink two sizes into your silly waistcoats—which is strikingly evident when you don't starch your shirts, Evan, in case you weren't aware, and having notable deltoids and pectorals is the opposite of helpful, in this case, because it means that, as they are shrinking, people are taking note of them—"
"Far be it from me to discourage you from looking at my chest," Evan said mildly, doing his best not to sound smug and only just managing not to flex anything, as would have gotten him scorned like mad and he would have deserved it, "but I'm sure you can finish your sentence at the same time."
Severus glared. Not, alas, at his chest, and with a distinct air of THAT'S what you got out of that?!
To which, of course, the answer Evan smiled back at him was Yes, because the rest of it was silly and that's the bit I care about and other people don't see what you do and you know it, ergo: silly.
"In that case," Severus went on in his huffiest, most Cat Who Has Jumped Nose-First Into The Closed Window, Nothing To See Here voice, "which is to say, if you didn't collapse like a cheese souffle someone had slammed the oven door shut on, I'd think you didn't care that, every time he sees you, your grandfather asks you what progress you're making." He had, by the end of this sentence, gotten over his embarrassed snit; he did like to pretend nothing had happen in these cases, when he was allowed to, although when he needled instead the fallout could last for bewilderingly long periods. It had been very sudden; he'd slammed the oven door shut on it.
Having hauled himself out of his momentary kerfluffle, he was, really, in one of his implacable moods, with serene black eyes he probably thought were coolly unsympathetic and really weren't, his hair still pulled back and a bit of a disaster from work. He probably thought that coming over all immovable-object-with-a-touch-of-superiority like that would provoke Evan into a storm of ambition, because it would certainly have worked on him. In fact it made Ev want to pull him into the bath, drag teeth down his neck (to begin with) to shake him up again, and then curl up on the couch together for a lovely warm nap, during which he would allow Severus a book, especially if Severus felt like reading out loud.
He got shirty if Evan got him too side-tracked to cook and then owled for take-away too often, though. Anyone would think he was being cheated into paying more on their living expenses, not less.
He was also still talking. "And if you hadn't made a point of managing to get in at least a sketch of everyone who was ever at school with us after first year …. , or if every detention you ever got hadn't been for sneaking out after curfew to do studies of different parts of the castle and grounds in moonlight, when both your father and said grandfather repeatedly told you that you should only do that instead of sleeping maybe once a season and would not intercede for you with the professors, I might believe you were only undertaking this profession out of duty."
"That doesn't mean I have to be in an enormous hurry to get my mastery, does it?" he protested.
Severus shrugged. "I don't know about perspective or symmetry or tone or focal points or bugger-me-auntie—"
"Do you have an auntie?" Evan asked, raising an eyebrow as he swirled the brushes and checked to see if they were cleaned yet.
Severus raised one back. "Would I suggest you bugger her if I did?" Ev grinned, drying his brushes with a tap of his wand. "What I do know is what looks real and that your grandfather's about as liable to give an undeserved compliment or hold his tongue as I am. And I know about work."
Evan wandered over and draped himself over Severus's back. "What do you know about work, plough-horse?" he asked fondly. "More specifically than how to do it until you're looking up at a tombstone?"
He leaned in contentedly to the bony shoulderblades lifting and falling in an exasperated sigh against him, let his arms slip around ribs that weren't too worryingly ripply this month. "I know there's the work that moves the world forward, the work that maintains, the work that preserves—and then there's hobbies and make-work and money-shuffling. And the first three, for those who can do them well, better than others, and get the chance…"
"You're not a very nice person," Evan told him reproachfully after a moment, face snuggled mournfully into his neck, breathing in home. And also whatever strain of the Wolfsbane potion Belby had the lab working on this week.
Evan had not previously thought that 'burnt strawberry, hot glass, and pine' was a smell. It wasn't bad, exactly, but it wasn't exactly good, either, and it definitely wasn't Severus. On the other hand, he was glad, really, that Severus had waited to wash at home instead of scrubbing up in the big sink at work, with the sterilizing soap that was murder on his poor hair.
(Which was, now Evan came to think of it, not much to look at from a distance, incredibly difficult to convince to do anything it wasn't already planning to while being, when not protected, very nearly insanely sensitive to environmental things like the weather, and very, very fine indeed, much softer than anyone suspected or than Evan would ever let anyone know, entirely addictive, all Ev's).
"I should think not," Severus agreed haughtily, his sniffy tone rather spoiled by the hand that had awkwardly come up backwards to tangle in Evan's (somewhat coarser, but therefore more cooperative and also much prettier) hair. He turned around so that they both had to straighten up and, when he'd held on for whatever complex arithmantical equation told him was long enough, asked quietly, "What are you afraid of?"
To graduates of some other House, this might have been a challenge, or even fighting words, but they were sensible people. When one sensible person asked another what he was afraid of, the expected answer was: what the danger is.
"I'll show you," Ev said glumly, and hauled out one of the canvasses that he'd magically primed and then gessoed in a fit of wild optimism earlier, before horrifying (or, at least, depressing) himself and retreating to the nice, safe practice of self-painting. As he switched canvases on the easel, he asked, "Put one of those bugs in the magnifying box?"
"Does it matter which one?"
He looked at the daubs of paint left over on his palette. "Do I still have a Mint Leaf Beetle?"
Severus looked at him, followed his eyes to the palette, looked at his waistcoat. Then Severus rolled his eyes. "I'm so badly tempted to say no and give you the rhinoceros," he said tolerantly.
"Oh, that's fine too," Evan assured him, "just don't give me a lady-bird or anything like like that; I've already softened most of my reds to flesh-tones and I'd have to squeeze out more even if I had a smaller canvas. 'Druther use what I've got out."
"Fair enough," said Severus, a bit cheered, the conservationist slant appealing to him as Ev had known it would.
The bug, un-petrified and put in the little box that cast its image solidly upward at about the size of an Alpine goat, started ambling around 'in' the open modeling area of Ev's home studio. Its shiny blue-black carapace stood out strongly enough against the white illusion-friendly backdrops to make Evan squint, and he hoped Severus didn't get a headache from it.
Photosensitivity on its own was sometimes enough to hit either of them with a case of (what Severus insisted deserved to be called) the megrims all by itself. He thought Evan was crazy for not confining himself to darkish and neutral colored clothes, like he did, but his hair was black. Evan couldn't get away from having red-gold at the edges of his vision without spending, well, longer than combing and clubbing took, at any rate, and even if he could be bothered Severus would start twitting him about his hair in tones more mocking than captivated, so he'd long since decided he might as well have fun.
Besides, while Severus was only ever going to need to look professional, and it might not matter now, in the circles a portraitist moved in, one was expected to look one's best. And Dad had always hinted that clients were most cooperative when they were presented with a pleasant and engaging studio environment.
And, if anyone he was inclined to be honest with had asked him, Ev would have told them that there was an enormous psychological advantage to walking around being pleasant and blond at everyone in rose-spectrum colors in Wizarding Britain. Narcissa liked pale colors, which both suited her coloring and suggested purity, and that was all well and good, but people who had actually been at school with him had already forgotten he hadn't been in Hufflepuff.
Not people from his year, granted. That would be too much to ask, when there'd only been forty-odd of them and they'd all had at least one class together. And the only Slytherins who forgot were the sort like Avery from his form and Lucius's two, er, friends, who'd probably made it into the House either because they'd insisted and the Hat hadn't found any virtues in them that made them obvious fits elsewhere, or because a failure to understand why one sometimes should do something other than simply grabbing what one wanted could, in an especially bad light, pass for ambition.
Still. People who'd been at school with him, with some of whom he had gone under the bleachers, behind the greenhouses, or up the Astronomy tower, had completely forgotten his true colors, even when they had personally pulled him close by the scarf or tie.
But he did try to stick to dark browns, blues, and greens at home, because even on a good day it was always a bit of a coin-toss what Severus would just think was foolish and flash and what would actually hurt his eyes. On days when the potion wasn't working as expected, he'd come home right on the edge already. Or when a newly bitten werewolf young enough to make Severus want to kick a hole through the world tried to sign up as a test subject, or Ranjit Patil got a bright idea and Belby let him waste materials trying it out even though he and Severus both already knew why it wouldn't work. Or when Potter was not just stalking but harassing him, or Evan or Narcissa was threatening to make him go to dinner with someone other than themselves (whether or not Narcissa's fiancé was included in 'someone' was also, on any given day, a coin-toss). Even just on days when the elevators at St. Mungo's played Celestina Warbeck or Calliope and the Jarveys, or someone was just being generically annoying, it wouldn't take anything half as dramatic as a huge, iridescent black bug against a white screen to tip Severus over.
A glint of light off a window could do it, which was why Evan had spent more time than Severus considered sane choosing window treatments (well. That, and because Severus's increasingly-incredulous face was always good for an afternoon's light entertainment). So could the Fudge baby crying from downstairs, or voices in the street, although this was not why Severus had spent so much time on six kinds of soundproofing that Evan had stopped finding it hilarious and got bored.
It might, however, have been why Severus was carefully arranging a backdrop of mint leaves against the back of the magnifying box. They didn't cut off all of the white, but they made for a good transition color and a good background—and, if it mattered, they made the beetle happy. It wasn't going to matter for long, so Evan supposed it was nice that it had its favorite food for as long as it would do.
Not bothering to ask the extraordinarily pointless question of where Severus, whose clothes didn't look as if they had more pockets than the obligatory handkerchief-and-pocketwatch one on his waistcoat, had taken the mint from, Evan beamed and planted a well done you brilliant thing sort of kiss on him.
Before realizing that other people were more or less pointless, Evan had taken looking for a Suitable Spouse almost as seriously as his mother would have wanted him to at that age, and it had been quite a busy year and a half. He hadn't ever met anybody else, in that period or ever, who would or could at once accept a compliment with abashed pleasure by whole-body squirm, return a kiss with otherwise unruffled aplomb, and, with the rest of their face, say you are so unspeakably weird that my massive vocabulary fails me, you strange person with extremely low standards.
Which just went to show why other people were more or less pointless, but there you were, and at least they had each other to be tedious or creepy with, according to taste.
"Right-ho," he tugged Severus back to the canvas. "Now, what we have here is a painting surface that I've already prepared to the best of my ability, so that it should be able to accept a living portrait. Not meant to tell you quite what that means, of course."
"You've painted some sort of arithmantic array on it with a potion whose recipe the Most Extraordinary Society of Pillocks doesn't let their members see," Severus said with tolerant impatience. "Your Guild may guard its details, as it should, but it used to publish boasts about how lesser mortals could never comprehend or reproduce such a complex array, until the muggles came out with flying buttresses. I assume that at that point they could no longer escape the conclusion that other people can do maths and use protractors and compasses, even if we can't draw a perfect circle freehand."
Although unable to help grinning at his friend's fathomless swottery, what Evan said was, "Aren't you trying to join MESoP?"
"Yes, but only because I won't be taken seriously by the serious brewers unless I can at least make it into that shower. Right, so. The canvas is prepared so that when you kill the bug it'll be a living portrait. Am I missing anything so far?"
"The canvas should be prepared," Evan corrected him, sitting down and readying his brushes. "I've made the potion and painted the array as well as I know how. And there's a step after I finish painting the poses that I can't let you watch."
"I don't know whether I should be more pleased that brewers have so many proprietary recipes that having one stolen wouldn't ruin our profession or impressed that portraitists have managed to hold onto theirs," Severus commented, perching on the arm of the chair with his own arm around Evan's shoulders.
"Well, wizards, which is to say purebloods, which is to say people who actually understand what we do, you barbarian, have traditionally been rather impressed with us, you know," Evan said airily, touching his wand to the canvas to start the brushes darting. "It helps."
He was past having to actually touch the canvas while he painted, now, but there was no point leaving it. He needed to stay the same distance from the bug while it was modeling or its size would go all over the place in the painting, as he saw its angles at different sizes. A really experienced master might be able to put together some sort of abstract monstrosity with that technique, but Evan was sure if he tried it his painting would just fail.
Worse than it was going to anyway, that is.
Severus had made a noncommittal noise, which Evan interpreted as, Spending eternity as a two-dimensional object people can talk at, with limited access to, eg, books, sounds purgatorial if not actually hellish. That was all right. Ev had the rest of their lives to design a background he'd be happy with and talk him 'round. He'd already planned the curtain on a track rod in the very foreground, with a panel cut out like a window.
Which, he'd sworn to himself, he would include even if it meant no one would see the rest of his painting ever again once the painted Severus woke. People seeing it was not, in this case, the point.
There was another noise, softer. Evan met it with an inquisitive one.
"What?" Severus demanded, defensively grouchy. Evan was going to have to keep a watch on him; this level of curmudgeonliness was adorable, but he understood it was a condition that intensified with age, and so would have to be monitored. "You like watching me work."
Evan smiled, and leaned back into him, although he kept his eyes on the bug. "I certainly do," he agreed, and pulled Severus closer.
"Of course," Severus added, cheerfully evil, "it was more impressive when you used your hands."
"Manual chauvinist," Evan sniffed.
"And proud." After a reflective moment, Severus added loftily, "I shall make you design me a card to carry."
"I suppose you shall make me do it with a quill?" he asked, grinning.
"I liked when you were learning ink and brush," Severus noted. In a quite low voice. Right behind his ear. With a finger sliding absently along the soft fold at his collar, very carefully not touching his skin, the rat. "The inkstick and stone together are much like a mortar and pestle, and as the brush stays so sedulously erect, your wrist guides it over a scroll as though stirring softly undulating runes into a cauldron, the pulsing vein ever exposed."
Evan swallowed, and swallowed again. His eyes were still fixed sort of on the beetle, but his vision had blurred a bit. Thankfully, the brushes had responded to his eyes cutting out on them by stopping. They hadn't fallen or gone back to the cleaning solution, though; they were just hovering a few inches away from the canvas. "I was," he started, and swallowed again. "I was going to show you." And added, stronger, "You rat."
He felt the long curve of a smile tug against his cheek. He wasn't sure if it was the kind of smile Severus didn't allow himself when people were looking at him or it just felt larger against skin than it looked. "Sauce for the gander, Ev," his personal bedevilment rumbled into his neck.
"Is sauce for the other gander?" he pointed out the problem with that one, since he couldn't actually deny the justice of it.
The smile against his cheek tugged wider, split open, and Evan could feel the smug. "Sauce for the peacock," Severus corrected, rocking a wriggly and self-satisfied inch closer and tighter, sounding quite as smirky as he felt.
"Spike," Evan protested, wounded, "are you comparing me to those shrieking demon albinos of Lucius's?"
Severus chuckled behind his ear, which was almost worse than the collar rubbing, if not the suggestive purring. "Never," he assured Evan, tucking his nose in, possibly just in case the dreadful joke hadn't made Ev quite sure he was who he was supposed to be. Well, he did smell a bit off, so fair enough. "The normal sort. You're dressed more than usually like one today."
Evan sighed. "Just because my waistcoat is blue," he announced to the ceiling tragically.
"It's a shiny, shiny blue," Severus clarified for him solemnly. "With the sort of webby patches and the black wrapping around where the light doesn't hit it," he added, his hands sliding down Evan's sides to illustrate.
"I'll be sure to tell Twillfit you much you like it," Evan said dryly, "assuming we ever finish up here and that you don't kill me."
He felt Severus's lips part in the sort of honest-to-Merlin grin that he definitely wouldn't have allowed himself if anyone had been looking at, and so he paid no mind whatsoever when Severus valiantly insisted, "You're hallucinating. You look ridiculous. Your hair's an absolute eyesore up next to it."
"Yes, we thought it would be striking," Evan said happily, instantly resolving to order a nightshirt in the same supersaturated midnight cobalt. Or possibly a set of sheets. After all, it wouldn't do anything for Severus's hair but swallow it, but his skin…
No, Evan, he told himself sternly, it would not actually turn it to opal. Not even in the moonlight, and probably not even if you turned the fire in the bedroom sconces blue-violet.
Although he was definitely going to have to try that. Also, he hadn't gotten any underwater photographs yet, and that was criminal.
Maybe not criminal, They'd spent most of this summer getting the flat in order, and last summer Severus had kept on insisting that Evan was going to decide they shouldn't move in together after school after all. Ev had known better than to press for an intimacy like that when Severus was, in effect, telling him I wish I could trust you, how stupid of me very nearly every day. But maybe it wasn't out of reach now, except for how close they were to winter. There was always international floo, if he could convince Severus it was for Art.
Distracting him from happy musings of rippling blue light playing over black eyes against warm, creamy white sands, Severus sniffed. "If you're going to take forever on the insect, I may as well wash up and start cooking."
"I-can-be-done-at-any-time," Evan pushed out in alarm, as fast as he could. Severus tucked his head in to chuckle against his neck, warm, quiet little puffs and the cooler poke of his nose, but Ev thought he heard an oh-really somewhere in it. "I can," he insisted, wounded. "I've got enough of its poses in that the portrait would move a bit if it were going to work, but it won't, and even if it were going to, it hardly matters if it has full range of motion from every angle. It's a beetle."
"We don't know what matters to a beetle," Severus said in his pragmatic voice. Evan rather loved it when he used that voice to be that daft. "Why do you say it won't work?"
"Because I made several canvasses this morning, and this is one of them, and I already tried others from the same batch, and they didn't work."
Severus hesitated. Tentatively, because he knew quite well that he wouldn't have liked it if Evan had said anything remotely like it to him, he suggested, "I don't suppose there might have been any drafting imperfections in the array in the early versions that, with practice—"
Actually Evan wasn't too terribly offended; hands could wobble and all that. He had to tell Severus it wasn't possible, though. If he was drawing the right array, he was drawing it aright. He wasn't supposed to tell him, though, that one used light-magic to project an array drawn once onto each canvas and then painted over it with the potion, and didn't.
Severus didn't press, although Ev could practically see the clever muggle-raised gears spinning thoughtfully behind his sloe eyes even without looking at them. "You said I couldn't know what you do to activate it. Do you need me to leave, or can I just close my eyes?"
Evan angled his jaw up to rub against Severus's cheek, and snaked an arm to give him the best hug he could from that angle. "I expect if I told you anything but 'leave,' you'd start trying to work it out from whatever senses I'd left you," he accused cheerfully. "By which I mean from the fact that I'd left you those particular senses."
Severus pulled away enough to let Evan see his face. It was plastered over with a very bland who, me? look.
"Yes, you, you rotter," Ev chuckled.
"I expect it's a series of charms to make some sort of… metaphorically floo-like connection between the painting and the subject, probably by putting a drop or two of the subject's blood into the last layer of paint, and introducing a time delay with a death trigger," Severus said.
Someone who didn't know him so well probably wouldn't have caught the slight roundness to his eyes and lift to his brows that said, to the initiated, I am wildly speculating in the hope that if I am somewhere in the vicinity of the right Quidditch pitch, my dreadful oversimplification/cringe-worthy error will provoke you into correcting me.
Evan smiled, trying not to look too much like he thought Severus was adorable. "Never confirm, never deny," he recited. "Nice try, though."
Severus sighed. "Worth a shot," he defended himself philosophically.
Evan pulled him back for a kiss. "Give me five minutes," he said. "And don't you dare start washing up without me."
Severus lifted his eyebrows at him. "Or what?"
"Or I shall be deeply disappointed and morose all evening," Evan returned promptly, turning big blue-green tragedy eyes on him.
Severus fought down a laugh. "It'd do you good," he said haughtily. Without changing his tone, he went on, "However, fortunately for you, tonight's dinner ought to be left to simmer for some while before serving." With that, he turned and left, his fingers last to go, lingering on Evan's cheek until his momentum pulled them away.
Evan, who was quite sure that Severus had been planning to make rarebit tonight, what with Severus having put it on the calendar a week ago in his spiky calligraphy and measured out the ingredients before leaving for work that morning, smiled.
Actually, Severus hadn't been too terribly far off, which was what ought to be expected when a person as clever and common-sensical as Ev's Spike had a great deal of general knowledge and absolutely no specific information to work with. Evan was very proud—of Severus for coming that close, but more so of himself for managing to keep anything even slightly esoteric, interesting, or remotely complicated from such a beaky Slytherin.
Of course, he kept all his sensitive study materials far away from their flat, safe in the family—er, company studio. But still!
By the time he called Severus back, the flat smelled like curry, lemongrass, and sweet basil. Evan rather thought that having a research potioneer to cook for him would have been worth the entire rent forever and all of both their expenses even if they hadn't got on at all, although of course Severus didn't believe that and was very prickly about keeping strictly to the terms of their agreement.
Evan opened his mouth to start explaining, and Severus popped a square of yellow pepper into it. Only… Ev's eyebrows shot up in pleased curiosity.
"I dipped it in the coconut milk and then the brown sugar," Severus explained. "Revolting, so I thought you'd like it."
Evan laughed at him, just with his eyes. He swallowed, and said, "All right, I've readied the canvas for the final stages in the enchantment. Here's the bug I've been working on, this is the self-painting I was doing this afternoon, here's a canvas that's been prepared and is ready to be painted, and this is a canvas that hasn't been magically primed in the same way but has gesso on. You see the differences?"
Severus examined them. "The prepared, er, primed one and the gesso-only look exactly the same to me."
Evan handed them to him.
His eyebrows shot up. "Oh."
Ev grinned. "Quite." Severus handed the canvases back, shoving the enchanted one at him with what Ev thought was undue haste. Curious, he asked, "What does it feel like to you?"
"Like…" Severus hesitated, his arms very tight at his sides, face stiff. "Like a fire that demands to be fed with apple wood and knows damned well that all I've got is bog oak. Like a child that's very nearly learned grizzling won't get it anywhere but hasn't quite learned how to stop."
Evan stared at him. Then he put down all the canvases and took the two steps over to do his best to wrap his startled Severus away from all the air, tight as he could.
After a minute or so, a very dry and ironic drawl tried to make its way through his shoulder to his ears. "Mmmnn… Hffn?" it inquired, so light it was nearly bouncing on the ceiling, which was quite a feat considering it was both bone-shiveringly baritone and being crushed into his body. "Vvht gzz't vyll wyk kyu?"
"What does it feel like to me?" he hazarded a translation. He spoke nearly-fluent Severan—at least, he mostly understood it when he heard it, most days, which, sadly, made him the world's expert—but Squashed was an entirely different dialect.
"Jzzt vndrng," Severus assured him, sounding about two seconds away from starting to slide into one of his bouts of hysterical laughter.
He turned his head, burying his eyes into the curve of Severus's neck. "I would have said 'inviting,'" he said softly. "Maybe 'a bit hungry.'"
After a moment, Severus, much more clearly now that Evan had given his mouth some room, said uncomfortably, "Well. Maybe it can tell you know what to do with it."
"Maybe," Evan didn't-really-agree, and clung tighter.
"You made it, after all, maybe it can tell."
"So I did."
"Ev? Ribs. I have some. I like them as they are."
Evan supposed he ought to pry himself loose, or at least looser, but he couldn't. He'd spent five and a half years at school (after they'd started talking at all) being more and more aware, year by year and, for a while, week by week, that it wasn't normal for life to be a suffocating, numbing cocoon that people and feeling were only glimpsed through dimly, that for most people life was immediate, vivid, and that for Severus it was unrelenting sandpaper on his skin.
Getting out of that stone cauldron of stewing tribal vitriol had helped Severus a lot, and even before that it had started to seem to Evan as though maybe some of that sandpaper was breaking away to free his cotton to wrap around Severus's raw places… or something like that. He'd tried to paint it once, and it had come out looking morbid when all he'd meant was that he felt awake around Severus, and knew he eased him.
He wanted to now. He wanted to wrap Severus in his own skin, weigh him down and warm him, cup hands around his face and press their foreheads together until he didn't feel a welcome as desperation or domination, or yearning as hopeless starvation. He wanted it so much it was all he could do not to tighten his arms so hard that Severus's ribs actually creaked.
Severus let out a dour sigh, which was an aching, inestimable comfort and nowhere near enough. He said, "Ev, I think this may count as a Black fit." Disagreeing, because he hadn't gone cold and calculating, and certainly wasn't shouting his head off or whipping thorny vines all over the flat, Evan stayed silent. "By which," Severus added gently, rubbing his back, "I mean you're being completely mental."
Ev shrugged a little, but he couldn't let go even when Severus tried untying the club of his hair and combing through it with his fingers, as good as that felt.
Severus sighed again, and leaned. They swayed together and, staggering, took a step towards the chair. Again, and again, until Severus had levered Evan down and had turned around to sit on him.
For some reason, that made Evan breathe again. Maybe it was feeling Severus's heart against his chest. Or maybe it was because Severus usually slept easiest curled over Evan's back. That meant that Evan very rarely got to guard his, and every time Severus let him, that trust hit him like a warm, ten-foot wave.
Of course, it could be argued that Severus sitting in his lap in a chair in their ludicrously-warded flat wasn't quite the same as Severus letting him be shield. Except he knew it was.
Eventually, Severus asked, "What happened?"
Evan swallowed, mostly to buy time. What he came up with that wasn't, quite, literally mortifying was, "…I don't want you to feel like that."
"Ev," Severus said gently, "I don't. It was a feeling from the canvas."
"You take everything hard," he tried to explain.
Then Severus twisted around and gave him a wicked, innocent, suggestive look.
"I am trying to be serious here!" Evan sulked.
"Oh, good god," said Severus, his eyes trying to crinkle at the corners and widen in Horrified and Appalled Disgust at the same time. "Don't do that."
Evan stopped dead. "You wouldn't," he declared flatly.
Severus shot him a look that was 100% pure Fiend from Bella's Id, and they said, "I mean," in chorus, before Severus continued, "be Regulus if you must," and Evan complained over him, "that joke had whiskers on in 1965."
"Well, I never heard it until '71," Severus said airily. "No, '72, I think."
"As we are now rapidly approaching '79," Evan said indignantly, "that is no excuse."
"I want no excusing," Severus said in his best high-minded manner (which, since he'd copied it from Narcissa, was inevitably a bit scornful and, on him, not to put too fine a point on it, snooty). "No excuse is needed and I do not ask to be excused. By my word and for the good of the state, the bearer has done what has been done. Quod succedit, facite."
And Evan, feeling worlds less rocky and desperate with a smirking Severus lounging insouciantly all over his lap, had to give him that. After all, if Whatever Works wasn't the official current Slytherin motto, it was only because they weren't about to give the other Houses the satisfaction of admitting it.
(That, and because the more-pragmatic-than-political faction had always, until Severus had shown up and started being loudly and idealistically incredulous at everybody, and improbably proven too strong to be quelled, expelled, or dumped in the lake with his throat slit, been the least clamorous. The more rabidly Sluggish and blood-consciously ideological elements had been wasting energy for decades arguing over whether it should be Overtake the Stars or Thicker than Water. Which stalemate was, as Severus had pointed out drolly after he'd translated the latter to English and finished the rather disturbing crying-with-laughter-while-tearing-his-hair-out thing, probably just as well.)
"Now," Severus went on, "let's see the other canvases. I do not say 'if you would be so good,' or 'if you will,' because you've gone all funny in the head and are therefore being temporarily deprived of options other than being held to your previously-bestowed word."
"Your previously bestowed word involved cheese sauce on things on toast," Evan couldn't help but remind him. Or rather, he could have helped it, because he wasn't Severus, but a gentle game of poke-the-pedant was always good value for galleons.
"That's as may be," Severus said primly, "but that's what we have both a cold box and stasis spells for, and in the state you've worked yourself into, a bit of bite on your tongue will ground you better."
Evan paused, and looked at him hopefully.
"I meant the curry," Severus grumbled, but gave in without a fight.
He wasn't actually very bitey about it though. This, Evan considered, must either have been because he was honestly interested in the portraiture or because he was, as Evan had previously noted, a rat and a rotter and also a wretch.
Well, he had been the most Ravenclawish student in their year who hadn't actually worn a blue tie (and if Severus hadn't made swottishness deeply unpopular by association in their year, that would likely have been a real scrum), as well as quite possibly the most mane-brained Slytherin who'd ever been allowed to graduate alive (including Rufus Scrimgeour, which was saying something—and also including Ev's cousin Bellatrix, which was saying something completely different, probably while running away), so obviously it was both. Ev sighed. "You will not be distracted," he observed sadly.
"Astonishing," Severus said acidly. "And here was I, convinced we had been introduced before now."
Evan nearly said something like, Even in fourth year I didn't snog anyone to whom I had not been introduced, but he caught himself in time not to bloodily murder the rest of his evening. "Naturally we have," he said, raising his eyebrows in the picture of surprise. "You're my Spike. I can tell because you're sitting on me and neither of us has pinned you to the ceiling by the throat yet."
Without moving a single muscle in his face, Severus beamed. His face did change, but actually it was the occipitalis muscles at the back of his head that were doing the moving. Evan had explained this once to a Regulus who'd made the mistake of wondering how Severus did that, and had gotten for his trouble only a wall-eyed stare of the Bella Has Proclaimed That Fuchsia Is My Color O Help Me Help Me I'm Going To Have To Wear It Now Please Tell Me I Am Not Inextricably Doomed variety. After which Reggie had nervously avoided Ev for a week.
He could only conclude from this that it had somehow not occurred to his cousin that a portraitist-in-training would have to know anatomy. Little wonder Aunt Walburga had gone a very appropriate steel-grey.
It wasn't that Reg was exactly dim, Evan knew, although sometimes this was hard to remember. He always turned out not to be when he'd had the right amount to drink or was talking to friendly Gryffs and Huffies, or the baby snakes who didn't spook him. Evan suspected that his for-practical-purposes intelligence would soar if someone removed his nerves.
The potion that they were hoping would convince the Most Extraordinary Society of Potioneers to make Severus a member might do that, actually, but its effects were relatively short-lived and it hadn't been tested for long term or chronic use. And mostly likely wouldn't be, at MESoP, which was one of the reasons Severus sneered about the society.
He wasn't sneering now but snuggling back into Evan, although no doubt he would have said 'shifting,' and bossily declaring, "Then you should by-Salazar already know I will not be long distracted. Lesson on, my Lord Peon."
Evan laughed and squeezed him. "Right you are," he agreed, not trying to come up with any matching oxymoron. All that was occurring was my Liege client, and between their rent bet-arrangement-compromise-thing, the way some wizarding families hadn't quite shaken off their old feudal relationships, and Mrs. Snape's maiden name, Severus was likely to think that a bit on the nose for all the wrong reasons. "Er… have you ever touched my works-in-progress before?" he asked cautiously. "Oils, I mean."
"Yes, and they didn't do that," Severus assured him.
"Oh, good," he relaxed. "I didn't think so, but…" He shrugged, and then smiled as Severus moved in a little in appreciation. Just for fun (Severus would have said 'an experiment'), he shrugged again, but this time he got an eye-rolling sigh and a light thwack on the thigh. Ah, well.
"Will the unfinished magic and a leviosa interfere with each other?" Severus asked.
"Nope," replied Evan, beaming himself now because, this being Severus, Ev could be sure it wasn't out of laziness that he wanted to avoid getting up.
"Smug," Severus noted tolerantly.
"I have the reason," Evan explained, and kissed his throat. Then he sighed, and lamented, "Burnt strawberries."
"Finish up, then," prompted his amused Severus pragmatically, beckoning the canvases up with his wand, in no way as if he was urging Evan to hasten their appointment with washcloths and what he insisted on calling gallons of herbal tea and all the wand-blown glass bottles he said were absurd but filled for Evan anyway.
"Right!" He didn't mind that Severus laughed outright at his bright and eager tone; that was more or less what it was there for. "Right, then, we've got the practice painting of me and the demonstration portrait of the bug. They've both been primed to accept many images to assimilate into a complete picture of one subject. They could both be activated to show a lifeless picture, but I mean without life, not without movement. In that case, they'd show the motions the subject had made while it was being painted. That's done all the time with landscapes and in other paintings that are just for looking at. A dog chases a ball or a model does a pirouette or what-have-you; it's nothing more than a photograph."
Severus nodded.
"Except much better quality."
"And more expensive," Severus agreed, in his you may be right but your head needs deflating anyway tone.
Ev shrugged. They were more expensive, much, even small, because they were more work, which could only be done by expert hands, and better quality and harder to come by, and photos didn't need such sturdy frames. "No one would do that in one that was going to be human portrait, though, because the poses… well, they don't tell a story, or show a moment. The sequences we put subjects through are designed to make sure a painted body is complete from every angle and can move completely freely. That's not something a person wants anyone but their portraitist seeing them do. Maybe their healer, if necessary. It would be awkward and unattractive and generally creepy."
"Never say no one," Severus commented dryly.
"…Good point," Evan allowed, revolted. "Please don't make it again."
"I'll refrain in front of your grandfather," Severus conceded. He wasn't laughing per se, but it was in his voice.
"Thank you. So: in that, they're the same. But the demonstration portrait has also been connected to the beetle. Theoretically, what happens is that I paint a still picture of the subject, in this case the beetle, over the prepared canvas, with these paints." He gestured to his Second Paintbox, and saw Severus blink and look furious with himself as he realized it was a different color than the one Ev had been using earlier.
Ev pretended not to notice. "After all the enchantments have been done—I'm not quite finished—and when the subject dies," he went on, "the magic I did while you were out activates, you were right about that. This both brings the portrait to life and dissolves the topcoat. Normally," he added, "we only do the image of the subject in the topcoat paint; we'd do something different so that the background would be in normal wizarding paint but always visible. That way there's less chance of anyone playing This Is Not The Portrait You Think It Is."
"I'd think that wouldn't be allowed," Severus commented drolly.
"That is unbelievably not allowed," Evan said fervently. "People have tried all sorts of tricks with portraiture over the centuries. Some of them are bones in the sands of Azkaban. Some of them, we didn't even bother getting whatever secular law was pretending to exist at the time involved: they're just feeding the yew grove."
"…Your family doesn't need my help to be creepy."
"Your family is so ill-mannered that muggles are still fascinated by its bedroom politics four hundred years later."
The other half of Severus's family did not, for the purposes of this sort of game, exist. Even in company where mentioning it at all wouldn't be considered hitting below the belt, there just wasn't much to say. What anyone did know was, being obviously personally painful, was, again, out of bounds in a friendly, and almost no one wanted to play a word game with Severus that wasn't strictly friendly. Certainly no one with sense.
Severus stuck his regal nose in the air and haughtily disagreed, "Eight hundred." Evan collapsed into snickers over his long neck, even if his hair did smell like burnt strawberries in a coniferous greenhouse in midsummer and, coming off what must have been a long brewing day, actually felt a bit like it usually looked.
Severus put a hand back to comb into Ev's hair and, a bit of a smile in his voice, asked, "All right, then, why didn't you do the background in the usual way with the beetle painting?"
"To see if you could see the difference between a not-a-painting-yet and a not-a-portrait-yet." He smiled. "And now they're mixed up, so we'll find out if you can guess which is which!"
Severus pulled back enough to let Evan see the face he was making at the G-word. Then he studied the canvasses. They were both white, but it was the white of a snowstorm, maybe, or the inside of a cloud sped up through a pair of ominioculars. "This one," he indicated Evan's self-painting practice, "I'm not sure how to put it. It's… it's as if there's more in it, but… less of everything there's more of. That is, all the many things are less substantial than are the fewer things in this one." He gestured to the demonstration canvas and asked warily, "Is this one the beetle?"
"It is!" Evan confirmed gleefully, and gave him another squeeze for being brilliant and perceptive.
Severus gave him another of those it's not that I'm not pleased about this, it's just that you are UNUTTERABLY BIZARRE looks. Ev would train him out of that eventually.
"Right, since the painting's not going to have a still-image placeholder or be displayed until it becomes a portrait, I shan't bother with a topcoat. And you don't have to leave for the final enchantment; the done thing is for the client to approve the topcoat and then we have a bit of a ceremony for them. Framing it and casting the final spell and handing it over and whatnot, very solemn."
"…Why did you take out the second set of paints, then?" Severus asked, bemused.
Evan tried to stop his shoulder from hunching, and also tried to keep his voice from being shifty, and probably would have succeeded well enough in both of those goals if he'd been talking to someone else. "Habit," he lied.
"You forgot you were impatient for a bath," Severus translated cheerfully.
"Yes, well," Evan replied, somewhere between a humph and a who-can-blame-me. "Maybe I forgot I was hungry until I smelled strawberries."
"This would all be more credible if you were hastening the moment of eating instead of prolonging the bit where I'm sitting on you," Severus remarked. Then he slapped Evan's sneaking hand and turned, scooting up onto the arm of the chair to loom down and lower the Black Ice Eyes Of Go Ahead And Try That Again, Please Do. Rats.
"And you can wipe that good point expression off your face and keep your giant mitts decorous until I have been edified, thank you kindly."
Evan gave him big, soft, chastened hope eyes. It was, as Severus had put it, worth a shot. (Not a term Ev heard much from other people, but then, he didn't know anyone else who'd spent much time in the Sherwood. It could also be a Chaser thing, he supposed, but he kept forgetting to ask Reg.) :D
Severus's narrowed and his voice went harder, although not cold. "I haven't forgotten the point of this, if you have. You've hit a roadblock and it's got you literally staring at your navel all day instead of moving ahead towards what you've been pushing for since, well, if not the day I met you then that was only because we didn't have time to get unpacked first evening off the Express and you couldn't get to your sketchpad. You are telling me what's wrong."
Evan sighed. "Put the beetle canvas on the easel." When Severus had, and had dropped the other, and Ev had double-checked to make sure he had the right one up there (not that it really mattered; his own hadn't been linked to him; but still, good safety habits), he pointed his wand at it. "Watch the bug in the box," he told Severus glumly, and waved his wand sharply. "Cygniste enmortia."
There was a sort of wavering in the air between the magnifying box and the canvas, and then the beetle, still projected goat-sized in its leaves into the air above the box, collapsed and stopped moving. On the canvas, delicate mint leaves bloomed out of the white chaos and a shiny blue-black bug stood immobile in their midst.
"…Ah," uttered Severus. He looked at the dead beetle a little longer, rather white. "And your masterwork has to be a self-portrait."
"You can't ask other people to do something you won't prove is safe yourself, when it can do that," he confirmed grimly.
"Cygniste in morte," Severus mused after a moment. "From Xypníste, that would be: wake in death? Er, possibly if you picked Latin or Greek and stuck with it? Should it be a p in the middle, not a g? More a pinched y-like i-sound, like the in-language word? Or if the qualifier wasn't blurred?"
"No, that's definitely the incantation. I'm sure the problem's in the priming or the preparation. You know how these old spells can be."
"Criminally muddled," he agreed with a severe scowl. "I know pronunciation changes over time and some of those old charmsmiths wanted to make sure muggleborns who'd never come to rely on wands wouldn't stumble on their spells by accident, but aquamenti my arse, if that spell should do anything it's make people thirsty, or possibly need the loo, or, outer range of probability, think themselves fishes—er." He noticed Evan looking amused at him, and coughed. With bright courtesy, he acknowledged, "You are having difficulties."
"I've gotten better," Ev sighed. "The canvases used to burn up before I realized I wasn't giving the array—well, I wasn't drying it in the right way before putting the gesso on."
Severus blinked. "Hm. And you've checked to make sure you have the same problem when you're using the traditional brush-cleaner?"
"'Course. I wouldn't let you think your potion worked perfectly if it didn't, Spike, I wouldn't do that to you."
"You'd better not," Severus growled, appeased. "Is this, er, a normal progression in mastering the magics?"
"Oh, yes," he said, not significantly less gloomily. "It's not something you can buy or grease your way into, a Magister Memoria. That's why we start with bugs."
Severus thwacked him upside the back of the head, hard enough to make a noise that was quite noticeable, that close to his ear. "So in fact you're on schedule and doing fine," he said, exasperated. "Evan, you lazy-arse twit, just because it feels harder for you on the non-artistic bits… You should be expecting that, you know what talents you've sunk the most effort into. You wanted to take all the tidying-up chores—"
"Because you don't care if you bleach things grey when you're sanitizing," Evan pointed out, although he had no idea why Severus was bringing that up. Because if Evan wasn't allowed to touch the tea things than Severus was definitely not allowed to clean Evan's furniture. Especially since Ev's primary concern in choosing the sofa and the chairs had been that the chairs should be comfortable and the sofa should feel gorgeous, and only then that they shouldn't be eyesores but soothing, and only then that they shouldn't actually need an elf to clean them (which was only even an issue because Severus had very nearly had a privacy-related panic attack at the idea of Ev's parents' elf splitting his time to help out at the flat).
Especially since Evan had a recurring nightmare about Severus taking it into his head that he was effectively Evan's housekeeper, throwing a fit, and leaving him.
But he'd angled them away from that disaster with Good Reasons To Be Legitimately Appalled. "And you haven't the first idea how to care for good materials, and you don't notice when there are so many books there's no place to sit down, or even see dust except where—"
"—I should make you do all the cleaning without magic for a month until you know what effort is. I think I'll make roasts, so you can scour the pans. Properly, with a steel scouring pad. I'd heal your oversized delicate poncy hands for you afterwards, as a courtesy, since we were at school together."
"But I keep killing the bugs!" Evan tried not to whine.
Severus's mouth quirked.
"…Well, all right, yes," he sighed, making a face back, "as a general rule we want all bugs in the flat and, indeed, the building, to be dead, granted, but I don't even know which part of it I'm getting wrong, and Grandpère says we're supposed to figure it out ourselves."
Severus pursed his lips at him, half considering and half unimpressed. "And since when has your process of doing your homework involved checking your own work? Don't give me that look, Ben Goldstein and I checked each other's maths in Arithmancy, and Patil and I do it now in the lab, and have Belby do a triple-check when he's in. A second eye catches what the first one skips. Why do you think I think the international brewer's guild is better than the British-dominated one?"
"Because they publish articles about what people are doing in places with ingredients you've never gotten a chance to play with."
"Because they think peer review's more important than over, Ev."
"…But if anyone but me sees it we could both end up in a yew grove."
Severus waved an irritable hand. "If I wanted to live with a badger I'd live with a badger, Fer-de-Lance."
"All right, Blunt Force Trauma," Evan sulked, "how, exactly, am I being insufficiently squiggly to meet your high standards, O Battering Ram of the Corkscrews?"
Severus rolled his eyes so hard that Evan put being offended on hold in fear they might pop out. "An array is an array, a recipe's a recipe. Are there rules about individual equations or preparations?"
Evan paused. "There are rules about letting laymen figure out the whole things," he hedged, "as well as actually seeing them."
"I'm flattered," Severus said dryly, "but—"
"You are," Evan returned, just as dryly (well, he tried), "actually, not in the least flattered. Maybe you couldn't put together an array from its equations, but you're a research brewer, Spike. This is not flattery. You got hired, not 'taken on,' to do a paid apprenticeship on the most quixotic potions project St. Mungo's has funded since they tried to reconstruct Mithridates' Shield, which they knew in advance was going to have upwards of forty ingredients if any of the four or five ancient poisoners and herbalists who'd tried for it before and all disagreed was even onto anything, and you got yourself on Belby's short-list without Sluggy plugging for you—what?"
"You used 'quixotic' correctly," Severus smiled, sliding back down into his lap in warm, wiry reward.
Evan sighed. Severus had (tried to) read far worse and duller things with him. This was not the point currently at issue. Neither was the way that Severus couldn't even take a compliment when it wasn't so much a compliment as an historical fact with associated paperwork, although that one he really had to do something about at some point.
"Ev," Severus said, tracing the side of his face with an expression that said if anyone I was less fond of was being this stupid I would thump them, and the option is not off the table. "What you do is, you hide the relevant equations and preparations of ingredients and how-would-these-stirring-patterns-and-temperatures-affect-this-mix in the middle of a load of other questions. Of each category of problems, you have two subcategories: questions that include and are quite like the questions you want answered, and questions that are nothing like them but are similar to each other. Make up the worksheet with the questions all mixed up—assign each of them a number and pull the numbers from the big mixing bowl with your eyes shut. Fill it out, showing your work, and we'll go over it."
Evan gaped at him. "But that's…" He gaped some more, even if Severus was starting to give him the what am I going to do with you purebloods, I'm not even disappointed it's just that good grief fluff-brained aristos sweet Salazar the sorrow look. "How," he demanded admiringly, sliding his hands up Severus's sides and wondering if he could get away with banishing at least the dull, shadow-colored waistcoat, if not also the shirt, if he aimed for the laundry bin, "do you come up with things like that?"
Severus gave him just a couple of breaths of sigh-laugh. "Stand back, Rosier," he instructed dryly, but he was the one who stood up. "I'm going to try science. Specifically, misapplying an existing internal consistency measure."
Evan blinked at the empty room where he'd been, and then went to the doorway. "I think I knew what most of those words meant," he called down the hallway at the lovely sway of his flatmate's retreating back, perplexed but appreciative. "You've taken them through the forest and quite around the twist, though."
Severus turned a bit to arch an eyebrow over his shoulder. "Isn't that what you're here with me for?" he inquired, and turned into the bedroom, presumably on his way to the en-suite.
"Quite right," Evan agreed contentedly to the empty hallway, with a sharp little nod, and, as he followed, dropped his trousers outside his studio to exasperate Severus with later.
* Credit to XKCD.