At Hogwarts, nothing is allowed to interfere with OWLs. Thursday afternoon, after James has had his fun and Lily has stormed off, Severus still has to take his Defense practical. Too much to ask? Riddikulus!
Notes: A reviewer mentioned a doubt that Severus would, with this much support in his school years, turn into the bitter, angry Snape Harry reacted badly to in PS/SS. This was an excellent question, and one I shouldn't wonder if other readers weren't asking more quietly, as it was a concern I've had in mind from the beginning. So I wanted to address it publicly. Here goes:
No, he certainly wouldn't... all other things being equal. But they aren't: there's a war between now and then, and even unmagical war changes people all the time (and the VA needs all the help it can get and more). And, after the war, a lot of years of teaching teenagers who don't want to be there, which is pretty darn wearing in its own way for a skinless introvert. But, yes, while in a way I wish this was a happy, fluffy AU story-arc where Severus has the sense to do his apprenticeship in Hong Kong or Switzerland... the war is going to happen, and Harry will shrink from Professor Seventhousandbuttons Snarlyface on schedule.
But not in this title.
Professor Marchbanks had put them in the last group to be examined, with a couple of Hufflepuffs. Her jovial, "Snape, is it? Feeling better, are you?" was far too loud to be believable as a normal product of her wizened old body, suggesting she couldn't hear herself properly. She seemed to be able to hear other people all right; pity whatever spell she was using for deafness didn't work for her own voice. But then, Spike said Flitwick said people never did hear their own voices as others did. Which explained a lot about Avery.
"What?" Severus blinked, swaying a little. Evan was (almost) sure the white potion hadn't made him worse. It had been a necessary precaution: all the possible outcomes if they'd run into Potter or his lot without it had been too horrible to contemplate.
"Exams, Spike," Evan told him, gently firm, unhurried. "The professor is going to test you now, and you have to be amazing or Narcissa will eat your feet."
"Why my feet?" Severus asked him, still blinking.
"So you can't run away when she goes for the rest of you."
"Ahhh."
"So you have to focus."
"Focus," he repeated.
"Right now," Evan tried.
Severus paused. Something shifted in his eyes. "Time to work," he said experimentally.
"That's right."
"Right." He nodded, and then he really did seem to come into focus. Evan was bemusedly impressed, but also quite worried for a moment. If he both focused and remembered right now… but no, he was turning to Marchbanks. "Afternoon, Professor. You were my Charms examiner, I think?"
"That's right, that's right," she bellowed genially. "All ready now?"
"Yes, sir."
"Oh, no," Evan groaned. "Spike—general counter for nonverbal magic?"
"Finite venanum," answered his dyed-in-the-wool swot, promptly and correctly.
"…All right, then," he sighed, crossing all his fingers and his toes as well, and crossed over to his own examiner. It wasn't a hard one if you knew Latin, but at least it proved not all Severus's ley lines were tangled. "Afternoon, Professor Tofty. Sorry about the fuss."
Tofty was peering at Severus in concern over his pince-nez. "Not at all, not at all, but ought your friend to be out of bed?"
"Absolutely not." This was evidently not the expected answer, so he elaborated, "There isn't enough no in the whole world. He's doing it anyway."
"Oh, dear. Well, I daresay Professor Marchbanks can look after him."
Evan thought more investigation and perhaps protest would have been called for there. But it was a respectful answer. It was a level of respect perhaps more appropriate to of-age than sixteen, but sixteen was close and one did only get one shot at the OWLs. And, although Tofty didn't know it, Spike would bite anyone he caught coddling him. Hard.
Tofty consulted his clipboard. "Now, let me see. ...Oho! Rosier!"
"Yes, sir?"
The old wizard's eyes, under the overgrown grey brows, were a pleasant, twinkly sort of hazel that made Evan think of mossy oak. Mostly green umber and sepias, flecks of cinnabar green light, maybe mixed with cobalt yellow lake? "Extraordinary thing… I examined a boy earlier who said he was having to use his friend's wand because someone named Rosier had broken his own this morning."
"Really?" Evan asked, blinking in surprised disbelief. Asking for consideration because a borrowed wand might not work well for him was perfectly reasonable, but naming names made it Telling Tales. Not Done.
Also, since Evan and Narcissa could quite possibly get him expelled by Monday if they decided to dig their heels in and risk an extended-family war, Not Smart. The ripple effect would be more of a tsunami, even if the family decided to count Cousin Dorea and her son and Sirius a dead loss; the Potters were Somebodies in their own rights, had allies of their own. Severus had been right in the library. Fantasies aside, they weren't irresponsible enough to throw the wizarding world into civil war. But if they were more shortsighted or pettier, he'd be finished West of the USSR and North of the Nile, blackballed from all the wand-shops (that were any good, at least), just done. If he didn't know it, he was an idiot. If he was gambling that they wouldn't, he was evil.
No, wait, back up, deflate, cool down, Do Not Go Black In Front Of People Not Currently Under The Boot. Potter didn't know they cared. Spike had made sure of that. He'd kept his shadow off their reputations and made sure no one thought they could be used against him, had stuck in public to people who would have been getting in trouble with or without him. Potter probably thought Evan had just been taking an opportunity to get in a potshot at Gryffindor from under the cover of his badge. Or was too pride-stricken to think straight. Either way, naming names was still infantile.
Maybe he'd take a lesson, when he cooled down himself. Watch and see. For now, Evan sighed in perfectly genuine pained resignation. "I expect he was a Gryffindor, then. The interhouse tension's gotten a bit excessive lately; they do like to make trouble. I try not to get involved, myself. As it's said, he will win who knows when to fight and when not to."
"Aha, you've read your classics!" Tofty chortled. Evan hypothesized that he either liked everybody and thought kids and their squabbles were darling or hadn't liked Potter at all.
Ev hadn't so much read The Art of War as suffered through Severus fanatically committing it to memory, but that wasn't the sort of information one volunteered.
"Of course you'll have had your ethics section on the written exam," Tofty went on, flipping to the back of his clipboard, and slanting a shrewd twinkle at Evan, "but perhaps just one more question, for a bonus point, since the subject's come up. Under what circumstances do you think it would be right to break someone's wand, Mr. Rosier?"
"Well, Professor," he said thoughtfully, rocking back easily on his heels, "It would be an extreme sort of thing to do, but I'd say it might be called for during an unlimited duel or some other sort of life-and-death situation. Bad form coming from the challenger, of course, in a duel, although unlimited is unlimited. Or if you came across someone, say, who already had another wizard on the ground, unarmed, outnumbered, and unconscious, and didn't look like he or his mates were about to stop. Then it might be a quick way to contain the situation. Take a weapon out of operation, shock everyone out of mob mentality before anyone crossed into Azkaban-worthy territory, that sort of thing."
Tofty had been scribbling down his answer. Finishing, he looked up, but not at Evan. Ev followed his gaze to where Severus, still looking blinkish and owlish and frankly rather drugged, was holding a protego steady against a whip of fire Marchbanks was lashing at him. "I see," he said sadly, and Evan hoped with unaccustomed viciousness that he did.
Then he turned back to the front of his clipboard, and smiled at Evan. "Well, then, Mr. Rosier, shall we get on with it? Wand out, please."
By the time Evan had finished demonstrating his counterjinxes, wards, and shields (so much easier than writing about them), the two Hufflepuffs had each emerged from behind a black curtain, looking shaken. However, Marchbanks and Severus, respectively laughing delightedly and glittering with rapt animation, were still shooting spells at each other. Severus was surrounded by fallen arrows and his hair looked a bit singed. Marchbanks's tiny boots had been glued to the floor by thick build-ups of quickly melting ice, and her robes had a heavy, leaden look. Which was not a nice thing to do to a witch of her age, given how shrunken she looked: the same callous respect Tofty had shown Spike. Neither of them were talking. As Evan watched, Severus started to shrink, but he was back at his current not-quite-full-size in an instant.
That might have disturbed him, given the week he'd had. In any case, it was at that point that he slashed his wand twice in quick succession. He very nearly got her wand with the expelliarmus, too, she was so surprised by his toenail spell.
Which, of course, was the point of it. The hack-and-slash no more reaction time for you, Sparky rain-of-hexes technique Spike and Narcissa favored when they were done playing with their food was inefficient, to Evan's way of thinking. They both had enough raw power and quick imagination to get away with it, and Evan recognized that his bias was informed by how bad a fit it would be for him. Still, it wasn't efficient, or elegant. Showy. Fun to watch, and they did seem to enjoy themselves, but wasteful. Ev had to give them this, though: other than Spike's sworn enemies, two-to-four on one, they got no repeat challengers.
"Seen all you need to, Griselda?" Tofty asked loudly in amused alarm. Evan was so, so glad to have gotten the sane one who didn't even offer students duels for bonus points.
"Oh, I suppose, I suppose," she bellowed back, cheerfully regretful as she clipped her nails and mended her boots and robes. "Well done, young man! Haven't had so much fun in ages! That your own spell?"
"Yes, Professor," Severus said, lowering his wand but not putting it away or taking his eyes off her, which made the examiners laugh.
"He'd made that one up by second year," Evan told them, trying not to sound too obviously like he was showing Spike off. She would have been throwing her punches, of course, barely hitting him with love-taps, and not just because she'd been doing this all afternoon. Still, it was amazing what Spike could handle, he thought, when it didn't come in spite.
"I only converted the wandwork for nonverbal casting last month, though," Severus said. That would have been modesty, false or otherwise, from almost everyone else: from him it was a prosaic offering to the gods of accuracy. "I was doing a lot of conversion then."
To make Spike tell them he'd had the choice, since this was the Defense OWL, Ev asked, "Why didn't you use your tongue-locking hex?" He'd apparently left his subtlety in bed that morning, or possibly up the Astronomy tower.
Severus stared at him. "You don't stop someone from talking in a duel if you know they can cast silently just as easily. If they want to tell you what they're doing, you let them." Evan grinned at him, and couldn't stop himself from giving the examiners a smug look. Severus looked thoroughly confused, and not wrapping him up and kissing him between the eyes was quite difficult.
"Very good, very good," Tofty chuckled when Marchbanks had had Severus demonstrate. "Just one more thing, boys. Let's return to the alphabetical, I think. Step through here, Mr. Rosier."
Evan stepped behind the curtain obediently, and then groaned at the sight of the wardrobe. Well, he'd had plenty of time, over the years, to think about what might make a white peacock look ridiculous. Anything might, really, so long as it didn't charge at him and shriek. Which, of course, it would.
He brightened. Maybe if he concentrated very hard he could put the boggart in McGonagall's favorite plaid. Or rainbow colors. Rainbow-colored plaid! And make it trip over its feet and do a pratfall on its tail and warble Sirius's Godric-awful muggle 'pink rocks' music or whatever it was. Yes, that should do it nicely. Lots of pink. But not Siri's music. That warbly caterwauling Spike had been mocking in the store.
Oh, he thought in distant shock when the wardrobe opened. Have I grown up, then?
There were no peacocks, flocked or giant or at all. There was no pink, no color that really qualified to be called color. Lots of muddy, grayish sepia. Where the walls and curtain had been, he seemed to see a leaden sky, cloudless, sunless, graceless, endless, stretched out dully into a flat horizon. The landscape, if you could call it that, was broken by perfectly symmetrical, creepily featureless marble busts on pedestals. There was one right next to Evan. It had dust on it, a thick layer, as white as the statue.
The whole affair made his skin crawl violently, and not just because he felt suddenly as cold, stiff, and torpid as a snake in winter. He realized sharply how long it had been since lunch, and the air seemed thin, somehow.
Next to him, Tofty seemed startled. Probably most people their age still got things like peacocks and spiders.
Evan raised his wand falteringly, but his mind was a blank. There was nothing funny about this. How could you fight a dead world? Give him anything to move and he could move it where it ought to be, or at least try, but this was just… just nothing. Even the statues were nothings. He gave one a push, to see if it was even there. His hand went through it, just like a ghost, but without the bone-numbing chill that told you you were touching something real.
Maybe this was how Spike had lived all the time, those silent few weeks last month. Certainly fighting everything wrong with the world all the time Spike's thing far more than his.
He relaxed suddenly. Of course it was. He cast, "Riddikulus," in a strong voice, confident with relief. A tiny, winged, black and white cobra (he hadn't intended wings) burst out the statue next to him as the spell forced the boggart to mold to his will instead of his fear.
The little serpent hovered warily, regarded the landscape in massive offense, and then started spitting indiscriminately. Where the venom landed it spread, the grey mudscape dissolving into mad colors: a jarringly bright chaos, but still so much better than the muck. The transformation didn't seem to be going fast enough for the snake. It struck at the sky and started chewing it up viciously, shaking itself like a cat's tail, terrier-like in its stubborn enthusiasm.
A second snake followed it, much larger, pale grey under a vibrant, iridescent sheen. It neither bit nor spat (shieldtails weren't venomous, as far as anyone knew), but simply slithered along, giving the too-bright colors pitying looks until they abashedly resolved into elegant, fanciful gardens. Evan looked up, and found that the cobra had bitten the sky all blue and stars (as if you could have both at once if you wanted, why not?), and bent the Milky Way into a really self-satisfied smirk.
He laughed aloud, full of glad and already plotting out the triptych. Even if no one else would understand it. The summery warmth of the classroom faded back into view to the slam of the wardrobe's door.
"Well, that's that," Tofty said, giving him a pleased and kind smile and checking off a box on his clipboard. "And once Mr. Snape has had his go, we can all go in to dinner."
Evan's stomach turned to lead. Well, of course Mr. Snape would be expected to have his go, what had he thought? If those two badgers and Evan had all had to do this, then naturally. "Ah," he said. "He's… that's not really a good idea, he's had a really difficult morning. He wouldn't even be out of the hospital wing, ordinarily."
"What are you talking about," Severus half-queried in annoyance, stepping past the curtain. "I'm taking the test; I'll take the damn test."
"No, very bad idea," Evan gushed urgently, like a cut throat, but the wardrobe was already swinging open. Tofty gently pushed him back to the edge of the curtain. He wouldn't go farther.
Then, "But that's mine!" Tofty declared, astonished. It was the foulest bed Evan would never have cared to imagine: covered with cobwebs and dust, reeking of stagnation, sickness, and decay. There were things moving in there. It was breathing, one might almost say, exhaling waves of stale and unhealthy odors.
Tofty waved his wand in a perplexed sort of way, leaving it clean and brightly colored and entertaining them all with (Evan winced) jolly, dischordant, whistling, quilt-bouncing snores. He stepped back, right next to Evan.
The boggart turned into a vampire who, while not unappealing in a nondescript you will never notice me in a crowd sort of way, was in no way charming or romantic. It had a baggy muggle 'suit jacket' on over its trousers, a poor excuse for an overrobe that stopped far too far above the knees to be decent. Going about in shirtsleeves was one thing, but an overrobe that, er, didn't go over... Lockhart was a fan of the tightly-tailored horrors, and Slytherin had to admit he and Wilkes looked amazing in them, but in a very dirty way. For Wilkes, that was the point, but Lockhart didn't quite understand the line between charmingly-naughty and really do not wear in public at all ever when no skin was actually bared.
The vampire didn't look naughty. It looked businesslike, like it was wearing really-truly robes and might turn up at the Ministry to be boring at people. Evan could only tell it was a vampire, not a muggle, because it was literally parchment-white, pulsed a cold, subtle menace, and smelled of damp stone and old blood.
He pulled his wand. Domestic and captive boggarts were often reasonably well behaved, but they were still, like Dementors, Dark creatures who fed on emotion. They took on the form and substance of what people's fears made them. Boggarts in the wild had killed people before, and not just by chasing them off cliffs or into Muggle traffic. This one wouldn't be able to give anyone the vampire's curse, but it would certainly be able to bite bloody holes into their necessary arteries.
Marchbanks' Riddikulus! left the boggart rather cartoonish-looking as it backed back into the wardrobe, nervously smoothing back a deep widow's peak and twitching back a red-velvet lined cloak, apologizing in a heavily accented and very squeaky voice for bothering a nice old lady like herself who couldn't hev hed any blaad in her anyvay, he maast hev hed the direeections upside down…
The examiners looked at Severus curiously. "You're not one of those people who doesn't get afraid, are you?" Tofty asked with interest.
Spike laughed far too loudly, high-pitched. Well, for him. Even considering. When he saw they wanted a verbal answer he said, emphatically, "No." Then, frowning a little, he added, "But I don't seem to remember what it feels like at the moment."
They seemed to come to the same conclusion at once. "That girl," Marchbanks bawled in exasperation. "Thinks all her ickle chickies are made of spun sugar. I suppose you got a cheering charm or a potion in the hospital wing, Mr. Snape?"
"I was given a potion," Severus agreed obediently, looking a bit alarmed because of how intently Evan was glaring do not say by whom at him. This ordinarily wouldn't have needed clarifying, but he wasn't at all sure what Spike's mental state was at the moment.
Or his own. He'd been an idiot. Severus had needed the potion, needed it medicinally, but giving it to him against medical advice might look to the professors like cheating if they found out. This was the Defense exam, after all, and working through fear was part of defense. And that had never occurred to Evan. Narcissa Must Never Know.
"Right before his DADA OWL," Marchbanks said at a normal volume, which probably meant she thought she was muttering under her breath. "Well, there's no help for it, Mr. Snape, it'll have to come off. Finite venanum."
Spike yelped and shot up a few inches, his face shifting harder and his shoulders broadening until his robes actually fit. He started clawing at his back. After the first surprise Evan, moving forward to help with the chest band, murmured, "Welcome back," into his ear.
He had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, he'd had lingering-goodbye plans for Spike's last night with those sweet, sensitive little breasts, that extra-wicked spark he'd been glinting up at Evan, that lemonade out of lemons is for amateurs and Hufflepuffs smirk. He also, only partly selfishly, didn't want Spike to associate that body with this morning, and wasn't sure whether getting him out of it almost at once was going to be a help there or not.
On the other hand, it was really good to have him looking and smelling completely himself again. That woody smell in whatever it was he used hadn't worked very well with his altered pheromones. Much more importantly, having his height and heft back (among other things) and knowing that what had been displayed against his will wasn't what he had anymore might help him recover, once the memories hit him.
Spike looked at his hands, still long and fine but stronger than they were slender again, as though he might kiss them. A good idea, or at least a good start, thought Evan, who had missed his knuckles irrationally.
Then Spike looked up, indignant. "I tried that," he told Marchbanks, sitting down to take off his extra socks and spell the extra height off his soles. "I tried that right away, must have been a dozen times, and it never worked."
Sounding himself again, too. Evan did not descend on him to suck at his throat and feel the vibrations of his deeper-again voice. Since there were people in the room. It might be disturbing for them after the vampire, after all. Evan was a very restrained person. He considered the ethics of giving Slytherin points for his thoughtfulness and decorum.
Instead, he said to a shocked Tofty with a sigh, "I told you interhouse tensions had been getting silly. They got him this weekend." He nearly laughed when Tofty's legs twitched, just like most of the boys' had yesterday.
"Benefits of being healthy as a horse and older than dirt, boy," Marchbanks was cheerfully yelling. "Try it again in five or ten years, you'll see."
"Why was it the draught that I took first that dissipated?" Spike asked, interested. "That was the one that wasn't a temporary effect. Was it because I didn't want it? My subconscious directing the magic? Or is the canceling spell less concerned with effects that'll end on their own?"
"Could be because you didn't want it, or is there any chance that potion wasn't as well made as the other? A weakness in the making is a weakness for the taking!"
Severus snorted. "God, yes." Evan chewed down a smile. No, Spike wasn't a boaster, but false humility was definitely not his thing either.
"Either way, it's the other one you can't keep. Off it comes!"
Too fast! Evan took a quick step towards Spike, but he didn't explode all over everybody. He did lose color, and stopped trying to stand up. His hand rose to splay absently over his heart, rubbing as though he didn't really notice what he was doing. "I think that was contraindicated," he said faintly, and bent down to put his head between his knees.
Evan sat down next to him and started rubbing his back slowly. "All right, Naj?"
"Feel a bit sick," Severus choked out.
"Breathe." He made his voice as soothing as he could manage. "Deep as you can. Nice and slow. You've just got to do this one thing, and then you can have another dose."
Severus was silent.
"I know you," Evan told him, dropping the soothing tone in favor of fond amusement. Confidence would tell Severus there was something he needed to be confident about. "You get in prefects' faces when they're two feet taller than you and your ribs are cracked toffee. You've scored goals with one eye and your arm half off. You've got every Black who knows you treating you with more respect than we give most purebloods, love you or hate you, and we're all terrible, terrible snobs, Spike."
"Never. Impossible. Proposterous," Severus muttered.
Evan kept rubbing, talked over him as though he hadn't snarked. It was the only way to deal with him, really. "You've kept Mulciber from setting Avery on you or going after your muggleborn friend for three years, even though you argue politics with him to his face." You go home and come back every summer, he thought, and won't let anyone help you when you're outnumbered four to one. "You made the Tartan let you into Arithmancy, for Salazar's sake," he smiled, tucking a private little chuckle under Spike's hair, and gave his friend a who-do-you-think-you're-kidding shoulder-bump. "You can take a stupid boggart."
Severus lifted his head as though it weighed a thousand pounds. "I defeated that boggart before I fought it," he said to Marchbanks, with a mulish jaw. "If you recognized Sun Tsu," he turned to Tofty, " then maybe you know this one: You can ensure the safety of your defense if you only hold positions that cannot be attacked. Divorcing oneself from fear is a perfect defense against a boggart. It didn't even know I was there."
Points to Slytherin, Evan thought, rather surprised, for trying to talk your way out of trouble for once. This, unlike his wry self-congratulation on the subject of baseline decorum, was a case he really would make to Slughorn later. If Prefects could give points as well as take them and then account for it later, the Great Hall hourglasses would have exploded years ago, but Sluggy was always open to a viable excuse to pull ahead of Flitwick.
"And I'll give you a bonus point for identifying the tactic in hindsight," Marchbanks told Severus, patting him briskly on the shoulder (she nearly had to reach up), "although it you'd done it on purpose I'd have had to call it a cheat. You're being tested on the boggart-banishing charm. Of course, if you want to take a zero—"
Spike was on his feet and moving to the wardrobe at once, giving her a respectful and toned down version of his patented venomous glare. Evan had wanted to kick old ladies plenty of times before, because he had a few choice relatives and because he'd been exposed to a great many fractious clients of his father's. Never one that was, objectively speaking, quite nice (if noisy), though.
It wasn't just Severus who yelled when the door opened; Evan heard his own loud startlement as well. The room seemed suddenly choked with musclebound giants, and the fug of sweat and stale beer.
Evan recognized a caricature of Potter, and there was something unrecognizable that smiled with engaging shyness and leaped for Spike's throat like a sabre-tooth vampire. Most prominent was a figure that flickered back and forth from some caveman-like parody of Severus and someone thicker and broader-faced, with less neck and forehead and much paler, yellowish-brown eyes. It had clubs for hands, and smelled the worst. Avery and Mulciber were both represented, and lithe little Bast Lestrange with a nasty-looking knife and a nastier grin, and a few of the older Slytherins, some graduated. There were others, less clearly defined. They descended on Severus in swift and violent silence.
There was an Evan-like thing, too, Ev saw, not so much disturbed as yanked and knotted. It and its stiletto sort of tripped onto Spike more than dove at him. This was actually not funny in the least. It had dead-ice eyes and a doll's empty smile. Huh, Evan thought distantly, chilled. Same as mine, really.
He heard the snarled, "Fuck you all riddikulus!" Then the room was empty again.
Nearly empty. A small frog blinked harmlessly from the middle of the floor. Then a bare foot about the size of Hagrid, his hut, and his dog put together descended from the ceiling and squished it before disappearing. Instead of a slamming wardrobe door, there were frog guts splattered on the floor. The wardrobe couldn't have slammed, being in splinters.
Unexpected, certainly, but Evan didn't see the humor.
Severus wasn't laughing, either. He was panting, white-eyed, the snarl still baring his teeth. He was badly bruised, and his shirt showed through great tears in his robes and jumper. With a shaking hand, he took a quill out of a pocket and transfigured it into a thick wooden stake, which he slammed through the frog-bedecked floor.
Then, while the examiners were still staring, he threw what looked like half a flask of water over it in three triangular splashes, and set it on fire. Green fire; it must have been saltwater. Evan groaned, although only inside his head. At least the Tentacula had been an accident—if anyone would believe that now. At least they'd gone last this time.
"Professors," Severus clipped off without looking at the examiners, with a brittle, even courtesy. "If we're done, I hope you'll excuse me. I'd quite like to go be ill now."
Evan rose, too, his face and chest both feeling hot and tight, and said, just as civilly, "It's worth considering that when someone says something's a bad idea, Professors, occasionally one might know what he's talking about. Goodnight."
He caught up with Spike in the boys' toilet, and was thankful it was closer than Myrtle's. Spike, it turned out, hadn't been exaggerating, and would probably have taken a broom closet if it had been on the way.
Ev cast the strongest this-room-is-unwelcoming charm he could, pulled the dark, sweaty hair back with a spare ribbon. He summoned water and went through Spike's bag for mint, rubbed his back and wet a cloth and did all the things one did. Held his hands tightly to keep his nails out of his arms and knees, healed his lip as soon as he'd stopped biting through it. Hummed and kissed and rocked, tried to shove those cold, glassy eyes out of both their minds.
"We're having a House meeting tonight," he said quietly into Spike's hair when the shakes had died down to a slumped shivering against his chest and Spike sounded like he was breathing almost normally again. "But you don't have to come. You should be back in the Hospital Wing. I know you don't want to be there overnight—"
A choked noise, and a full-body flinch. Severus's hands tightened on him, hard.
"I know," he said, kissing behind his ear and holding tighter, "and I won't make you go, but you should let her look at you."
"I just got upset," Spike said thickly. "I'm… I'll be fine. She can poke me tomorrow. After Runes. The white stuff should keep me going until then."
"All right," Evan said. "But we'll be sending someone to bring back food from the kitchens. We're not having dinner in the Great Hall."
"No," Spike agreed, almost soundlessly. "Home now."
"This instant," Evan agreed. "Is your stomach settled?" He passed over the rest of the vial of white potion, and when Severus had swallowed did most of the work of creakily levering them up. "You've got an appointment with some purple goo."
People were heading for dinner, and quite a lot of them were shooting Spike fascinated and curious looks, variously morbid and variously veiled. He'd pulled himself together completely once they were in public, and barely condescended to flick the most obvious of them cool, disinterested glances. Much of that would be due to the potion. It probably helped, Evan thought grimly, that he still didn't seem to remember what they were curious about, except with his body.
"It's Grenade Balm," Severus said as walked down the hallway. "Being mainly pineapple."
"No," Evan said firmly, half-laughing, because that was what he would have done if nothing was wrong. He knew a terrible pun when he heard one, even when he didn't understand it. Spike had this haughty your failure to comprehend the quiet hilarity of my joke reflects solely on the sad limits of your impoverished intelligence face. It was bizarrely kissable, although a bit threadbare today. "We've told you and told you: you're never allowed to name anything ever again. Incidentally, before I expire of curiosity, why a frog?"
"It was a toad. Toads are traditional."
It had definitely been a frog. "And the foot?"
"We haven't found anything that works better than the telly to keep Da quiet," Severus said, looking embarrassed. "I can't really help seeing it when I'm home."
"What kind of jelly?" Evan asked, frowning and genteelly ignoring the urge to ask, toejam? Severus looked reluctant, but took the kind of deep breath that preceded very long explanations. With luck, this one would last until they could close the curtains.
Movieverse!McGonagall chased Snape out of the castle with a fire-whip in DH. I had a puzzled that seems powerful but elementary thought (no pun intended).
Chapter art (link in profile): You're never allowed to name anything ever again.
And now for something completely different:
Next: Slytherins are, actually, Slytherins. They, like, plot and stuff.
