Worried about the divisive effect of having to keep the Dark Lord's secrets in the future, Severus wants to be sure he's carrying his own weight with his friends. Worried Spike's pumpkin juice has been cut with the bad drugs, Evan wants to try cognitive recalibration.


Warnings: Insecurity. Sleepy, cranky, purple-tinted... not prose, I don't even know, Ev's a bit of a... Look, purebloods with the drama. He doesn't have a snake cane, if that helps.

Also, an unusual living situation, which follows from the prequel (see The Wicket Gate (gen): April 14 and Spring for the whole megillah). Yes, this version of the story really is gen, yes, this friendship really is as platonic as it isn't casual. Backstory elements will by summarized for your convenience by the end of the chapter. If you need a warning for non-erotic physical intimacy, here it is. More on Slytherins and friendship below.


#18 Dye-Urn Alley #18

"You look tired," Evan frowned. "Meeting go all right?" He was entertained and relieved, if not enlightened, when Severus answered only by throwing a coat over his head.

Later:

"Ev?"

"Mmmmm?"

"Don't try to manipulate the hypersensitive megalomaniac anymore, will you?"

"…Eh?"

"Or at least don't use the Platinum Peacock."

"…Ah. Point."

"Ta." Rustling. "'Night."

"'Night, Spike."

"That's right, you should be sorry. …Are you—are you laughing at me?! You are! You bastard! I got it right in the teeth and you're laughing at me! Evvvannnnnnnnn!"

"Oi, Spike?"

"Haaaaate yoooooouuuu…."

"Light of my socks, nutmeg in my coffee, emerald of my cheese board, blackberry in my tea?"

"Good god. What."

"Do you know what time it is, if my NEWT in astronomy doesn't grossly mislead me?"

"Hmm. Could you mean Go To Sleep You Sodding Ungrateful Whinger AM?"

"Spot on, Class Act."

"…Actually, nutmeg in the coffee might be interesting."

"…O Hallowed Death, take me now."

"Ev?"

"Mm?"

"He's not here."

"…Who isn't?"

"Death."

"Oh? Missed his chance, then. Sleep's turn, g'night."

"…Ev?"

"You could pass for Death all right, Spike, but hit me with a sandbag and I'm hitting back."

"Are we still partners?"

Evan sat bolt upright, and so did his eyebrows. "What kind of question is that?" he demanded, his lazy, cozy, drifting warmth shattered.

"I…" Severus wasn't meeting his eyes. "There may be things I'm not allowed to talk about, going forward, and…" He smiled humorlessly. "I don't know what you need me for, now we're out of school, that you couldn't get from an elf and an accountant."

"I cannot possibly be hearing this," Evan explained to himself out loud, voice flat with disbelief. "It's hallucinations brought on by lack of sleep."

"I don't think you should have done it," Severus said, ignoring him. "Set a flea in his ear, however you did it. But it was easy for you, wasn't it? No trouble. I wouldn't have dared if I'd known where to start, and that's nothing new, but you hardly need someone to chivvy firsties back to bed for you, these days, or any tutoring, or help menacing morons who won't hear a word to the wise, and I—"

"Severus Octavian Seth Prince-Snape," Evan clipped out, voice frozen with fury, "if I ever hear such utter rot from you again, you'll wish I'd stopped at slapping you down—or up, sidewise, or perpendicular. Did he curse you stupid? You raise my hands this instant."

He glared until his hesitating flatmate gave in, raised his eyes heavenward, indulgently, and lifted the potion-stained appendages Severus knew perfectly well he meant. "Do you think you get to take them back just because I don't have a project on right this very moment? I don't remember saying I was done with them; did I say anything remotely like that?"

"S'pose not," Severus admitted, with a grave, almost wistful look. It would have translated to something revoltingly soppy on another face. He added, with a little more of the gleam Evan liked to see, "You're far too lazy."

"I'm sorry, it can't possibly be that you were trying to talk from over all the way over there," he stormed on, with a cutting gesture. "Do you need to be reminded where your voicebox is?"

With a somber expression that was very nearly a smile, Severus leaned over and flicked a mocking fingernail into the hollow of Evan's throat, quite hard enough to sting.

"Are we still partners," he repeated scathingly, dripping mockery. His hand (one of the broader, gold-toned ones, not one of the long-boned, brewing-strengthened set) clenched convulsively, possessively, in the hair at the nape of the idiot's neck, so fine it hung limp even at summer's most humid.

No one else, now they were out of the Slytherin dorms, ever saw the unpleasant sheen of Spike's splash-fume-and-hex shield washed off quite normally pale skin and not at all greasy (if still truculantly limp) hair at the end of his brewing day. After all, he even ran back to the stillroom after night parties. Knew he was going to. Planned to. Who did he think would paint him his proper puppyishly swotty instead of brazenly offensive if Evan didn't do it? No one, that's who.

And who would keep Evan from drifting off to sleep and dying of numb boredom without a tempest spinning reassuringly at his back, shield and shove? Bella if anyone, and dying of numb boredom would be preferable to her kind of excitement.

But you couldn't tell Spike the things he did for you weren't the things he did for you on purpose, weren't the things that cost him anything, or that he had to think about. That wasn't something he could take in, even when you both knew the reverse was true. Even if having things done for him on purpose actually upset him. Even if, like Evan, you wore his very own words on your arm, an image inked in tiny runes like brushstrokes, so that neither of you could be in danger of forgetting you were the still place, the balance, the hearth. He'd think you were making fun of him, and the harder you tried to make him believe you meant it, the less good-humored his disbelief would become.

Even so. Even considering his idiot himness.

Were they still partners. "Unbesoddinglievable."

"Verzeihung bitte, Herr Schwartzrosiger," Severus apologized with deep (and deeply insincere) formality into Evan's collarbones. A tiny smile tugged just at the corners of his eyes when he raised his head. He laid himself flat with an arm out: a clear invitation for Evan to thump him into shape like the lumpy pillow he was before settling down for the night.

Opting for Latin, Evan simmered, "Asine," and took him up on the unspoken offer with enough force to make sure his dunderkopf wouldn't forget the lesson all week. And also with a cushioning charm: why should Ev suffer?

Because they'd both gotten completely pants at sleeping alone since... well, whatever it was that had happened to Spike in '76 had happened. He'd charged off white-eyed, armed with silver bracers transfigured from Evan's cufflinks, saying something about the Evans-bitch (he hadn't said that) being in trouble, and come back shaking and bloody and covered in mud. He'd barely spoken for a month, had never told them what had happened. Evan had been extremely put out to find out that the only reason he'd stopped waking them all up screaming after the first night was that he'd been casting silencios on himself.

Obviously Ev hadn't been going to put up with that. He'd never bothered to ask himself why, because some things were just instinct. Why give yourself a headache over-thinking things that, being in the bone, weren't about thought or reason in the first place? Severus either hadn't cared enough about life to wonder or had needed it too badly to risk the question. Probably both by turns, judging from his eyes. Which were about all anyone had had to go on for weeks, because he'd barely said a word the whole time.

Things had gotten better, but for Evan, the idea of going back to a cold bed every night had been almost as sickly awful as the thought that Spike would never get better at all. His parents' house was always cold, and quiet, usually just Evan and the elf at home. The year before, Ev had gotten a little Quidditch visibility and half the school had noticed he existed (and, though he said it himself, wasn't particularly hard on the eyes). It had suddenly become possible and even easy to pull warm hands and eyes onto him, very nearly whenever he'd wanted to, to get hugged, petted, snogged, more. That had felt like pulling a fur coat on over bare skin in winter, every time. Still did. Curling up with his best friend every night, knowing he could rely on it without fussing about making it happen or what ulterior motives might be involved... that was actually being warm.

And Severus seemed to alternately feel safe with him and go rabid-frothing-guard-wyvern between him and the world for no apparent reason. Which Evan didn't really understand, but it certainly made him feel extraordinarily (if unnecessarily) protected. If it made Spike happy, or at least feel in control of his life, why not?

There might be problems in the future, when Evan met someone who wanted more than a sweet hour or two at a time from him and wanted to oblige them, or had to take the marriage-search seriously, or if Severus... Actually, Spike either was monogamously married to his work or was so private that even Ev didn't know what he did. That would be fairly impressive of him, but not inconceivable. Or even unlikely, really, given that his attitude towards privacy had been practically a fetish even before fifth year.

Which, given what complete bastards kept telling him he looked like and what any snogfriends he'd admitted to at school would have been in for, was understandable. Even considerate, in a way that made Ev sick with fury to think about. Spike had done the same thing with/for/to his nonsnogging-friends, and they'd respected his strategic reasoning, Merlin, enough to let him. Until it had left him half-naked and nearly comatose by the lake.

Lesson the first: while a capable defensive tactician, their cobra could not strategize his way out of a paper bag. Or function under ambush. At least, not under a blanket of spite and during an exam week and with an audience who'd certainly report any really nasty spells to the authorities. Fair enough, actually, although it was worrying how much of a problem each of those factors had turned out to be.

Lesson the second: never give Severus the option of going it alone or looking after himself. Evan considered him not only sacked but blackballed for being utterly rubbish at it. A spouse would have to understand that, even if it complicated matters.

And, really, it wasn't a bad first test. Evan wouldn't want to raise an heir with someone who couldn't be flexible about problem-solving or keep patience and an open heart for a bright, difficult, vulnerable, magically-talented, oversensitive person who'd break his heart and back for a smile from Mum or a friend but get it completely wrong nine times out of ten. Because that wasn't just Spike, it was every kid with Black blood he'd ever met. Well, he didn't recall having been oversensitive or particularly difficult, at least not on purpose, and he didn't recall Narcissa having been vulnerable. Bella certainly hadn't given him that impression, although you couldn't tell what she and Siri were feeling from what they did or or said. Or shouted. Too stiff-necked. Apart from Bella, though, most of them had, as children, been more or less like that.

For now, anyway, everything was quite comfortable. Except when Spike was being an insecure lunatic.

He felt much calmer in the morning. All told, he considered, he'd handled that particular little unjustified panic attack very well. There wasn't even any crockery to reparo this time.

Still, it was an object lesson in speak-of-the-devil; hadn't he let his thoughts stray to this very potential disaster only last week? Are we still partners, full and equal allies? Are you carrying me? Unacceptable. Clearly he should leave the pessimism and catastrophe-preparation to Spike, who you couldn't stop being braced for absolutely everything all the time even with tranquilizing potions and a foot rub. Not even the universe could arrange for that many devils to come when called.

And Evan knew exactly why that was, didn't he.


Verzeihung bitte, Herr Schwartzrosiger: Please forgive me, Mr. Black-Rosier (Black-Pinker might also be right)
Asine: Ass. The four-legged kind.
Dunderkopf: Foam/yeast-for-brains/dregs-head. Dunder being a Thing in rum-making. It's foamy and yeasty and is used in the process but is also a by-product of an earlier step, and can be used as fertilizer.

According to duj it also may, in Northern England, be a fluffy textile product. Which is one more data point in favor of Spinner's Row being in a (failing) mill town around there. I want to spin idle speculations about whether the cotton fluff was named for the rum foam, but they'd just be that. I can say for sure, though, that Severus knows both meanings of the both word, Evan vaguely suspects it means something like sound-and-fury (thunder, see?), and I'm just relieved Professor Snape wasn't calling his students something more organically rude.

Further thoughts: There's a probably-Connecticut Yankee-inspired book called The Dragon and the George that had a lot of very interesting thoughts in it, including on the kind of paradoxical, almost dialectical thinking that I use for Severus's occlumency (when he gets there). One of them was about how medieval friendship (for knights) differed from how we use the word today, partly as a function of everyone living so much farther apart and, you know, no cells or even telegraphs. Seeing a friend was a big deal. It involved at least days of travel, and expense, and you'd stay for weeks if not months. If they had a problem while you visited, of course you'd risk your life to help them. In fact, you'd probably met because you'd either fostered or fought together, and either way you were some kind of brothers now.

Wizards don't live in the modern world in their heads. The purebloods who care about blood purity (Slytherin-sorting families) more than most. They don't grow up under those conditions, but Slytherins are raised at school to have a very reserved attitude to trusting other people. I do think that a strong or clever friend a Slytherin felt absolutely safe with would be about the rarest and most precious resource there was. Best to be attracted and married to them of course, but either way: a genuinely reliable ally who would act for you out of liking, or at least without needing bribery or handling, let alone manipulation or threats? To be reciprocally protected at almost all costs, if only out of sheer enlightened self-interest.

Which is not all of what's going on here by any means, but it's a lot of what Severus calms himself down with when he manages to not have the panic attacks out loud.