Summary: Variably fun crafts projects to do with friends
Warnings: I don't even know where to start, but presumably you've read canon and made it past ch3, sooooo I'm sure you'll be fine. Or at least, better than Severus.
Notes: Regarding the very long stretch between posts this time- first, sorry, that was a bad stopping place.
Second, since the last chapter went up I've started an internship which asks to add about ten hours to my week. It's very cool and I hope that it will ultimately both give me a path to a career change and make me a more agile storyteller. At the moment the schedule of that+work is kicking my tail, though. There's an upcoming schedule change that I think might make things easier; I'm not sure when it'll kick in but when it does my hours will at least make more sense for someone in my time zone. vOv
At the moment I'm only one chapter ahead, but my beta is being an enormous help around keeping my head in the story even when I'm too low on time and energy to actually do much about it.
To be honest with you, though, posting in two locations which use two different formats has been bordering on more trouble than it's worth for a long time at this point. Not hating on lurkers—I am one of you—but I'm not getting a lot of feedback here (and most of it's from one person, bless you, you know who you are), ffnet has started crawling with ads in a way I find unpleasant, I can't do the footnotes properly on this platform, and I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to keep doing double formatting runs with this schedule. This isn't me saying right now that I'm stopping, but if I do end up letting one site lapse it'll be this one. If you want to be sure of catching updates to this and any new work of mine, I'm at Archive of Our Own under the name of potionpen.
September 3: Sherwood Forest
Why did Rodolphus corner you on Friday?
The question had been itching at Evan for two days, but Spike had refused to discuss their unexpected Friday evening meeting while they still needed to focus on getting through their talk with Grindelwald without giving away Merlin-knew-what, and since then they'd been in public.
"You first," Spike said.
"Why me first?" he asked, a little indignantly.
With a look strongly implying that Evan should not have needed to be told, Spike slowly said, "Because yours is likely more pressing, as Rus Lestrange is less of a loose bludger than his incomparable wife."
Evan, as someone who Bella had never seen as company to behave nicely for, couldn't argue that. Still, "If I'd thought it was that pressing I would have insisted on going somewhere private sooner. And If it worried you that much, why didn't you—"
"Because she doesn't talk to me if either of us can avoid it, I can't do anything about her, and Grindelwald worries me more. We don't have to think about him any more for a while, so what was she cornering Regulus about?"
This being inarguable (if, in Evan's opinion, tangential-to-irrelevant), he gave in. "She'd come by Grimmauld to have tea with my aunt and burn Siri and Andi in effigy again, and wanted to know why Kreacher's head isn't on the wall in the foyer."
"The skin-crawling surreality of imagining Bellatrix and your aunt politely pouring each other tea aside, that's a reasonable question. Why hasn't Reg made a bust to put with the others?"
Evan paused and looked at him. "They're not busts."
"Illusions? That shouldn't be too hard to answer, then; Reggie's not bad at charms but I don't think he's that good. Unless he thinks she'd scold him for not at least putting up a temporary one until he can practice, or commissioning—"
"No, Spike," Evan said gently.
It took Severus a minute to realize, and then he turned white. He looked at Evan, silently demanding to be told he was wrong
Evan shook his head. "Great-whatsit Elladora convinced her elves that they'd be harming the House by waiting for a natural death after they got too old to be effective servants. She must have been really convincing. They see it as an honour; they look at it as a reward for being the best. Fortunately, Kreacher's the last in his line and I don't see Reggie teaching a new elf to follow that tradition. The house stopped attracting new erklings about ninety years ago and nobody's been willing to sell a trained elf to Aunt Walburga's branch of the family in fifty, including Granddad, so I don't know what she's going to do if she outlives Kreacher."
"Wash her own sodding plates, possibly," Severus said in a calm, disinterested voice that was, just slightly, shaking.
"Look," Evan said, twining a hand around his arm. In the last possibly-thirty minutes (or, more likely, seconds) since Evan had snogged it (or, more likely, the last thirty seconds) said arm had apparently been taken over by gnarled rowan roots. The idea of this made Evan's painting fingers itch, but it couldn't be comfortable for Spike under the skin like that. "The sooner you accept that slightly under a third of the family would have been sent to Azkaban before they'd been out of Hogwarts a year except for having power and money—"
"The happier I'll be?" Severus asked through clenched teeth.
"I doubt it," Evan said wryly. "Just, the less surprised you'll be when Uncle Cygnus teaches Narcissa's kid to play conkers and gobstones with his set of gilded 15th-century witchfinder bits."
Severus choked.
"And if you aren't taken by surprise you'll be less likely to start a fight about it and have Bellatrix decide you're a blood-traitor as well as a mudblood and yes, I'm aware that that makes no sense, but you know she would and I quite like you alive, so if you can wrap your head around it somehow I'd sleep easier."
Severus didn't say anything.
"He taught me to play with them." Evan kept his voice steady, but he knew anxiety was twisting his face and crushing his eyes. That was not a good silence. If Spike started thinking about Ev like he did most of the cousins because of this...
Evan couldn't even bear to think about an if like that. "I was quite young at the time and nobody around me thought there was anything wrong with it, so I didn't either. Then. And all that lot didn't have a you, you know."
"Nobody," Severus repeated, carefully and flatly.
"Sirius did," Evan conceded. "But Sirius was always upset about something and the general consensus was that he was just being a brat for the sake of being contrary, so I didn't attach much importance to it."
"Narcissa didn't. Think there was anything wrong with it."
"Well, she thought it was distasteful, but… Spike, if you think Narcissa cares about people who aren't family the way you do…"
"I do not," Severus scowled reflexively (and ambiguously, in Evan's opinion). After a moment, he asked plaintively, "Didn't Narcissa's other sister marry a muggle?"
"Muggleborn," Evan corrected. Severus shot him a stormy look that meant it made no difference because muggles and muggleborns both read the same fairy tales before Hogwarts and knew how to use the tiny abacus machine with the buttons.[1] "Andi and Narcissa both take after Aunt Dru, Spike. I only knew Narcissa thought it was nasty because we all got shown them at the same time. Andi had learned to control her face by then. I've no idea what she thought about it."
Severus was silent for what was probably only a handful of seconds but felt like forever. He'd gone a little grey-faced, and Evan could see where the lines would be in forty years—or twenty, if he kept on worrying like this. Ev wanted to kiss him—partly for comfort, and partly to reassure himself that Spike would still kiss back. But he could see that Spike was feeling things too hard to take it well.
Eventually, Severus swallowed, and his jaw tightened. Evenly, he gritted, "What did Regulus tell Bellatrix."
"That after Kreacher died, they cleared out his sleeping area and found he'd been hoarding heirlooms, so he didn't deserve to… be on display."
"I expect Kreacher took that well," Severus said distantly.
"I think he would have preferred to actually be on display," Evan agreed. "Though—that, is, that is what he told her, but he did it in the Oh I Wish You Could Tell You The Truth I'm So Proud But It's A Secret sort of way, not the I Have Been Betrayed In A Not Very Important But Fairly Disgusting sort of way, so I think she got the idea. Kreacher will understand that, especially since it'll help Reggie with her. Still, you can add clearing his good name to the list of reasons to finish all this business."
"All this business." Severus closed his eyes for a moment, and took a long breath, let it out slowly. "Well. I suppose I needn't be quite so concerned about your sensibilities."
"Hey," Evan objected, hurt and not feeling any less worried, to put it mildly. "I didn't understand back then."
"What didn't you understand."
He had to pause and think about how to put this. "I know you think I was sad a lot before school, but I wasn't sad," he said finally. "I wasn't anything. If you'd tried to describe not being bored to me it would have been like trying to describe fresh air to a fish."
Unsurprisingly, Severus's brow creased as he visibly tried to work out how to do that. It didn't appear to be working very well, although at least the distraction lowered his shoulders an inch or two. Evan wanted rather badly to crawl into his lap and pull the tick-tick-tick of a mind that never ran out of things to think about around himself like a blanket.
He remembered being a kid and thinking that Spike's tight-wound caring-about-everything was too much trouble to bother with, a threat to his peace. It was disturbing, thinking back to how he'd felt then. Not that he blamed that kid-self, or thought he'd been stupid or felt sorry for him. It would be too easy to feel that way again, if he had to be alone.
Only if he did now, he'd know what 'better' was. He couldn't feel sorry for that kid; he'd thought he was fine. He hadn't known yet how crumpled-up-in-a-ball he was; the eternal rainy-Sunday of every day drearily the same hadn't bothered him.
Spike's brain seemed to be convulsing a bit, probably due to trying to think like a fish, so Evan heroically refrained from kissing him all over his face and throat and tried to explain in a different way. "Nothing ever happened except when I visited the family, so there wasn't anything to feel anything about. It was just me and Linkin in the house, and he kept things… going smoothly. Stopped me banging into things and alarming the neighbours and so on. Well, the visitors. The closest neighbours were half a mile off, so I suppose they wouldn't have been alarmed. But I listened to him mostly, so he didn't get mad at me."
Spike was looking at some tree blank-faced, except for slightly creased brows, like he couldn't even understand the idea of somebody's parents not getting mad at them. It made Evan want to cry a little, but he didn't have time for that; he had to explain or Spike might never stop not-looking at him that way.
"It never even occurred to me that people might defy their caretakers on purpose until Siri started getting really oppositional, and it didn't look like a good idea when he did it so it wasn't exactly tempting. And when I forgot what I'd been told he got disappointed—Linkin did—and he'd scold and tell me my parents wouldn't like it, but he didn't shout or anything."
"You said he used to hit you with a wooden spoon."
"Yes, but like you bop me, Spike—he wasn't hitting to hurt; he'd never do that even if Dad told him to."
Spike shot him bitter lucky you eyes. They scared Evan half to death for a second, and then Spike flinched and his hand jerked to his chest.
"Are you ok?" Evan demanded, grabbing his arm.
"I suppose that depends on whether it's 'ok' to be a complete arse," Spike said levelly, and had his arms around Evan and his eyes buried in Ev's neck before Evan had finished blinking at him. He just stayed there for a minute with very controlled breathing, letting Evan, mystified, stroke his back and hair. Eventually, Ev would realize that the Spike's arm had jerked right, not left, but that wouldn't be until much later.
After a long moment and a shuddering sigh, in a tight-throated voice, Severus said, "I'm glad he wouldn't, and shall have to apologize for thinking ill of him."
"You'd insult him if you did," Evan pointed out, running a slow thumb over Spike's jaw and squeezing with his other arm. "You'd be apologizing for thinking he's a good, obedient elf."
A little more steadily, more in his own voice, Spike asked. "Right, that is what I was thinking; wouldn't he have had to?"
"If Dad had really wanted him to, he would have asked Mum to find a way to tell him so he couldn't get around it." Like I'd ask you, he didn't say. He didn't think Spike would be very happy being compared to Evan's mother, wouldn't hear just that Evan was calling him clever.
"Ah." Hot air bloomed slowly into Evan's collarbone, warming him in a way as upsetting as it was reassuring, but it was followed by the dry press of a determined kiss. Spike nosed him gently, said, "Go on, then," and kissed again, steadier.
Evan tried to kiss his hair, though the angle was bad. "I was just going to say that he had to say no so I'd learn not to eat too much just because it was there, but he was pleased when I liked his cooking, you know? He wasn't mad about it."
"Did you want to eat too much?" Spike asked, pulling away with a long breath and slightly damp eyes, looking as if he was curious for reasons that had nothing to do with what they were talking about but possibly did have to do with cooking and unquestionably had to do with pretending the last five minutes hadn't happened.
Evan shrugged, getting in a nuzzle of Spike's temple as it retreated and winning not quite even the ghost of a smile but a wan relaxation around the eyes. "Probably. Good food is more attractive when you don't have anything else going on that feels good. When nothing's interesting, even if it's not good food, it's something to do."
He wished he hadn't said that: Spike's face did a complicated thing that was part mouth-tightening anger at the problems of people who could be casual about food and part pity and a lot self-hatred and not even a little bit good.
"Anyway, he probably thought it was right that I should try to get things I wanted," Evan hurried on. "He wasn't mad. There wasn't anything for me to get upset about, and there wasn't anything to be excited about except Grandpère coming to teach me to draw sometimes. And he said I was behaving badly if I got excited, so I didn't."
He was glad Spike was looking at him again, but this expression wasn't any better than the last one.
"It wasn't… I mean, I didn't know anything else, so I didn't feel badly about it." The leaves were just starting to turn yellowish at the edges, some of them. One bunch high against the sky had already gone a glowy red, all by itself in a sea of green. "There were holidays, and I liked that those were different, I suppose, but m'cousins could get a bit tedious so I suppose there was always a bit of a sense of is-it-worth-it. Going wasn't exactly something to be all happy and excited about, it was like a week of nothing but watching Punch and Judy with hexes, but they didn't ever really go after me either; it wasn't scary. And there were a lot of cursed objects in a lot of my relatives' houses that Linkin acted like I should be scared of, but mostly the holidays were just exhausting. Either it was boring and people got huffy at me if I drew them or there was a lot of everybody else shouting at each other and I couldn't understand what made them think they should act that way."
Gently, Severus repeated, "Think they should?"
He shrugged, scanning the undergrowth for chipmunks or garter snakes or what-have-you. Not that he particularly cared about seeing some, it was just that his eyes were too heavy to look up. "Well, I mean, I didn't understand why someone would do anything if they didn't think they were supposed to. What I'm trying to say is, I was numb all the time, so I didn't know what hurting felt like to other people."
A hand slid down his arm, wrapped around his own. "I can see how that could happen," Severus said levelly.
"You're still not allowed to kill my parents," he felt it prudent to add, leaning in to cling. He felt all raw inside his chest, but Spike wanted to make him feel better so he didn't mind really. Curling up on Spike and closing his eyes for a while again would have been nice if he hadn't still had things to do today, though.
"Then you're not allowed to complain about mine."
"Am so!" he insisted hastily, in case Severus took a split second's silence as agreement, and the very quiet snort was the best he could have hoped for. Forcing himself to look up, he asked, "Okay?"
The sceptical mmm noise Severus made was the yes Evan needed, despite also clearly meaning that Spike was never going to say anything about Evan's relatives was okay because that was deeply not the case.
"Okay," Ev agreed to this entirely reasonable position, and clung to Spike's arm until it was removed in favour of wrapping around the small of his back. Spike tried to keep walking forward but, recognizing an important tree, Evan turned them to the left fork of the path.
"At Beltane," Spike said quietly, after a while, "I got into a discussion with Rodolphus about anthropology, and he started talking about drinking vessels made from skulls."
"And now it makes sense that they don't bother him?" Evan asked glumly. It wasn't that he wished he hadn't asked, or would have preferred not to know what Rodolphus was up to. He just didn't want to hear any details and didn't want Spike to have to tell him.
"...Actually, yes, in retrospect, but that's not the problem. At the time I thought he was talking about… I don't remember, we'd been talking about Vikings. Or possibly Huns. That sort of thing. And I said I didn't see how they could work, and he said I had the idea upside down and he'd come by to show me how they were made."
"Did he?"
"Yes," Severus said in a voice empty enough to echo, and stopped walking.
He kept not walking. And not talking. His mouth was tight.
Narcissa always said that if you prompted people to talk when they got like this, they'd change the subject. You had to wait it out, she said.
This particular people was fully capable of standing there in silence until it got dark, apparating them back to Rosier Hall and going to sleep in silence, and continuing to not say a word until some hopeless kid tried to melt a cauldron on Monday and shouting happened. Quietly, Evan said, "Go on."
"He brought—"
Eventually, Evan finished for him, "He brought a skull?"
Spike's mouth moved but didn't go so far as to open. He didn't start looking at Evan again, either. With his hands, in the ogham-signs, he spelled out: A-G-I-R-L.
And Evan didn't know what to say to that. It was quite like being at Grimmauld with everybody shrieking at each other around him, actually. He'd never known what to do then, either, but Anything Unignorable had generally been a good bet, in that they invariably stopped yelling in favour of staring at him and/or running out of the room to take a bath as quickly as possible. So he rested his hand, very lightly, on the one Spike had wrapped around his side, which was currently clutching the waist-strap of his belt.
After a moment, with difficulty, Severus said, "She was dead when he brought her."
Levelly, knowing he was mostly upset because Spike was upset and he only even thought this was important because Spike expected that anybody would, Evan filled in, "And he showed you how to make one."
It was barely a nod—more a tightening of Spike's throat.
"Did you know her?"
Another tightening. "From the lab—the clinic."
Another long silence.
"She was fourteen. Muggle before the bite. Played the guitar."
"Not well."
"I had to shout at her to stop her telling a boy she barely knew, to get his attention."
"I suppose I needn't have bothered."
"I expect her parents appreciated it," Evan tried.
"He'd burned her heart out."
Evan had never appreciated until now why people made inappropriate, unfunny jokes when things were awkward. Severus had no expression at all. He looked utterly calm. There had been no emotion in his voice for a full minute. If Evan said something like That's Rus for you or Do you think he wants to do that to Bella, that awful calm would crack.
Except that if he tried to treat this lightly, even as a pretence, Severus might never trust him again.
"You never told me," he said quietly, squeezing Spike's wrist a little.
"I put it away."
"What does that mean?"
"I just… put it away. I dealt with the problem, and then I put it away. Didn't remember it until Friday when Lestrange brought it up."
"A geas?"
"No, I just… in books," he explained, looking at Evan with a hint of helplessness trying to squirm out from under the cool stillness of his face. "When they're guilty. It makes them make mistakes. Obsess. Try to fix things and leave new footprints. So I knew I couldn't ever think about it again. So I didn't."
"Until Rodolphus talked to you." Evan wondered if 'just put it away' was why Madam Flamel felt it important not to let a 'natural occlumens' go untrained. Spike's memory spell let you put things away until you needed them, but when you did need them, it just felt like remembering a word you already knew but had unaccountably not been able to recall half a conversation ago, and the spellcaster could set the conditions for making that happen. This didn't sound so in control, and Spike's face at the meeting had been one of his more awful blanks. Had that just been the content? Was 'just putting things away' like this safe?
He waited for the nod, which, again, barely qualified as one. "What did he want?"
"Back then," Severus said, breathing as though something were on his chest while he was very tired, "he left me to 'tidy up.' And on Friday he wanted to know how I'd done it."
"How—"
"Don't ask."
Evan considered this and tried again. "What did you tell him?"
Severus sighed again, still as though he were trying to lift a mountain with his underfed chest. "I told him that what I'd tried hadn't worked properly. Which it didn't," he added, the grey in his skin shifting greenish.
"He didn't try to break your arm, so I suppose he believed you?"
Severus twitched his mouth, meaning sort of. "He believed me, but he said it must have worked well enough since nobody made a fuss about finding a body in that condition."
"Spike," Evan said quietly. "You know Bella probably put him up to it."
This actually got a reaction: Severus's head whipped around, and Evan got stared at.
"Think about it," he insisted, holding Spike's eyes steadily. "Bella is a Black witch."
"I think she's a wizard," Spike said dubiously. "The way Narcissa uses 'witch,' anyway, and she's the one who uses 'Black witch'."
Ev was deeply relieved to see him relaxed enough to get hung up on semantics, and this time he really couldn't help leaning over and nosing a kiss under Spike's ear. He was rewarded by being uncomprehendingly blinked at, which forced him to smile and do it again; there wasn't any way to stop himself.
"Maybe," he agreed, "but she's a Black, anyway. Even the ones who don't care that much about the family for the sake of the future of the blood care about it for the sake of their own standing. And she doesn't think that thinking for oneself is important; she believes in upholding the traditions her daddy taught her. Downholding? They're not very uppish. But she hates that Narcissa and Reggie insist on being friends with you."
"Not you?" Severus asked, trying for lightness in the way Evan hadn't dared to earlier.
"She barely acknowledges I exist," he dismissed this out of hand without sorrow. "And Narcissa does make up her own mind. Bella knows that, though she doesn't always accept it. Reggie, though—she thinks Reggie is hers. But he won't stop being friends with you, even to please her. And that means, you understand, that if she went after you herself—well, more than just being rude, I mean—Reggie wouldn't like it, and it would hurt the way he feels about her."
He thought about it, and added, for the sake of completeness and feeling rather Spike-like about it, "Obviously also Narcissa would never speak to her again and I'd reduce her to her component cells comparatively slowly beginning with her hands, but I don't think she realizes except about Reggie."
"...Evan?"
"Mmm?"
"That's not the way you make threats."
He blinked. "It isn't? It's the way you do it."
"It really isn't," Severus said, in his talking-to-an-infant voice with pained eyebrows. His eyes had gone helpless again, but in a warmer, meltier way that made Evan feel neither of them had been breathing properly for a while until now.
"What did I do wrong?" he smiled, leaning in so close Spike was almost taking his weight as they walked.
"You're supposed to say something absurd and impossible," Spike criticised, tightening his arm around Evan's waist, "so the other party understands the strength of your opposition but isn't actually afraid that you'll do it."
"...Pretty sure that's not how you do it either, Spike."
"If you actually mean it," Spike carried on as though Evan hadn't spoken (or laughed at him), "people are liable to feel challenged and get stubborn, and then you have to either fold or follow through and either way it leads to no end of trouble."
"I'll take that under advisement, marshmallow in my mulled wine," Evan said amiably, letting his eyes crinkle at Spike. He couldn't remember one single threat Spike had ever made that would have been magically impossible for him, if he ever put his mind to the how of it and weren't such a squish.
Now he wanted to try toasted marshmallow in hot mulled wine. He wasn't sure how it would taste, but he was sure it would smell fantastic, all cinnamon and ginger and sweetness beyond sugar. He'd have to work on turning that into a scented oil. With a hint of almond? That might be overkill, though. Smoke, maybe, for the balancing note.
Without quite letting go of Evan, Spike backed against a tree and slid down it to sit. The ground's cushioning was still grass rather than fallen leaves, but the air had begun to take on that crisp dried-leaf smell. "What do you think she meant to happen?" he asked in what was, for him, quite a small voice.
After considering his options, Evan sat beside him and appropriated a shoulder for the purpose of resting his head. "The thing about you, pearl in my pasta," he started, sympathetically.
"...I break your teeth?"
"You flail," Evan said, patting his wiry thigh and then leaving his hand there because he could and it was nice and he wanted Spike to be warm. "You're a flailer, Naj. You shout and you wave your hands around and Bella was only at school with us in first year, and there was quite a lot of shouting that didn't get you anywhere."
A silent Spike folded a hand over his, almost visibly remembering why that had stopped. The hand tucked a lock of Evan's hair behind his ear on the way down, probably in memory of what Ev's pensieve assured him had, indeed, been an outstanding case of bedhead.
Evan smiled back at him, feeling melty around the eyes with Spike's long fingers lightly warming the bones of his wrist. "And when she heard stories about you after she left they were mostly about fairly overt fighting that occasionally ended in all the candles in the Great Hall dripping blood that turned out to be redcurrant sauce and stained badly."
"That was your stupid cousin."
"I didn't say you did it. I said that's how your fights ended up sometimes and that's the kind of thing she knows about you."
"So you think she was trying to get me arrested."
"I think it was probably important to her that you do it to yourself."
Severus pulled away enough to meet his eyes, his face collapsing inwards a little so Evan could see where every single line was going to be again. His fingers twitched in the absence of brushes; he wanted everyone to see that Spike was this upset, cared this much, when he asked, "But what about Rus? If she thinks I'm just a, a…"
"Shouty manebrain?"
"...Yes, thank you," Severus said with a dour sideways eye-flick. "If she thinks I'm that useless, could she possibly have imagined I'd be too loyal to Rodolphus to save my skin by telling them who did the actual killing? It's not as if we've ever been close. She couldn't possibly think I'd be that grateful just because he's in the Twenty-Eight and he doesn't care enough about me to be rude, could she? If I'd gone to the Aurors as soon as he left I could probably have avoided even being charged as an accomplice, and don't think I didn't think about it."
Evan already regretted what he was about to do to Spike's poor face, but even when they avoided saying true things they didn't lie to each other.[2] "The thing is, they mostly got married because their grandparents agreed it was a good idea, Spike. And as far as I could tell she agreed and she seemed to be looking forward to it; I'm not saying she got given to him against her will. But they're not us, Spike. They're not even Narcissa and Lucius. And if it hadn't been for him, she wouldn't have almost had a baby to lose.
He bit his lips anxiously while Spike's face, as expected, crumpled more. But all Spike said was, "Will she try again?"
Evan shrugged a little against him. "She seems to like whosisface a lot better than she likes Rodolphus. And he likes you."
"...So either I'm safe as long as he values me," Severus said dryly, "or she could have a jealous fit at any moment."
"I think the first, really," Ev said judiciously. "Jealous fits are beneath her digni—oh, wait, that actually was one, wasn't it."
"If you're right," Severus agreed, even drier, "I should say so."
"Er."
Severus let his head thump back against the tree, but too gently for Evan to feel a pressing need to scold him about concussions. "Wunderbar."
"No, we're back in England," Evan reminded him, and got lightly swatted. He smiled, feeling too wrung-out for an entire grin. "There's a bright spot, though."
"Illuminate me."
"He said to the painter." Evan blithely ignored the silent outraged eye-groan on the premise that Spike wasn't being a hypocrite, just grouchy at being pun-upped. "She has no idea what happened. She doesn't know that you were upset and handled it. As far as she knows, you are still compelled to be shouty and flaily even when a good Slytherin will be shrewd; as far as she knows you just weren't upset by what Rodolphus did."
"...I'm not seeing a good side to her potentially making other equally if not more dramatic attempts to get me flustered."
"It means you can control what she sees you get flustered about," Evan said, looking up to hold his gaze soberly, not as tempted as usual to get distracted by unfair eyelashes. "And it means she doesn't think you're squeamish. Which means she probably won't try to get you that way again. And also that she'll be reconsidering the idea that you're weak-hearted and of no account. And if she thinks you're strong, and she sees you being a help to someone she wants to help…"
"Then she'll still be prone to jealous fits."
"Yes, but she's not stupid, Spike. And just because she's openly rude whenever she feels like it does not, as you of all people should know, make her less of a Slytherin. Even if she thinks you're a rival, before she decides to act on it she will do a cost-benefit comparison."
"I'm not reassured."
"Because you're not stupid, either."
"I'm not rude just because I feel like it."
"Spike," Evan disagreed, not quite too tired to press a grin into his bullheaded temple.
Severus sighed, and let his head tilt sideways against Evan's. "It never occurred to me she could have anything to do with it."
"You occluded the whole thing away," Evan pointed out.
"I mean that I thought it was beneath her dignity to admit I exist."
"Well, I could be wrong." It wasn't quite sunset yet, but the light around them was starting to take on that golden tint that felt like your eyes were sipping honey. The trees weren't dense enough to block it, only to make it look like lace. Quietly, he asked, "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Then you would have been an accomplice after the fact, too." After a moment, glumly, "Which I suppose you are, now."
"As far as I know, you're telling me a spooky ghost story in the fine old Muggle tradition of scaring your date so they jump into your lap."
Spike made a face. "To tell you the truth, I wasn't sure whether I had told you or not. I remember it seemed very important to keep you out of it while I was trying to work out what to do, but after I came home I… I was rather upset before I bottled it up, and I'm afraid I don't quite remember what I said, exactly."
Evan frowned. "This was right after Beltane?"
"The week after."
"Ah. Right before he decided you should spy."
"...Now you mention it, yes."
"I remember that."
Rather upset.
What he remembered was Spike coming home on the tail end of a Polyjuice transformation and collapsing into a hysterical ball, repeating, over and over, not for people, I said it's not for people!
He remembered having to pry Severus's fingers away before he could claw his own face off and healing the red nail-marks. And that it had taken him twenty minutes to get Severus to stop making stifled, swallowed screaming noises in between the throttled sobbing breaths that got worse every time Ev asked what had happened, to get him to calm down enough to swallow a dose of Draught of Peace, not so much sip by sip as choke by choke. He remembered thinking that Sirius or Potter must have done something spectacularly awful, and having to remind himself that it would still start a civil war if he had either of them killed.
He supposed now that it had been an error to remind Mr. Flume how much trouble the Gryffindor boys had caused in his shop as students right before Honeydukes was due to start negotiating with its vendors about autumn shelf space.
Oops?
Not oops. They deserved it regardless.
In fact, he should probably find a reason to have a chat with Zańka Pasternak before the first Hogsmeade weekend—well. Zonko's would already be stocked by now in preparation for that. Too late to do anything about those negotiations, and sadly the stuff probably would sell. If he (or Lucy; Narcissa refused to acknowledge that joke shops existed in her world) persuaded her that business with Marauders Moon would hurt her reputation, though, she'd probably push them for a much less equitable deal for the Yule-and-Christmas shopping spree.
And, of course, if Sirius was clever enough to realize their play for Honeydukes sales had been blocked, as opposed to just failing, he might have time to reconsider his behaviour.
Although as far as Evan was aware it had mostly been Potter stalking Spike for the last year, give or take a few months, if that post-Beltane episode hadn't been Siri's doing after all.
Was he being unfair to the wrong cousins because trying to get at Bella would be a Very Bad Idea?
Probably.
They still deserved it.
"Where did you go?" Spike asked, poking him a little. "In your head."
"Honeydukes," Evan said truthfully.
Spike smiled, a little wan. "Home and ask Linkin for cocoa?" He considered. "With… cinnamon? Red wine? Rum?"
"I want to show you something first," Evan said, and levered them both up from the ground.
They walked arm in arm and close as they could press for the next few minutes, quietly as the sun skulked lower and the sky caught fire, Severus limply wrung dry and Evan's heart inching farther and farther up his throat with every beat. Maybe he should wait. Maybe Spike couldn't like anything right now, even things he normally would.
To distract himself, quite possibly because he was an idiot, he asked, "Are you going to tell Dumbledore? What you told Rodolphus you did, I mean."
"I'm not telling him any of this," Severus said in a voice of serrated lead. "What I did was complicated, and I didn't keep any notes that would help people backtrace. I didn't tell Rus any details, only that I used transfiguration, and I should be able to find a way to suggest the professor's people keep an eye out for that without bringing this mess into it. If telling would stop him… doing anything, that would be another matter. But he must already have other ways to… cover his tracks, because more people have disappeared than been found. He didn't want to know because he needs to. He just wanted to know if I'd used the same method he'd been taught—I think to work out whether I know what his lot's been doing and he should invite me along. Friendly of him, I suppose."
"So you'll be putting the whole thing away again," Evan supposed, and Severus nodded tightly. "Bit of a risk, not telling him upfront."
"It wasn't something I was thinking about when it would have been upfront, and it's on the late side now. I think he understands I've had to witness things he wouldn't approve of, and he's checked I was telling the truth when I said I hadn't killed anyone, and that he's agreed I shouldn't. If the professor knew the details… I don't see how he could… I can put him on the alert another way. It would hurt more than help."
Evan stopped walking and made his stance solid to stop Spike from going on without him. "If I knew the details, you don't see how I could look at you the same way?" he demanded gently.
Spike's throat completely froze up.
Without changing his tone, he said, "Gold-plated witchfinder bits, Spike. We just went over this. I was there for Rabastan, remember? Breathe, will you?"
"I'm not proud of it," Spike said fiercely, rounding on him. "Anything gold-plated is a trophy."
"I know," Evan said, keeping his tone steady. "You were in a bad spot and you went completely cobra-brain."
Spike swallowed, and a few muscles on the side of his face twitched in a way Evan hadn't seen before. It wasn't ugly in the wrong wrong wrong way it was when he got so angry it edged into hate, but Ev didn't want to draw it. Spike was too scared for Evan to want that.
"Or am I wrong?"
"Cobra-brain," Spike repeated, turning it over in his mouth to see how it tasted. "I don't know. I felt... Iced over. Tunnel vision. Not my eyes, my head."
"Strike mode," Evan nodded. "Been there."
Severus eyed him, clearly torn between his intrinsic curiosity and a strong conviction that he Did Not Want To Know.
"I don't think I've mentioned it to you," Evan said, a little embarrassed, "because it was such an awful day, but, er. Cleo-came-and-got-me-and-you-were-unconscious-and-I-might-have-blown-up-Potter's-wand-a-bit."
Severus adjusted his gaze from eyeing to staring. "Go back."
"Er."
"Farther. Awful day."
"Very awful. Worst day."
"OWLs."
"I know you don't like to talk about it and frankly I don't either—"
"You did what."
"Well, nobody else was doing anything," he defended himself crossly.
"Blew up his wand."
"Maybe."
"'Maybe.'"
"A bit."
"Define 'a bit,' please." Evan would have been alarmed at how still Severus's face had been and how flat his tone had stayed, if not for the slowly up-crawling eyebrows.
"I think the handle survived." He considered. "And I saw some splinters. You know, in his hand."
Severus looked like his eyes were going to start spinning in opposite directions at any moment. "But… it was in public, the whole school knew; you couldn't have blackmailed them to keep quiet. Isn't that illegal?"
"Just extremely Not Done," he said, and shot Spike a bit of a pout. "I'm not going to blackmail anybody, Spike. If you blackmail them, they've been warned and they have something on you, too."
"How did you—is this another I'm On The Black Tapestry So I Can Get Away With Anything thing?"
"No, it's a 'several people who were quite ashamed of themselves for not doing anything heard me claim I'd been aiming for Lupin's prefect badge and when Potter ratted me out to Tofty he gave me a chance to explain in a hypothetical kind of way and when I did he took another look at the state you were in and chose not to pursue the matter further' thing."
He gave Spike a moment to get over having to acknowledge that widely-respected adults had seen him be Distinctly Not Himself before going on. "And then as far as I can tell Potter convinced himself he must have remembered wrong."
"His wand."
"He's lucky I didn't blow up his head," Evan shrugged. "Tempting, but I was feeling quite chilly and focused, you see, and the world had slowed down a bit, so I was able to think the ramifications through."
"...Snake-brain."
"Snake-brain."
"...His wand?!"
"Should I have gone for his other wand?" Evan wondered. "That's probably the one that makes more trouble."
Severus choked. "You're just trying to stop me worrying about shocking you," he accused, not seeming sure whether he ought to be hopeful or wary.
"Maybe a bit," Evan conceded. "I'm not wrong, though."
"I'm glad you didn't," Severus said, finding his hand to squeeze.
Ev thought that Evans would probably have taken that as an indication that Spike and Potter didn't wish each other any real harm and would be able to get along someday. He knew better. This was about Spike knowing in his bones that Evan was his safe hearth and not Fiendfyre. He squeezed back.
"I almost want to see the pensieve, though," Spike added. "Just to see his face."
Evan's hand clenched on his. "No," he pushed out, remembering the bare spill of long, limp limbs in the grass, remembering the watchers. "You don't."
"...No," Severus agreed, with a not-thinking-about-it expression. "Maybe someday you'll paint it for me. His expression. Out of context."
"If I ever do his portrait, that'll be the topcoat," Evan promised, and thought to himself, With Evans in the background, running away from someone who would die for her while he was under the wand.
Severus eyed him. "You're thinking something vicious about Lily," he said. It wasn't an accusation. He just sounded resigned. "I can feel you thinking it."
"Well," Evan shrugged mildly, "you're my Spike. I did almost sort Hufflepuff, you know."
"...And suddenly I am fifty times more terrified of a quarter of our population than I already was."
"That's probably smart," Evan agreed, getting up and stretching. "They are running the world. From their little hamster wheels." He extended a hand down.
Letting Evan pull him up, Severus said, "Badgers aren't rodents," so immediately that he couldn't have even thought about it at all.
So Evan kissed him. Sometimes you just had to.
Once Spike had relaxed into it, Evan wrapped a hand around the back of his neck. "There's a reason Bella was happy to marry Rodolphus in the first place," he said while he had Spike's attention, holding his slightly alarmed eyes from two inches away. "He would not make a good enemy. And if anyone ever takes him out, they'd better get the rest of his family at the same time. You had one way out. You took it and came back to me. Keep doing that. I need you to."
"I turned her into bread and fed her to the ducks," Severus said emotionlessly, and then he swayed a little, the way Evan had after an accident in Charms sliced into his queue far too close to his neck and he'd stood up too quickly after losing eight inches of half his hair.
"Somebody ate some?" Evan asked, remembering not for people. Spike nodded, still looking a little uprooted. "Not you." A vehement head-shake. Evan nodded—with sympathy, but there was nothing to be said about that. "Anything else you've been carrying around in the back of your head like One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi's been strapped to it?"
"I think some of the ducks exploded. The transfiguration didn't hold, and..." His throat tightened.
"I guess that means nobody ate them, so it's probably for the best," Evan said practically, even though he knew it'd make Spike turn green again. It was worth it to prove he agreed things were bad but Spike didn't horrify him. "Anything else?"
"Your father's more of an iceberg than you ever were," Spike said, hesitantly but also with enough force to show he didn't just mean he found Ev's dad unpleasant to be around.
"Dad's Grandpère's responsibility, and Mum's. Not ours." He was aware he'd probably said that a little too quickly, but Spike didn't seem to notice.
"We're going to get found out and die horribly."
"That's why you need to let me paint you."
Severus looked rather cheered. As they started to walk again, he remarked, "While I remain unconvinced that being two-dimensional and frame-bound without nerve endings would be a good thing and suspect you might be suffering from He Who Has A Hammer Thinks Every Problem Is A Nail syndrome, don't suppose for a moment that I fail to appreciate how many clumsy idiots would have reached for bravado, denial, or short-term comfort as an answer to that."
Grinning, Evan said, "While unremarkable people express affection more briefly, don't think that I fail to appreciate the specificity of your admiration."
"Well," Severus said practically, "Everybody else comments on your appearance; one has to stand out somehow."
"They really don't," Evan laughed.
Spike commenced telling him in detail (and in indignation that was utterly adorable on its own merits but also made Evan's heart squeeze at how hard he was working to move his mind back to everyday things) what girls had said about Evan behind his back in fifth year.
Ev kept laughing at him until he saw what he'd been looking for: a wild rosebush with white flowers, cuddled up too close to a silver birch to take full advantage of what sunlight made it through the leaves. "Wait, stop a bit, we're here."
Spike blinked. "This is what you wanted to show me." He squinted around, and dubiously asked, "Are the roses enchanted?"
"You tell me," Evan said, hooking his thumbs in the hip-strap of his belt and leaning back on his heels.
Severus gave him a narrow-eyed look that said, If anyone pops out of nowhere and yells Surprise Happy Birthday it will be your fault how hurt they're going to get. He started prowling around, wand out, examining the flora and the ground. "The birch is a port-tree," he remarked, puzzled, "and so is that oak over there, but we aren't near anything anyone would want to get to-and-from, are we?"
"Can't see why anyone would," Evan agreed. "Say, Spike, remember when you had me cut those petals for Lammas?"
Now the scowl he got read Seriously, anyone who jumps out at me is going to lose a limb and was enormously buoying after the sick, scared, fragile eyes of five minutes ago. It didn't alter a jot as Severus, without looking down because he was busy glaring suspiciously at Evan, lowered his hand into the rosebush.
"Oh, look at that," Evan said mildly as the stand of trees between oak and birch suddenly and without fuss faded away to reveal a bronze gate, its arched doors filled in with an openwork diamond pattern.
"...Where are we," Severus demanded, his eyes skittishly wide.
"Let's go find out!" suggested Evan, all sprightly innocence. "Go on, open it—no, don't wipe your hand first."
"Evan what did you do."
Evan walked the few steps over to him, took his face between his hands, and kissed him with open eyes until Spike's breathing was back to normal and his eyes were only normally suspicious instead of nearly frantic. Then he pricked his own palm on the thorns, caught Spike's bleeding hand in his own, and brought both down on the highest left hinge of the gate. "We only have to do that this once," he promised, tapping his wand on the bloodstains to end the ward's receptiveness to new people.
"Evan. What did you do."
"Come and see," he proposed, opening the gate.
"That's what they say at the apocalypse," Spike objected, his dark eyes rimmed with white again.
"Spike," Evan laughed, and pulled him through.
Whichever movers Runcorn had hired had done a good job, especially considering the time constraints. To Evan, the clearing felt as though the forest, though perhaps still a bit unnerved, was well on its way to accepting the addition.
It wasn't pretty—simply a squat, round old tower of greyish stones closely fitted together and held by greyish old mortar, nestled thickly in trees that hadn't been quite so tall before Evan had put his claim on the land. Narrow windows here and there looked good for having a good sightline while shooting spells (or, he supposed, probably actually arrows, since it had clearly been a muggle building until now) without making an easy target of oneself. The crenellated roof suggested it had probably been a watchtower once, though it was too wide around for that.
Under the keystone arch, the door was its one point of beauty: impenetrable bog-yew, fossilized to the rich red-brown that Evan had always instinctively (and, in the face of reality, sulkily) felt that rosewood ought to be. Even that was somewhat dulled down and uglified by contrast with the grubby stone. Varnish would have helped. Would help.
"It's a peel tower," Severus said flatly.
"Is it?" asked Evan, who had not thought to ask about the historical or technical details.
"Round isn't usual," Severus conceded. "Square's easier even in a guard tower if you've got people living in it. Furniture fits to the walls and whatnot. Evan, what did you do."
"I haven't done it yet," Evan protested digging into the mokeskin fold of his trouser pocket. "Hold on, I know I've got one somewhere—aha."
"It's a knut," Severus said, in the same flat What The Hell Do You Think You're Doing voice.
"Try again." Evan held the coin out to him.
Severus blinked. "Where did you find a penny?" He examined it more closely. "Evan, that's Queen Victoria. That's a bunhead. With a printing error." The flat tone reemerged. Evan had missed it for the intervening 2.5 seconds. "Evan. This is rare."
"You probably don't want to know, Spike," Evan apologized.
He had, as a matter of fact, found it at the age of seven, in the wing of Rosier Hall he hadn't shown Severus yet, in a daisy-painted cabinet of twenty drawers. This particular drawer had, as well as a wallet full of old Muggle money-paper and coins, held a cursed pocket watch, a handkerchief daintily embroidered with greyhounds, a large pair of scorched brown shoes with a flat toe-box that looked quite uncomfortable, and a bag of teeth. It (the wallet, not the teeth) had also held a few yellowed visiting cards reading 'John Snow, 18 Sackville Street London." In the margins of the top one, dark red ink had scrawled a handwritten '10 June 1858, for interference.'
It really was ink; Evan had sniffed it. That didn't make it less creepy.
The things had probably all belonged to different muggles; Grandpère's uncle Belvedere had not, by all accounts, been a particularly organized fellow. His habitual use of lead-tin-yellow to put subtle haloes around all his magical subjects probably hadn't helped with that.
Severus kept looking at him, but Evan ignored this in favour of casting an engorgio on the penny until it had, by his estimation, about the same mass as two elephants. Its rim made a considerable dent in the ground, but Severus was (in an I Am Surrounded By Idiots sort of way), keeping it balanced with a spell. It didn't even wobble.
Evan cut it into fifths with his wand, cast an affinity charm to group them together, and floated them to land at regular intervals around the tower wall.
"I think that was a hundred galleons you just butchered," Severus said faintly.
"I thought it was about the same value as a knut," Evan remarked without much interest. (He was actually a bit interested, but Spike needed to be taught a lesson about money. Namely, that its only importance was in what it could do for you.)
"When it was made, but people collect them! That was rare!"
"Well, I couldn't use an actual knut, Spike. The goblins look down on that sort of thing. And I wanted a coppery bronze, not one of those yellow alloys. Anyway, how do you know?" he asked, quite curious but without looking up from the runes he was carving into, thanks to his affinity charm, all five pieces.
"Some of the boys I was at school with before Hogwarts had rudimentary stamp and coin collections and used to whip out pamphlets and check every coin they found in the street against a list of valuable ones."
Evan paused. He badly wanted to know whether Spike had been one of those boys; the urge to paint a tiny, eager Spike holding a coin up against the light with a pamphlet in his hand was almost overwhelming, but he suspected that the answer would be no-with-massive-offence even if it was really yes. In addition, there was a point of confusion. Questioningly, he stamped his foot.
Severus uttered, "Gah," in tones of direst disgust and came to peer over Evan's shoulder and explain what you did about post when you didn't have owls or floos. Although he listened with interest, Evan kept scribing in runes for peace and adaptability and everything he'd been able to think of over the last week that would coax the tower to be what he wanted.
"Root these for me, will you?" Evan asked, pulling a solid, oblong cone of bronze out of the bottom of each coin-piece, broadest at the bottom and about four feet tall, the heaviest ends pointed widdershins around the tower.
"How much trouble is it going to make," Severus demanded, scowling.
"It's going to stop trouble," Evan assured him. "If you don't, the rails will fall down. Very securely, please. If you pack the earth around them till they're cased in diamond, actually, that could be useful later."
Severus gave him an I-don't-like-surprises look, but sighed. He went around the tower, first slowly loosening the dirt below each piece until the cone was buried, and then firming it back up again. Giving Evan an annoyed look on his return, he said, "The temperatures needed to make natural diamond do not belong under a forest. You'll have to make do with an approximation of rammed earth."
"Perfect," Evan said, and grinned at Spike's sulky-face over being deprived of an argument when he was feeling off-balance and cranky.
He coaxed the pieces into delicate (looking) lattices of long snakey vines that twined deosil into an open, striping spiral round the tower's walls, growing spokes that nudged into the stones and rooted there in a more treelike way, anchoring themselves in the crenelations at the top. The three towards the back had to loop around a few trees before resuming their spirals, but that would be good for birdhouses and faefeeders and hammocks and suchlike.
"Very… nice?" Severus said helplessly.
"Oh, I'm not done," Evan promised, smiling at him. He moved between two rails and began, squeezing the cut in his palm to make paint a few times, tracing runes into the stone. He worked quickly, so that by the time Severus had run out of names to yell at him for hurting himself he'd done all he meant to. There were quite a few runes, but Severus knew a lot of bad words.
"Okay," he said, straightening up. "Now I'm going to do one last thing, and then I want you to put an array for permanence over the runes. Your blood would be best, but I've got a poplar stylus and an apple I can juice if you'd rather not."
"Evan," Severus said in his most I-have-a-headache voice.
"This might take a few minutes," Evan warned, fishing around in his pocket again. "I'll need to concentrate."
While Severus was letting out an extraordinarily put-upon sigh, he pulled out a chunk of jadeite and focused on it, letting his senses sink into it until he understood what it was like down to the molecules. Then he touched his wand to the wall of the tower and began transfiguring.
The lowest visible stones and their mortar brightened from grimy granite-grey to a nebulous thunderhead shade. Down by their feet it was pebbled with paler streaks like sunspots and then, starting at knee-height, webs of darker shadow instead. Higher, and they began to be marbled with rich, bright green, the colour of healthy moss in deep shade, fading into the dappled late-summer-leaf canopy of the sun-drenched Sherwood.
The black had curled its last tendril by the time the green reached the second storey, and a dark sea-blue began to marble its way into those higher stones instead as they greened. Both green and blue lightened as Evan worked up, the green graciously giving way. By the time he reached the crenellation the stones and what had been their mortar were made of a pure, pale, translucent blue jade that nearly disappeared against the sky where the tower poked just above the treetops, the colour of wispy clouds on a bright day.
It was all one piece of stone, now, but the shapes of the old slabs of granite remained, nubbly and not quite climbable. Inside, though, as his final touch, he evened out the walls and levelled the floors, smoothed both to a satin gloss.
With a sigh of satisfaction, he pulled back to look at his work. The way the colours swirled into each other was, though he hadn't conceived it that way, the reverse image of a firestorm. As pleased as he was with it, for just a second he could hear Grandpère being annoyed with him for incompletely visualizing his composition before putting brush to canvas. Of course, Grandpère had probably never played with marbling paper.
The charcoal of the ground floor melted more smoothly than the higher transitions into the lavender jade of the basement, more rippling than marbled. Between the start of this transition and the grey stone picking up some of the red tones of the forest earth at the base, it looked almost as if it had grown naturally, taken root, but at the same time almost like a (very small) castle in the air, complete with clouds to sit on.
It was almost a pity that no one else was ever going to see it. He could put it in a fantasia, though. One of his made-up landscapes, or in a little book. Not quite like this—something in shinier precious stones with sparkles instead of eddies, to please a more childlike palate.
He looked back at Severus, suddenly nervous again as he had been in his new studios, showing him the sketches.
Severus was leaning backwards on the grass, braced on his palms, looking rather as if he had not sat down entirely on purpose. Evan wasn't sure what that meant, but the long legs and fingers splayed any which way on the grass looked nothing like a broken doll this time—more like an ungainly adolescent fawn astonished at having tripped over its own hooves. His face was completely blank, except for the wide eyes.
"You don't have to do the array if you don't like it," Evan said, feeling as if he was babbling with the anxiety shooting up in him to catch at his throat. He'd never seen anyone in a pose like that before—maybe he should introduce it in portrait sittings? The perspective on Spike's legs from his angle was gorgeous with the sunset warming the neutrals of his harshly-cut trousers, though of course that might just have been Spike's legs. And the curve of his chest that made it look hollow, like he'd been punched...
Spike hated it, he absolutely hated it, just look how flat and limp his fingers were against the dark autumn grass. It was too colourful. Ev had been trying for something close to camouflage, but Spike thought it just looked clownish. He clearly couldn't believe what bad taste Evan had. Evan's taste was so bad it was making Spike think he must be a bad-taste choice, too. The tower was so ugly and silly it was hurting him. Evan was so stupid. "I can try something else."
Rockily, looking blind around the eyes and wobbly at the joints, Severus drew himself to his feet and made a silent gesture with his wand. Around them, a swirl of leaves came out of the trees on a sudden gust of wind. There was something odd about their texture, dull or grainy, but they were moving too quickly for him to get a good look. They swept stormily around the tower, avoiding the brass rails, and when they flurried back into the trees they left the tower polished and gleaming (but still nubbly, as if it had been carved to look like different stones, or like a column of enormous soap-bubbles pressed closely together).
Approaching the tower, Spike slipped between the rails without a word. He drew blood out of his thorn-prick just as Evan had, and traced an array for endless, stable, indestructible, temperate durability over the runes.
"I can try something else!" Evan repeated urgently. "We don't have to live with that if you hate it!"
Spike turned his head like his neck was rusted and gave Evan such a disbelieving Are You Out Of Your Tiny Mind stare that Ev relaxed suddenly enough to sway and sag, loose-kneed. With warm You're Being An Unbelievable Idiot eyes, Spike pointed at his array and cocked an eyebrow by way of asking Evan to check his work.
Evan had only thought about fixing his transfiguration in place, but Spike probably knew more than he did about even the minerals you could grind up for pigment. He did say, "Make sure to leave room to let us make changes," because they were going to want things like sky-charmed ceilings and kitchen and bathroom fixtures and expanded-space closets and interior walls. "For plumbing and whatnot."
Spike paused jerkily and re-drew a few parts before tapping it with his wand. The finger-wide red writing all disappeared into the stone, leaving thinly etched runes sunk into the jade as if carved there, not a trace of blood left on the outside, their lines deep but invisible unless you knew where to look. He turned around, blank-faced and hoarse. "Evander. What did you do."
"I had a busy week too," Evan told him, and reached out for his hand. He wasn't too worried anymore; while they didn't often use each other's full three syllables and Linkin had been as likely as anybody else to only pull them out when his ward was in trouble, Spike rarely bothered covering it up when he was mad. When he even tried, you couldn't tell what he was thinking but there wasn't ever any question about how he felt. This wasn't that.
"Come on in," Evan said once he had limp fingers in his hand, both of them a little shaky with residual shock but unhesitating. His thumb seemed to want to stroke Spike's knuckles and the softer skin over the long bones behind the palm, and he saw no reason in the world to resist. "Let's see how it looks from inside, and then you can set the wards while I decide whether to put curtains or stained glass in at the windows. For the rails, I was thinking of climbing roses, obviously—"
"Obviously," Spike said in a voice so faint that Evan wasn't entirely sure whether he was agreeing or thought the idea that it might be obvious was very wrong.
"We'll want to make the actual flowers only visible from the inside, I thought, maybe the rails too. I was thinking about blue ones, at least until I can breed the Vivienne du Lac to be a climber, and we could put some York or Tudor ones in, too, if you like, though all three together might be garish—"
"I have bad news for you about your national flag," Spike mentioned inexplicably, still sounding dazed.
"In little dots on such a big canvas, I was going to say," Evan finished with a touch of reproach, stroking Spike's wiry upper arm and curling a possessive palm around his hidden trellis, though it probably wasn't actually visible under there right now since Evan wasn't touching his skin directly. He had no idea what Spike was on about on the subject of flags, but since Spike didn't seem to actually care about it, neither did Ev. "Anyway, I was going to say it doesn't have to be roses. Or not just roses. I've got ivy seeds, and sweet pea and morning glory and bougainvillaea. Oh, or star jasmine would—"
He'd barely barred the door of the echoing round room behind them when Severus did some kind of dodging manoeuvre, caught him by the arm, and propelled him hands-first against the cloud-grey wall, just where the green was starting to bloom.
Well done me with the texture, he thought, but we have to get more light down here. Make it more translucent, maybe. With pale furniture, weathered grey. Beech, or bird's-eye maple. Cushions in shades of charcoal and bright green to bring out the Imperial ceiling, coppery autumn-leaf sconces twining all around and guarding the fireplace. Skyscapes flush against the walls, no frames, fading into the stone. Bloodwood or red elm upstairs, to glow against the sea-colours, and Spike had now been pressing Evan against the wall for long enough to design a floor plan; what was he waiting for?!
Had Evan horribly misjudged what he'd want after all, and Spike had just been humouring him to make him feel better? Had he misjudged that badly, even after the revolting, exhausting exercise of asking the ginger harpy for her opinion? What had been wrong with him, even thinking of that? He knew her judgment was abominable and she was prone to completely misunderstanding Spike.
But surely even just the promise of getting away from Ev's parents would be a positive for him, even if he didn't like the tower or the colour scheme at all? Or what if he just couldn't like anything so soon after talking about Beltane, and Evan had completely muffed it by insisting on his original timing plan when Spike was obviously too raw for—
"You are," a dark voice growled unhurried menace into his ear as his collar was yanked down from the back, "absurd."
He'd only been waiting for Evan to meet his burning-embers gaze in the smoked-glass sheen of the stone, apparently. Phew. Also guh, and Evan might even have gone so far as phoar. He still wanted more light down here, but it would have to be carefully done so that this eyes-coming-out-the-mist effect wouldn't be lost.
He was never sure afterwards which had happened first, Spike's hot mouth coming down on the top of his spine or the sudden strike of cool September air as all the cloth on his person, including his hair-tie, dissolved into a ring-shaped pile of loose thread around his cheery red boots.
"Showoff," he accused, relaxing all over at this clear evidence of approval and looking forward, in the back of his mind, to finding out what had become of his socks. Seeking warm linen or better, he pressed luxuriantly backwards.
Nose and crooked smile pressed between Evan's shoulders, Severus retorted, "Kettle, Black," and then stopped speaking out loud.
1. A couple of years ago, when Evan had been struggling with the calculations for an array he couldn't ask anyone outside the Illuminator's Guild for help with, Spike had bought him one of the little boxes, saying it would save him time. It had died in a spitting shower of hot sparks as soon as Evan had hopefully poked his first little square rubber button. This had gotten him that look that said Spike wasn't sure whether to find something to worry about for the next month or just laugh himself sick.
Instead of doing either, he'd ended up trotting off to bully the poor salesperson into giving him his money back so he could re-spend it on ingredients for a patience potion, his idea being that even if the calculations kept taking forever, at least Ev could focus on them without getting bored and frustrated. Evan truthfully reported that it had kept him from getting frustrated, and didn't mention having to stop taking it because he kept losing even more time to nodding off over the parchment and then cleaning ink off his sleeves and forehead.
Well, he didn't exactly stop taking it. Just for the maths. It was fantastic for getting him through sittings with his more yammery clients. But if he told Spike that it would just get him the face that said I Am Labouring Under The Baseless Impression That You Are A People-Genius And Therefore Think You're Just Complaining To Get Snuggles Which I Will Probably Give You But Not Before Calling You Out On It. (Spike, obviously, just thought of this as his Oh Come On expression, but Evan was confident in his interpretation.)
2. Except for when Evan said he absolutely had not made tea while Spike was out. Or claimed he'd had a big lunch with a client when Spike cooked with bitter melon. Or with dandelion greens Spike had almost certainly picked off the side of the road.
Or when Spike said he'd brought the bitter melon home because it had been on sale and it had nothing to do with his knowing just from the smell of the kitchen that Evan had dishonoured his precious pot by using a teabag.
Notes: Just for the record so you're not crying 'continuity error!' later, Evan has completely forgotten what he meant the ground floor to be used for; this little interior design scheme he's got going is not going to happen. Which is just as well, because Severus spends too much of his day in the Slytherin common room for work and would not actually have been enthused about coming home to a facsimile.
To be even more creeped out by Evan's family than you already were, check out the default entry for John Snow on Wikipedia. It's not who you think—this one knew something.
Next: It's not the best idea to try to put in a normal work week at a new job while having an existential crisis, but cobras gonna cobra and everyone else will handle the regretting.